Caribbean Americans and Afro-Americans

Originally printed at http://www.trinidadexpress.com/commentaries/Caribbean_Americans_and_Afro-Americans-125699428.html

By Selwyn Ryan
July 16, 2011 According to a report carried in the Express (June 24, 2011), Machel Montano was due to perform at the White House on the occasion of Caribbean Heritage Month. That event celebrated the various contributions made over the years by migrants from the Caribbean to the development of the United States.
A proclamation issued by the Obama administration, dated May 31, 2011, was full of praise for their contribution. It states, inter alia, that "Caribbean Americans have prospered in every sector of our society, and have enhanced our national character while maintaining the multiethnic and multicultural traditions of their homelands. They are doctors and lawyers, public servants and scientists, athletes and services members. Their successes inspire individuals in the United States and abroad, and we take pride in the contributions Caribbean-Americans continue to make to the narrative of our Nation's progress.
"Their achievements are borne of hard work and ambition, and my administration is committed to creating pathways to prosperity that ensure future generations of Caribbean-Americans, along with all Americans, are able to pursue and realise the American dream."
A week earlier, an issue of Express Woman (May 22, 2011) carried a story about one of these Caribbean Americans whose grandparents left Trinidad and Tobago in 1916 to begin life anew. The reference was to one Rhoda Brathwaite Weekes, who, according to the story, had established a soft drinks business in the late 19th century, but left it to go to New York, and who, together with her Kittitian husband, established East Harlem's first black owned business.
Rhoda's granddaughter was Susan Taylor, the CEO of Essence magazine, one of black Americas' successful publications devoted to the black female.
The report talks further of Taylors's success which she attributed to the work ethnic which she inherited from her Trinidadian grandmother. As she writes "I grew up in a family that was about work and productivity. They were very strong and clear with nourishing values that kept me on a good path, even when our community was falling apart. My mother never cared what anybody looked like or what they had. She wanted to know what your values were; that's been inculcated in me. That's really what I learnt from my Trinidad lineage."
My interest in these two linked stories was prompted by work which I am currently undertaking on black entrepreneurs, and by an article which I recently read. The article, "New Light on Afro-Caribbean Social Mobility in New York City,"which was written by Dr Winston James, Professor of History at Columbia University, analyses the achievements of black West Indians in New York. James addresses the controversial question as to why West Indian blacks consistently out performed Afro-Americans in the professions, in business and in other related activities at the turn of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The noted Afro-American economist Thomas Sowell attributes the related performances to cultural, historical, and demographic factors. He observed that while both groups were black, their performances differed. As he explained, "West Indians in the United States have long had a distinctive life style, set of values and educational, economic, and cultural achievements very different from those of American [blacks]. Though only a small fraction—perhaps one per cent—of the black population in America—they have long been overrepresented among prominent blacks. West Indians have long been prominent among 'the first Negro who' pioneered in various legal and political positions in New York."
Sowell argued that West Indians had different historical and demographic experiences. There were fewer whites in the Caribbean, and as such there was less opportunity for occupational exclusiveness. Jim Crow laws were not sustainable in the British West Indies.

The economics and governance regime of the plantation also made West Indian blacks more self reliant and defiant than their American counterparts. "Emancipation also came some three decades later in America than in the Caribbean. Thus, much of what is attributed to race as such is a function of special historical circumstances. Incidentally, Caribbean Americans were often sneeringly referred to as "black Jews".
Sowell was criticised by James, who, unfairly in my view, argued that his explanation for the successes of the black West Indian was inadequate in that it fails to make clear what constituted the "culture" of which he spoke. Sowell was accused of using the concept too broadly. To quote Prof James, "he uses culture in such a broad manner—skill, values, education, attitudes, family patterns, behaviour, that it explains virtually everything and therefore nothing."
In James' view, the factor that best explains the performance of West Indian blacks in the United States was the type of migrant who went there in those years as opposed to those who went to the UK in the years after World War II. By the terms of the 1917 Immigration Act, only persons who were literate were allowed entry. Citing Department of Labour statistics, he notes that only 1.1 per cent of the adult black migrants who were admitted to America in the period 1918 to 1932 were illiterate. James Weldon Johnson, author of Black Manhattan, noted in 1930, also noted that "there was practically no illiteracy among the migrants from the West Indies....Many have a sound English common school education".
What all this meant was that America imported the "brains" of the Caribbean leaving behind "brawn" as a residue. It also meant that the Caribbean was denuded of its brightest and best. "The migrants came from the thin layer of the most literate of the societies." This "brain drain" eased the pressure on the Caribbean job market, but served to empty it of a whole generation of persons who constituted the Caribbean middle class. As James observed, "the most remarkable feature of the socioeconomic profile of the early migrants is the high proportion of their number that held, in their country of origin, professional, white-collar and skilled jobs. Caribbean teachers and doctors, clerks and accountants, dressmakers and seamstresses, tailors and carpenters emigrated to the United States in disproportionately large numbers compared to their unskilled compatriots.

"From 32.4 per cent (1899-1905), the professional and skilled workers had increased to 43.2 per cent of the migrating black adults for the years 1927-31. In marked contrast, 81.7 per cent of Afro-Americans were employed in agriculture and domestic service."
Interestingly, Sowell concedes that migration was important, but argues that it was not the mulatto class that migrated to the United States, but rather those from the black population. One is entitled to speculate as to whether this mass exodus of upwardly mobile blacks was responsible for the fact that many of those who, like Roberta Brathwaithe Weekes went to New York and started businesses, would have formed the kernel of a black business class in the Anglophone Caribbean. It is worth noting that in 1909, 22 per cent of the black business in New York were run by Caribbean Americans.
It may however be that the migrants were, like migrants everywhere who had to work hard to survive and get ahead, forced to activate the entrepreneurial dispositions which many of them had. Those who stayed at home instead went looking for jobs.