Abstract
Necessarily Black provides an important reminder about the continuing significance of antiblack racism as the crucible in which the identities of racialized youth are being forged. It makes the argument not just that race matters but that blackness matters as the central axis for understanding the meaning of race in the United States. Although the book focuses on Cape Verdean youth in the greater Boston area, the reader comes away with the impression that he or she has been introduced to a black identity politics that one could just as easily find in the predominantly African American neighborhoods of Chicago or among the black, working-poor populations of Kingston, Jamaica, or Soweto, South Africa.
Several scholars have argued that anti-immigrant racism is not interchangeable with antiblack racism (King 2019; Kretsedemas 2013; Perea 1998). Although there are points of intersection between the two, anti-immigrant racism can be used to make invidious distinctions between American minorities and racialized foreigners that do not reduce to a white/black binary. One of the things I find most compelling about Necessarily Black is that it seems to be making a similar argument, but in reverse. Many Cape Verdean youth are first- or second-generation (or 1.5-generation) migrants, or they hail from migrant families, and their communities are targeted by the same deportation regime as any other racialized foreign-born population in the United States. Yet as Saucier points out, if you treat the racial otherness of Cape Verdean youth as analogous to that of Latinx or Asian migrant populations, you are not going to understand their experience of race. The Cape Verdean youth whom Saucier engaged—most of whom are male and all of whom are immersed in hip-hop culture—don’t think they are light skinned enough to pass as Latinx people (or if they are mistaken for a Latinx person, they see this as a version of passing for nonblack). And the kinds of problems that define their experience of race are not primarily defined by legal status worries or run-ins with immigration enforcement.
Critical studies of immigration have tried to show how immigrant exploitation is comparable to black oppression or how they operate along a continuum (Boza 2016). Saucier, on the other hand, stresses the singularity of blackness and antiblack racism. He notes that “antiblackness is a symbolic order that marks and values human lives in relation to nonblackness” (Saucier 2015:7). Although the sociology of immigrant racialization tends to subsume antiblackness within white supremacy, Saucier explains that this approach is insufficient for grasping how Cape Verdeans negotiate blackness. There are elements of Saucier’s argument that overlap with Herbert Gans’s (1992) cautionary tale about the second-generation decline of racialized migrant youth (as well as the segmented assimilation thesis that was published shortly thereafter) (Portes and Zhou 1993). But whereas these theories treat black identity as a contributing cause to the “decline,” Saucier treats black identity as an important cultural and political resource for youth who are burdened by a kind of marginality that is singularly defined by their blackness. Although he offers some critical insights about the performance of blackness and the commodification of the symbolic politics of black liberation, Saucier does not reduce black identity to the superficial theatrics of resistance. He also affirms black identity for offering a better diagnosis of the problem facing Cape Verdean youth than the one offered by the ethnicity paradigm or the mainstream literature on immigrants and integration.
In many respects, Saucier is updating and adapting Frantz Fanon’s (1967) argument about the fact of blackness. But this argument also sets up an expectation that Necessarily Black is going to explore the contemporary fact of blackness in more depth than it actually does. The stories that are recounted are short vignettes in which Cape Verdean youth recall having the N-word hurled at them in public settings, or being arbitrarily stopped and searched by the police or scrutinized by store security at shopping malls. Overall, I found that Saucier’s analysis was more focused on the narration and performance of identity than on the excavation of black experience.
Nevertheless, Saucier’s research is very effective in showing how Cape Verdean youth understand blackness as the defining theme of their social existence. Critical race scholars should be committed to innovating sociocultural frameworks that legitimize and enable the kinds of discussions that we need to be having about racism, making it possible for people to share, in more depth and with more candor, what they’ve learned or experienced about the fact of blackness. Viewed in this light, Necessarily Black is important because it offers a new perspective on how black identities are informed by a social ontology.