Intergenerational differences on anti-blackness in the Indo-Caribbean community in New York City

ABSTRACT

This study examines how anti-Black ideologies emerging from the Caribbean impact negotiations of race amongst Indo-Caribbeans in New York City by using thirty qualitative interviews with first-generation and second-generation Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadians. First, it highlights that global systems of anti-Blackness influence how Indo-Caribbeans experienced racialized violence in their home countries and navigate their racial identities in the US. It then reveals how the second generation negotiates anti-Blackness in divergent ways. Some second-generation Indo-Caribbeans uphold their families’ anti-Black sentiments by grappling with dating norms and maintaining racialized attitudes framed under colour-evasive racism. However, those in the second generation who have significant interactions in white spaces negotiate their attitudes about racism and Black people by seeking solidarity. Overall, this study finds that anti-Blackness can be rooted in legacies of white supremacy within immigrants’ home countries, but these sentiments can shift among the second generation as they navigate their processes of racialization.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Blackness
• white supremacy
• immigrant generation
• racial attitudes
• ethnoracial identity
• Indo-Caribbean

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful for the support and guidance of Van C. Tran and Philip Kasinitz. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for the constructive comments which have strengthened this paper. Lastly, I am indebted to the Indo-Caribbean community members who bravely shared their stories with me.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Though Bonilla-Silva (2015) labels this as colorblind racism, I will use the term “color-evasive” instead of “colorblind” to recognize the ableist language implied by “colorblind” (Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison 2017).

2 Traditionally, the term West Indian has been used in scholarship solely highlighting the experiences of Black Caribbeans from former British colonies. When I use the term West Indian, I refer to the collective Anglophone Black Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities, as they each refer to themselves this way. But I use the ethno-racial term Black Caribbean to refer to West Indians of African descent, and Indo-Caribbean to refer to West Indians of South Asian descent.

3 Though many believe that Indo-Caribbeans were granted the land they worked, this only happened from 1869–1880; after this, most Indians bought the land they worked on (Brereton 2007).

4 Coolie is a colloquial term that is used to refer to Indo-Caribbean people. It was historically used as a racial slur against Indian and Chinese indentured servants. Though the term is contentious, many respondents use it loosely to refer to themselves and other people of Indian descent.