Stories of Identity among Black, Middle Class, Second Generation Caribbeans: We, Too, Sing America

by Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot

Overview

This volume addresses how black, middle class, second generation Caribbean immigrants are often overlooked in contemporary discussions of race, black economic mobility, and immigrant communities in the US. Based on rich ethnography, Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot draws attention to this persisting invisibility by exploring this generation’s experiences in challenging structures of oppression as adult children of post-1965 Caribbean immigrants and as an important part of the African-American middle class. She recounts compelling stories from participants regarding their identity performances in public and private spaces—including what it means to be “black and making it in America”—as well as the race, gender, and class constraints they face as part of a larger transnational community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319622071
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/31/2017
Edition description:	1st ed. 2018
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot, PhD is Senior Lecturer of Sociology at Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies, USA, and a social research consultant for nonprofits and philanthropies across the US, Canada, and the Caribbean.

Table of Contents

Introduction: My Personal and Scholarly Journey
1. Un-Othering the Black Experience: Storytelling and Sociology
2. What Does Race Have To Do With It?
3. Blackness as Experience
4. Habitus of Blackness and the Confluence of Middle Class-ness
5. From Lessons Learned to Real-life Performances of Cultural Capital and Habitus
6. Performing Identity in Public
7. Transnational Community Ties, Black Philanthropy, and Triple Identity Consciousness
8. We, Too, Sing America: Where do we go from here?

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Lorick-Wilmot shows how her respondents filter (gender, sexual, ethnic) identity through specific geographies and distinct front- and back-stage personas that guide how Afro-Caribbeans ‘move through the world.’ Avoiding common assimilationist thinking in the study of immigrants, she melds postcolonial, intersectional, and double consciousness frames as she checks still-resonant assumptions (á la Moynihan and his ilk) of what it means to be black in the USA.” (Vilna Bashi Treitler, PhD, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA)

“Building on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Lorick-Wilmot formulates the notion of triple identity consciousness and mounts a compelling critique of the endurance of white supremacy. Among her respondents, she finds a palpable commitment to the advancement of ‘positive human excellence for all’.”(Steven J. Gold, PhD, Michigan State University, USA)

“In the engaging, self-reflexive style of an oral history, Lorick-Wilmot uses undervalued but necessary frameworks of class, post-colonial theory, transnationality, and the diaspora to show that the middle class, second generation Caribbean experience is also the Black American experience.”(Nadia Y. Kim, PhD, Loyola Marymount University, USA)