Countering anti-Blackness with migrant solidarity: Black and Caribbean linkages through racial struggle

ABSTRACT

Black Caribbean migrants are uniquely positioned between multiple forms of negative racialization – that of their experiences with both anti-Black racism and xenophobia due to their immigrant status. Such positioning means that they may be subject to increased anti-Black and anti-migrant policing. In this paper, I argue that Black Caribbean migrants’ experiences with race in the United States can and should be interwoven with research and advocacy focused on the increasing criminalization of migrants or, Crimmigration research. I use archived newspapers, fliers, and pamphlets produced by Caribbean activists to show how they not only recognized these two-fold processes and but also reframed Black identity and politics to include anti-Black and anti-migrant discrimination as linked causes. I contend that their advocacy and concern for Afro-descent migrants, African Americans, and migrants more broadly reveal the expansiveness of Black politics through the bringing together of both Black and migrant concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• ethnicity
• racism
• Blackness
• Black immigration
• solidarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Throughout, I utilize both terms immigrant and migrant to reflect the shifting categories of im/migrant inclusion and precarity in the United States.

2 For example, Clergé cites a disagreement in political strategy between Black leaders W.E.B DuBois (African American) and Marcus Garvey (Jamaican-born) who both organized in New York.

3 Jamaicans and Haitians have been migrating to the US since the 19th century as part of a larger wave Caribbean migration throughout and beyond the Americas after the abolition of slavery. Post-emancipation, many Black Caribbeans sought work outside their homelands as they faced competition from imported labor and the solidification of power by landowners.

4 Data retrieved from U.S. Census Bureau, 2019 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates.

5 FANM formerly stood for Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami [Haitian Women of Miami] and has been re-titled, Family Action Network Movement.

6 See for example the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (https://baji.org), the Black Immigrant Collective (https://blackimmigrantcollective.org), and the UndocuBlack Network (https://undocublack.org), amongst many others.