We Are Here! We Are Here!

Yesterday I was thrilled to read Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times that began with the following paragraph, "In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks - and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us." He was commenting on Richard Nisbett's book Intelligence and How to Get It that puts forward the notion that cultural values inherent in these ethnic groups allows them to capitalize on their intelligence and become successful in ways that other groups do not; intelligence can be transcended by the context in which it is applied. Ultimately, "success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive." (from New York Times, 6/7/09)

I was thrilled because I am a West Indian or Caribbean American, either term is fine with me, and there is not much written about us. The article goes on further to state that "West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-American as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher." We usually and generally are lumped in with African-American blacks because, after all, we are all black which has less nuance ethnically in America than do white Americans; we have our Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans and so on but you don't really hear about the specific ethnicity of black Americans. Like the Whos in Who-ville, we West Indian or Caribbean Americans want to yell to the world "We are here! We are here!"

I was born in England, the child of West Indian parents. When I arrived in New York, from my prestigious boarding school in England, I was shocked at the lack of academic ambition on the part of my fellow black Americans. Here I was in Westchester County, an upscale suburb of New York City and I actually endured more taunting from my fellow black students because of my academic ambition than from my fellow white students, until it mattered to them. In my Senior year when I was accepted to an Ivy League university, many intimated that I was accepted because of affirmative action even though I had received stellar grades right alongside them for all of those years.

Some of this annoyed me but what annoyed me more was having to constantly respond to the African-American history/experience in the United States; this was a history that was not my own. Though I had no forbears here, I was black in America and therefore lumped into the overarching black American history of which I was quite sympathetic, even to the point of internalizing much of the struggle, but I felt erased, sometimes; I was British and I was West Indian, what about that? Certainly, my history gets complicated having been born in England of West Indian parents and then emigrating to America but I didn't want to be put upon to overcome the unfortunate legacy of slavery and the black American experience either. After all, I was an immigrant, just like my fellow immigrants who came to America, in my case as the offspring of a parent seeking economic opportunity.

I am happy to finally see some recognizable distinction for us West Indian Americans. There was a movement to have a Caribbean/West Indian American ethnic category on the 2010 census. It did not succeed but maybe next time, maybe next time America will not lump all black people together and where we get to celebrate our heritage nationally just like any other ethnic group does.