America’s black population encompasses an increasingly diverse ethnic mix. Black immigrants account for approximately 10% of the U.S. black population, and African-born blacks are a growing third of a foreign-born black population historically dominated by people of Afro-Caribbean descent.

Christina Greer’s Black Ethnics raises critically important questions about the prospects for pan-racial political coalitions that bring together American-born, Afro-Caribbean, and African blacks. W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) famously wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that blacks carry a “double-consciousness” that pairs painful awareness of subordination with an inescapable recognition that America is their only nation. But the social identities of foreign-born blacks and their offspring present even more complexity. They are immigrants, blacks, members of their national origin group, and Americans. Black immigrants come to recognize that whatever identity they choose for themselves, American society will view them through the lens of race, and if they assimilate they become “black American” rather than “just American” (p. 22). At the same time, they have an “elevated minority group status” (p. 12) in the eyes of many Americans. They share blacks’ low social status but enjoy higher status than American-born blacks by virtue of ethnic distinctiveness and immigrant origin. Shared racial identity therefore promotes political convergence while distinct ethnic identity undermines it (p. 13).

Greer’s most significant contributions are her development of a theoretical frame to help us understand the political implications of a multi-ethnic black populace and her analysis of an original survey of members of a New York City union of social welfare workers that includes substantial samples of each black ethnic group. She also reports interviews conducted with the union’s membership. She seeks to understand both convergence and divergence in these groups’ feelings about the viability of the American dream, fair treatment of minority groups, and political preferences. She arrives at a detailed and sometimes counter-intuitive portrait of her subjects’ political beliefs. The conclusion is that both racial commonality and ethnic difference influence political preferences and beliefs in equal opportunity. Issues that separate whites and blacks tend to promote pan-black unity while other issues make intra-black divides salient.

Black Ethnics is not the first work to traverse this scholarly terrain. Mary Waters, Alejandro Portes, and others have considered racial and ethnic dimensions of black immigrant identity and the ways that this dual identity influences life chances, perceptions of American society, and patterns of assimilation. Political implications have also been studied. Reuel Rogers’ (2006) Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and the Politics of Incorporation considers impediments to coalitions between native-born and Afro-Caribbean blacks in New York. Alana Hackshaw’s (2008) dissertation and other work (see, e.g., “Black Ethnicity and Racial Community: African-Americans and West Indian Immigrants in the United States.” in Caroline Brettell, ed., Constructing Borders / Crossing Boundaries: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration, 2007) examines feelings of pan-racial solidarity between native-born and Afro-Caribbean blacks, extending, as Greer does, the notion of a “black utility heuristic” laid out in Michael Dawson’s (1994) Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics. Other than Hackshaw’s research, these works are appropriately acknowledged. But a clearer exposition of how the theory of elevated minority status and the findings presented in the book differ from, and overlap with related research would have been helpful.

Instead, Greer’s theory and results often appear to corroborate previous findings, with the main difference being an application of existing theory to the additional case of African-born blacks. For example, Greer reports that African blacks have more faith in the American Dream than native-born blacks, who in turn have more faith than Afro-Caribbeans. But she attributes these differences to the greater availability of “exit options” for Afro-Caribbeans than Africans and the fact that her African sample is much more heavily foreign-born and the Afro-Caribbean sample largely either raised in the United States from childhood or are second-generation (p. 91). Both these ideas are probed extensively in the literature on segmented assimilation and in Reuel Rogers’ research on Afro-Caribbean political incorporation. Greer adds the intriguing possibility that experience with ethnic conflict in Afro-Caribbeans’ countries of origin renders them less sensitive to racial issues in the United States, but the idea is not developed or tested empirically.

There are important differences between Greer’s ideas and earlier work, most notable of which is the expectation that the groups’ sense of common interests will vary by issue type. Still, the argument is too often hinted at, alluded to vaguely, or posed in a question form, rather than stated outright. For example, on page 5, Greer states that “[t]he simultaneous acceptance of a shared racial identity and preservation of a distinct ethnic identity is the essential element in better understanding coalition building, representation, policy stances, and political participation of blacks as a pathway to the American Dream in twenty-first-century American politics.” It is not till somewhat later (p. 36) that Greer provides a statement of the main thesis, and even here we learn only that there will be instances of pan-racial solidarity and inter-ethnic difference. The first chapter could have been a more helpful guide if it had provided more thorough elaboration of the theory of black elevated minority status, distinguished it from other theories, and noted specific determinants of political unity between black groups. Instead, crucial distinctions between unifying issues concerning interracial distinctions with whites and dividing issues that tap inter-ethnic differences are not specified until Chapter 4.

The book also might have been strengthened through more effort to integrate its various endeavors. Given that foregrounding and articulating the theory of elevated minority status occupies most of the introductory and first chapters, it is surprising to find that the first research question Greer sets out to investigate is how union membership influences native and immigrant black political participation (pp. 5-6, 35-36, and Ch. 3). Much of Chapter 5 assesses whether there are smaller inter-ethnic differences among blacks on issues the union has weighed in on than those on which it has not. These are important questions in their own right, but they are theoretically and thematically tangential to the book’s main argument.

Moreover, the goal of studying the political impact of union membership on the populations in question would appear to work at cross-purposes with the book’s main goal. If Greer is correct that “[u]nion memberships can provide a collective identity derived from members’ common interests and solidarity” (p. 45) then the use of the union sample to answer the book’s other questions is problematic. Greer argues that the union sample allows her to control for class and occupation (p. 44), but it is not explained why this is desirable, and it seems questionable to rule out actual socioeconomic differences between black ethnic groups as sources of inter-group political divides by design. It also seems to conflict with the goal of extending Michael Dawson’s (1994) theory, since the black utility heuristic is invoked in large part to account for black political unity despite increasing intra-black socioeconomic heterogeneity.

Even if it were desirable to control for class, basing the argument largely on a survey of a union with an explicitly primary dedication to social justice issues (p. 46) would be a liability in light of “[t]he underlying motivation of this study [which] is to examine the content of the composition and attitudes of blacks in America” (p. 86). Public opinion researchers can empathize with the challenges of surveying hard-to-reach minority groups, and no one would expect a truly random sample of the city’s black ethnic populations. But the selection and socialization effects implicit in union membership make it very difficult to sort out how the findings presented in this book might generalize beyond the sample. Perhaps the inter-ethnic differences presented are all the more remarkable given the nature of the sample, and some corroboration from General Social Survey data in Chapter 5 is reassuring, but heavy reliance on the union survey means the empirical results cannot give reliable support to the book’s hypotheses.

Black Ethnics calls attention to important questions about the prospects for pan-black racial coalitions in American politics and provides a sense of how and why their viability may vary across issue domains. It will likely spur more researchers to study these topics and will serve as a helpful guide for those who do.