(Re)Remembering Race

Using interviews, this chapter highlights the ways in which blacks talk about immigration. In particular, the chapter seeks to uncover how blacks use their group’s past racial experiences (e.g., Jim Crow) to understand their present circumstances. Interviews conducted by the author reveal that respondents see their blackness as being devalued in American society. Their racial history aids in their assessment of their comparative racial progress. Through the particularities of their group’s history, they are able to understand how racial hierarchy positions their group relative to whites, and how the presence of immigrants highlights their disparate states in society. However, respondents in these interviews harbor no major hostilities toward immigrants. Rather, they are discomfited by the ways they perceive whites as exploiting immigrants in an effort to enforce the subordinate status on their group.

Introduction

Using a personal anecdote to set the stage, the author introduces the fundamental argument of the book, which is that black people respond to the “threat” of immigration by critiquing a system of white supremacy that excludes blacks through the exploitation of other groups. In particular the book examines the ways in which blacks use immigration as a lens to evaluate their own status as citizens. In other words, as blacks think about what immigration means for the nation, they are also thinking about what it means for their group. The context within which they look at immigration is through their own group’s racial experience, which has often found blacks struggling for belonging in the American body politic because of white supremacy.

Conflicted Nativism

This chapter tests a number of the propositions of the book empirically, using an original survey. The data demonstrate blacks have some superficially nativist attitudes, particularly those blacks who see themselves as prototypical Americans. These nativist attitudes are attenuated, however, by increasing levels of national pride. Moreover, blacks express a feeling of closeness with immigrants, particularly continental Africans, than native-born whites. At the same time, blacks support the idea of more border security but, in the main, have not even participated in the most minimal of political acts either in support of or against any immigration policy. This suggests immigration is not a salient issue for blacks, and to the extent they care about immigration, they are not willing to put any of their political energies toward the issue.

Beyond Immigration

As the concluding chapter of the work, this chapter revisits the central thesis of the book, which is the import of the context and constraints of white supremacy on black public opinion formation. Using immigration as a lens to better understand black opinion, the book argues that white supremacy is at the core of black public opinion formation; in this way, it is not an individual story about immigrants or immigration policy. My theory of conflicted nativism helps the reader to understand how and why blacks hold seemingly divergent opinions on the issue of immigration. I am able to show, however, that these opinions are not in conflict. Rather, blacks have distinct considerations as Americans that come from their unique position in the American racial hierarchy and the ways in which white supremacy structures how they navigate an array of political issues. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of border separations, which has animated much of the recent conversation in this policy arena.

Emigrants, Immigrants, and Refugees

This chapter presents a historical view of black opinion on immigration. In particular, it looks at the colonization movement of the nineteenth century and the ways in which blacks employed the concept of immigration as a way to escape racial oppression. In fact, blacks applied the term immigrant to their community and seriously considered leaving the United States, with some relocating to Canada and Liberia, for example. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate blacks’ long-term engagement with the issue of immigration as part of their political tradition. Using primary documents, the chapter helps to demonstrate the depth and range of ways in which blacks have viewed immigration over time.

Citizens First?

This chapter explicates the author’s theory of conflicted nativism. This theory argues that blacks use their identity as Americans to claim privilege in American society. Yet, this identity is only superficially related to nativist attitudes and is not accompanied by restrictionist impulses. Using immigration as a lens, blacks have been able to identify the perniciousness of white supremacy that treated them as strangers in their own land. Rather than being threatened by immigrants per se, blacks understand white racism as the real threat to their upward mobility and therefore do not organize around immigration restriction. Furthermore, they are resistant to other race-coded messages.

Lies, Fairytales, and Fallacies

This chapter introduces the key ideas animating the text. The twin issues of race and nationhood remain a significant part of the conversation regarding black political incorporation and are rendered most visible in the domain of immigration. Blacks have a different perspective of America that is grounded in their peculiar history and experiences with the country and its institutions. The chapter begins by putting forward the major theoretical underpinnings of existing works in black public opinion. In particular, it focuses on the work on interminority relations and lays out the critical interventions of this text. Chapter outlines and a roadmap to the rest of the text are provided.