This study draws upon immigrant incorporation theories to investigate whether native origin trumps skin color in shaping the racial identities of black migrants. Using survey data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, six groups of black migrants are compared across two racial identity dimensions: racial group identification and racial group consciousness. The results demonstrate that while black migrants, with the exception of Puerto Ricans, develop a shared racial group identity with native-born blacks over time, the meaning they attach to being black in America varies by native origin.
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Notes
Although the social construction of race varies across contexts, throughout this paper, the word black is used as it is socially constructed in U.S. society.
Information about the MCSUI research project and data-collection methods are from Bobo, Lawrence, James Johnson, Melvin Oliver, Reynolds Farley, Barry Bluestone, Irene Browne, Sheldon Danziger, Gary Green, Harry Holzer, Maria Krysan, Michael Massagli, and Camille Zubrinsky Charles. “Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, 1992–1994: Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles Household Survey Codebook” 2nd ICPSR version. Atlanta, GA: Mathematica(Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts, Survey Research Laboratory, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Detroit Area Study and Institute for Social Research, Survey Research Center(Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Survey Research Program [producers], 1998. Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1998.
Census segments selected were either blocks or tracts and varied between cities.
Because foreign-born blacks were not sampled in Detroit, the sample does not include respondents from that city. The total sample is 2,454: 833 from Atlanta, 1,115 from Los Angeles, and 536 from Boston.
I chose to collapse the response categories in this way because the results of a multinomial logistic regression showed that the top two and bottom two categories were not significantly different from each other.
In multivariate models, native-born blacks are assigned the mean value for English-language ability and time in the United States.
To avoid problems with multicollinearity in multivariate models, citizenship status is not included in the current analyses. It is highly correlated with being native-born (r=0.75).
STATA’s survey commands (svy) are used to adjust the standard errors for design effects. These commands produce accurate point estimates, standard errors, and p-values (STATA, 1999:321–333).
Tests are available from the author upon request.
Not including respondents from Atlanta in the sample did not significantly change the results. In the interest of maintaining sample size, therefore, I chose to include these respondents in the sample.
A notable exception to the lack of such surveys is the ethnographic research on Haitian and African migrants conducted by McDermott (2003) in Boston and Atlanta.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank Camille Charles, Doug Massey, Grace Kao, Reagan Daly, Lindsay Taggart Rutherford, Elizabeth Vaquera, and Mathew Creighton for their assistance with this paper. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2003 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, GA, and at the Fountaine Society Conference, University of Pennsylvania, March 2003.
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Benson, J.E. Exploring the Racial Identities of Black Immigrants in the United States. Sociol Forum 21, 219–247 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11206-006-9013-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11206-006-9013-7