West Indian Americans
West Indian Americans are individuals of Caribbean descent, primarily immigrants from former British West Indian islands, Belize, and Guyana, along with their U.S.-born descendants. This group has made notable strides in various fields, achieving significant economic, educational, and political success relative to other African American populations. Many West Indian immigrants settled in urban areas across the Northeast, forming vibrant ethnic enclaves in cities like New York, Boston, and Miami. Their cultural strengths, such as a strong emphasis on education and entrepreneurship, are often highlighted as contributing factors to their success.
Historically, West Indian Americans have navigated complex relationships with African Americans, including moments of tension and mutual misunderstanding. While early generations tended to downplay their ethnicity, the civil rights movements of the 1960s helped foster a sense of racial solidarity. Today, this community experiences a diverse range of identities; some members embrace a distinct West Indian heritage, while others identify more broadly as African Americans or adopt a hybrid identity. Political engagement has also grown, with West Indian Americans increasingly running for office and rallying around candidates who resonate with their cultural values. Overall, the West Indian American community reflects a rich tapestry of experiences shaped by migration, cultural heritage, and evolving identity dynamics within the broader American society.
West Indian Americans
SIGNIFICANCE: The success of Black West Indian Americans has drawn the attention of sociologists and other scholars and created some conflict with other African Americans.
Black West Indian immigrants and their descendants, a small group among the African American population, have achieved considerable economic, educational, and political success in the United States relative to native African Americans. Notable conservatives such as economist Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and author Dinesh D’Souza contend that this group’s relative success in part demonstrates the error in attributing the economic and social plight of some African Americans exclusively to racism. The group’s exceptionalism has also been noted by sociologists such as Stephen Steinberg in The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (1981) and Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen in The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America (1989).
The portrayal of exceptionalism is only part of this group’s profile. Structural shifts in the U.S. economy mean that segments of this community will face severe sociopsychological adjustments to migration, coupled with constricted assimilation to American society. Pressures against full assimilation are greater for lower-class West Indians. Typically, middle- and upper-class professionals alternate between a more inclusive West Indian American or particularistic African American identity, and the lower/working class chooses a more ethnically focused, West Indian identity.
West Indian Americans are immigrants from the former British West Indian Islands, Belize, and Guyana, and their U.S.-born descendants. Most of the West Indian immigrants arrived in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1924, restrictive immigration legislation effectively halted immigration from the islands. Most of the immigrants settled in the Northeast, creating urban ethnic communities in Miami, Boston, Newark (New Jersey), Hartford (Connecticut), and New York City; they settled in Brooklyn and formed ethnic enclaves in East Flatbush, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Canarsie, and Midwood districts.
West Indian Exceptionalism
Generally, West Indian immigrants have been perceived as models of achievement for their frugality, emphasis on education, and ownership of homes and small businesses. Economist Sowell argued that the group’s successes, including those of famous members such as General Colin Powell, derived from a distinctive cultural capital source and an aggressive migrant ideology, legacies of their native lands. Home ownership and economic entrepreneurship were financed partly by using a cultural source of capital, an association called susu (known in West Africa as esusu), that first reached the West Indian societies during slavery. A susu facilitates savings, small-scale capital formation, and micro lending. These traditional associations have been incorporated into mainstream financial organizations such as credit unions and mortgage and commercial banks as they adapt to serve the needs of West Indian Americans.
Political and Social Incorporation
Early immigrants such as Pan-Africanists Edward Blyden and Marcus Garvey and poet activist Claude McKay were among the first West Indian Americans to become well-known and well-respected figures. Other famous West Indian Americans are former U.S. representative Shirley Chisholm; Franklin Thomas, former head of the Ford Foundation; federal judge Constance Baker Motley; Nobel laureate Derek Walcott; and world-renowned actor Sidney Poitier. Activist Stokely Carmichael, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and Earl Graves, businessman and publisher of Black Enterprise, have made impressive efforts on behalf of African Americans.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, West Indian American politicians were elected with the help of the African American vote; many of the West Indians, believing their stay in the United States to be temporary, did not become citizens and were ineligible to vote. In the 1970s, this trend changed, and two congressional districts in New York with heavy concentrations of West Indians became represented by African Americans. However, West Indian Americans, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with African American representation, have been fielding their own candidates in state and local elections in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. These efforts have been aided by the fact that since 1993, when legislation less favorable to the immigrant population was passed, West Indian Americans have been acquiring U.S. citizenship in greater numbers. This trend in resurgent ethnic political awareness suggests that West Indian Americans may succeed in electing a member of their group to office. In the 2024 presidential race, many West Indians rallied behind Vice President Kamala Harris, whose father was a Jamaican immigrant. Although Harris lost, the election showcased the collective power of Caribbean immigrants.
Differential Assimilation
At the beginning of the twentieth century, West Indian Americans and African Americans held negative stereotypes of each other and rarely interacted socially. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the children of some West Indian immigrants downplayed their ethnicity and attempted to integrate into the African American community, but both groups’ images of each other changed slowly. Powell, in his autobiography, My American Journey (1995), recalls his African American father-in-law’s reaction when he proposed marriage to his daughter Alma: “All my life I’ve tried to stay away from those damn West Indians and now my daughter’s going to marry one!”
The late 1960s, with its emphasis on racial solidarity and group identity, eroded much of the conflict between African Americans and West Indian Americans and supplanted it with Black nationalist sentiments and identity. In the 1990s, many West Indian Americans were caught in an identity crisis, unsure of whether they should be West Indians with a strong ethnic orientation, African Americans with a focus on their racial identity, or West Indian Americans with a more hybrid identity. Class pressures play influential roles in this identity dilemma. Lower- and working-class West Indian Americans have strong affiliations with their ethnicity and its cultural symbols, using the ethnic community as a “structural shield” in their coping repertoire. However, a growing segment of West Indian American professionals regard themselves as West Indian Americans because this identity unites the more desirable choices by eliminating obstacles to their ultimate assimilation as Americans. In addition, this community is not monolithic, and class divisions segment the group as well as influence its responses to racism and other societal challenges.
Bibliography
Barkan, Elliott Robert. Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012.
Garvey, Amy Jacques, ed. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey: Africa for the Africans. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Iannini, Christopher. Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature. Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2012.
Khan, Tracey. “Caribbean Americans ‘Rally for Kamala’.” Essence, 13 Sep. 2024, www.essence.com/news/politics/caribbean-americans-rally-for-kamala-campaign/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2024.
Pares, Richard. War and Trade in the West Indies. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Williams, Eric. The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.