I listened with fascination as my Jamaican immigrant student enumerated the ways West Indians were superior to African Americans. While the majority of my immigrant students could weigh in on why they considered African Americans less successful, Caribbean immigrants in particular were at pains to define themselves as separate from native born African Americans. I let her have her litany, a part of me horrified to realize that at an earlier point in my immigrant journey I had shared some of her frustrations of belonging to an invisible minority.
Curious, I asked what else about dark skin might suggest someone was African American? Responses ranged from wearing low-slung jeans and baseball caps, to dropping out of high school, and hanging out on the corner. Most discouraging was their de facto confidence that American blacks made poor decisions, and their lack of criticism of undeserved racist stereotyping.
I taught writing but felt my students needed an historical context to understand how black struggle and resistance had made so many of their immigrant aspirations, including a post-secondary education, possible. Indeed, how they came to have a black, immigrant woman as their professor. By the second generation many black immigrants find they have become black Americans.
The clipped cadences and other linguistic markers that once identified their parents as foreign have faded. In the book, a Trinidadian student is one of only three black women at an all-girls college and she gradually awakens to the reality of American race relations and her place in the struggle. I know a headline needs to be succinct and if you have more than one African country it may be appropriate. As the use of social media has grown, the voices of Africans are heard more often pinpointing lazy stereotyping and hyperbole.
There are websites with a mission to identify such instances. Africa is a country has a strong track record of catching gaffes. And contributors to Kenyans on Twitter kot are also formidable in their determination to puncture stereotypical attitudes to their country.
It is not the fact that the new arrivals look different; it is that they behave differently. But neighbourhoods are being transformed because people from other cultures are moving in there. Rapid social change is often linked to ethnic change - and people are disturbed by that. Can we talk about the alteration of Britain's racial make-up without being accused of prejudice or intolerance? It is tricky to find the words in which to conduct the conversation.
Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne told the Question Time audience that in Britain today "one in two of all Afro-Caribbean children under the age of 16 either have a white mother or a white father".
Did he mean children of "mixed race" or "mixed heritage" or "dual heritage" - or whatever the acceptable expression is these days? Here again we have an important and complex issue - the rapid growth in the numbers of children who don't fit into conventional racial or ethnic categories. There is evidence see, for example, this Home Office paper [55Kb PDF] that such youngsters perform less well at school, are more likely to abuse drink or drugs, to end up in prison, to face prejudice or discrimination.
But, as I discussed here last year , we don't yet have the language to engage with the intricacies of this. Globalisation has seen the development of what has been called "identity politics". The trouble is that the debate can barely get beyond issues of classification. Unable to define who or what we are talking about, we are unable to define the debate.
The British people, I think, are broadly tolerant and welcoming. We don't wish to offend or make a scene. That said, there is deep concern about how racial and cultural convergence is altering our way of life, and yet we struggle to find the words to voice those fears.
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