Abstract
In this chapter, the reader is first introduced to some of the participants in the study through their brief biographies. The MSGCIs’ stories reveal their “front-stage” and “back-stage” personas, and the significance of what it means to be Black,” “American” and “a child of Caribbean immigrants.” Lorick-Wilmot discusses the significance of physical and social spaces of belonging, and the implications of colorism as social capital and an indicator of inclusion/exclusion in the dichotomous world of “blackness” and “whiteness” in America. She examines how the MSGCIs both negotiate and struggle against being defined as a “Black person in America” while living with the identity realities of being a descendant of African, Indigenous, European and Asian peoples.
Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narrative of the past.
—Stuart Hall in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” ( 1990 :435)
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Notes
- 1.
The West Indian-American carnival had its roots in Harlem in the 1920s, when lavish events were held at the Savoy, Renaissance, and Audubon Ballrooms. The carnival left Harlem in 1965 as an increasing number of Caribbean immigrants settled in central Brooklyn. Aside from its economic impact, this Labor Day carnival is an assertion of pan-Caribbean culture, bringing together people from different island nations underneath one umbrella, and demonstrating the power and vibrancy of the peoples of the Caribbean. (http://www.bklynlibrary.org/ourbrooklyn/carnival/; Retrieved May 21, 2011).
- 2.
My leeriness derives from my own consideration of Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988/2008) essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in which she discusses an important viewpoint regarding one’s ability to retrieve the subaltern’s voice. Spivak urges the researcher like myself to constantly consider or question the lens through which I consider, interpret and perhaps even, translate the narratives shared so that I am not erasing the true voice and subjectivity of the subaltern and objectify it with dominant historiography.
- 3.
In their article, “Transnationalism in Question” by Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald describes transnational or transnationalism as having and maintaining connections to various networks or communities that extend beyond loyalties to any particular place of origin or national group. This notion connotes fluidity of identity, belongingness, and membership that exceed boundaries of nation and state.
- 4.
The one-drop rule led to widespread institutionalization of definite racial categories based on “hypo-descent” and gave formal credence to a burgeoning belief that blackness emanated from blood, as seen in miscegenation laws. Refer to Ian Haney-Lopez’s (1996) book, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race.
- 5.
There are two basic forms of chattel: domestic chattel, with menial household duties, and productive chattel, working in the fields.
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Lorick-Wilmot, Y.S. (2018). Blackness as Experience. In: Stories of Identity among Black, Middle Class, Second Generation Caribbeans. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62208-8_4
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