The Caribbeanization of Black Politics by Sharon Austin is a welcome, and still all too rare, inquiry into how immigration is changing Black politics. Research on the politics of immigrants in the U.S.A. falls broadly into two categories. One analyzes immigrant political incorporation: how recent immigrants, most of them non-white, are adapting to American politics, its institutions, norms, and practices—and vice versa. The other investigates immigrant reception: how Americans are reacting to the demographic changes precipitated by these latest immigrant arrivals. Racial dynamics usually occupy the analytic foreground in both streams of research. Yet Blacks are often curiously absent. All but a few of the studies in the first category overlook Black immigrants. Most in the second category focus on the reactions of white Americans and ignore African Americans. Austin's book addresses this gap in the research.
Migrants from the Caribbean comprise the majority of Black newcomers to this country. Most live in overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods alongside African Americans, due to persistent residential segregation. Their growing presence has brought unprecedented levels of ethnic heterogeneity to Black populations in cities across the country. How are Black politics transformed, Austin's book asks, when ethnic and nativity differences stemming from immigration become salient among Blacks?
Robust racial group identification and group consciousness have spurred African Americans' participation and solidarity in U.S. politics. The key test in Austin's analysis is whether Black ethnics from the Caribbean embrace these same forms of racial identity, and to similar political effect. If they do, she posits that the immigrants are likely to align with African Americans, and by dint of their expanding numbers, buttress Black political incorporation in several cities. If they reject a race-based identity, however, she predicts that their prospects for mobilization and cooperation with native-born Blacks might be diminished and the potential for interethnic conflict heightened.
This is well-tilled terrain in the small, but lively political science literature on Caribbean immigrants. In fact, Austin borrows theoretical frameworks for the analysis from previous studies—these include the minority group model attributing Blacks' racial identification to exposure to discrimination, and schema outlining the immigrant political incorporation process. The book's contributions are chiefly empirical. It is the most wide-ranging analysis of interethnic dynamics in Black politics, to date. It spans four cities (i.e., Boston, Chicago, Miami, and New York); includes African Americans and Black immigrants from both the Anglo- and Francophone Caribbean; and encompasses both first- and second-generation Black ethnics of Caribbean descent.
The empirical centerpiece of the book is an original survey of more than 2,000 non-randomly sampled African Americans and Caribbean immigrants across the four cities. It is an impressive trove of data, with items tapping respondents' racial group identity, experiences with discrimination, opinions about interethnic alliances among Blacks, and political participation patterns. Austin also draws on numerous secondary sources to trace the trajectory of Black political incorporation in the four cities. The case studies on each city recall key junctures in Blacks' bids for political power; fraught periods of racial backlash from whites; peaks in African American and Caribbean elective officeholding; and episodes of conflict and cooperation between the two groups.
The multivariate regression analyses of the survey data are the linchpin of the study. Austin examines covariates of racial group consciousness, such as education, immigrant generation, neighborhood racial composition, and “politicized” church attendance, among African Americans and their Black ethnic counterparts from the Caribbean. She also investigates the impact of group consciousness on various forms of political participation and candidate choice. Although there are notable variations in the outcomes for the two groups across the four cities, the analyses uncover several consistent patterns. First, they show that African Americans and Caribbean Black ethnics encounter discrimination from whites; and they both express racial group identification, as measured by linked fate, group consciousness, and support for race-based coalitions involving the other group. African Americans, however, endorse such alliances more unreservedly than Blacks from the Caribbean. African Americans are also more politically engaged than their Black ethnic counterparts. But racial group consciousness strikingly increases political participation and preference for Black candidates, in both groups.
These findings largely validate the minority group model, confirming that racial identity is a powerful political catalyst and heuristic for both African Americans and Caribbean Black ethnics. A few of the statistical results challenge conclusions from earlier studies. But Austin sometimes draws overly sharp distinctions between her findings and those from previous scholarship, even when the differences are matters of nuance or complexity. Many of the findings actually echo or amplify insights from existing research. The study is unable to resolve, however, several lingering puzzles and raises questions for future research. For instance, the analyses cannot rule out selection bias in the apparent correlation between neighborhood racial composition and group consciousness. Likewise, there are no contextual variables to test for group threat effects among African Americans living in neighborhoods with increasing numbers of Caribbean immigrants. There are also no analyses of how group consciousness affects vote choice when African American and Caribbean candidates are electoral rivals. Finally, the study glosses over the issue of agenda setting bias in coalitions between the two groups, and leaves open key questions about how racial group consciousness develops among Caribbean-born Black ethnics and whether this form of racial identity is actually diasporic.
What the study does demonstrate unambiguously is the unabating political significance of race for both African Americans and Black ethnics of Caribbean descent. The findings suggest that political incorporation for Black immigrants is simultaneously a process of racial incorporation. The immigrants' integration into Black politics in the U.S.A. ultimately may be more about racialization than about the “Caribbeanization” noted in the title of the book. This tortuous and too often vexing process imbues racial identity with political meaning and can ignite a galvanizing race consciousness among native- and Caribbean-born Blacks alike. With the recent escalation in anti-democratic efforts to suppress minority voting, the mobilizing benefits of racial group consciousness documented in this study are as critical as ever for advancing Black democratic inclusion.
