Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities

New York City, the melting pot of the United States, contains the nation's largest West Indian immigrant population. Since the immigration explosion of 1965, the Afro-Caribbean influx has impacted the social dynamic of the United States and its native-born African Americans, often with volatile results. Black Identities, an important sociological work by Mary C. Waters, explores the question, "How similar or different is it to be a black immigrant or descendent of immigrants in Brooklyn in the late twentieth century from what it was like to be an Irish, Italian, or Jewish immigrant in the earlier part of the century?" Waters interviews blacks from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, and other islands and deconstructs the mutual myths, truths, allegiances, and distrusts between these communities and whites (as well as African Americans with deeper family roots in the U.S.). Among the stereotypes Waters addresses, the most dangerous one is the perceived superiority of Afro-Caribbeans to African Americans. She deflates this and other myths with a combination of sharp scholarship and dead-on analysis. --Eugene Holley Jr.