Reflections on Migration and the Black Diaspora
by Maik Nwosu
As contemporary international migration becomes more complex, so too do the migration theories that attempt to explain the causes, trajectories, and consequences of these movements. These theories do not necessarily discredit the classical “push-pull” theory that correlates factors that “push” out immigrants from particular sending countries to those that “pull” them into specific receiving countries. In his itinerant study of the black diaspora, The European Tribe, Caryl Phillips views the “classic three-stage pattern” of immigration as, first, “the phase of labour movement,” “the second phase of family reunification,” and “the final stage of settlement as memories of the old country begin to recede and the first-generation immigrant begins to develop at twice the speed of the country that he has left behind.” The “push-pull” theory remains valid, but the search for other explanations of migratory patterns is premised on the need to account for other contributory factors. One of these explanations, migration systems theory, focuses on three interconnected tiers—the micro communal resources of the immigrants themselves, the meso factors facilitated by agents and intermediaries, and the macro legal and institutional structures. Thus, migration systems theory attempts to provide a comprehensive framework for the comprehension of important factors that influence the trajectory of migration—from orientation and departure through reception and settlement to citizenship and or return. It is a considered framework, but it can also be rather panoramic or imprecise for the analysis of some significant issues. One such consideration is the specificity as well as complexity of blackness in relation to migration within Africa as well as from Africa and the Caribbean (especially since the 1948 arrival in London of hundreds of Caribbean workers on the Empire Windrush).
While these explanatory frameworks contextualize aspects of contemporary international migration, none of them sufficiently accounts for its complexity. Even some of the theories together do not fully explain the despairing urgency as well as unstructured consequences of these movements. For instance, many of them seem to assume a well-defined divergence between voluntary and involuntary migration—a bona fide distinction that is nevertheless not always beyond question. The distinction between a voluntary and an involuntary migrant often translates into the difference between an “immigrant” and a “refugee.” The US Refugee Act of 1980 describes a refugee as a person “unable or unwilling to return to [his or her country of nationality or prior residence], and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution.” This definition excludes many international migrants, especially those who move for economic reasons. From the available evidence, migration has been necessitated by the search for better opportunities since the dawn of human history, but it can be argued that sometimes this movement is paradoxically almost as involuntary as it is voluntary. The fact that only about three percent of the world’s population actually migrate from their home countries suggests that international migration is not usually the preferred option. There is also the additional consideration that international migration is a tasking process in multiple ways. It may be unproblematic to classify the middle-class professional who quits a well-paying job in Lagos, Nigeria to take up another well-paying job in Cape Town, South Africa as a voluntary migrant. But what about the thousands rafting across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe, risking almost certain death because of the almost assured ruination they face back home in the face of impoverished opportunities caused by natural disasters or government policies? In theory, the “almost” disqualifies them as refugees, but in reality it has had an impact on migration flows out of Africa, including resettlement patterns. Certainly, not every African migrant fits into this category, but the massive human capital draining out of Africa—sometimes with stark urgency—complicates some of the assumptions of migration theories.
Race-conscious migration theories address some of these assumptions in their examination of the effects of racial differentiation on international migration. In the USA, one of the consequences of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, which changed the demographic character of immigrants by expanding immigration from non-European countries. By 2016, according to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, there were “4.2 million black immigrants living in the U.S.,” an increase from “just about 816,000 in 1980.” Thus, about ten percent of the black population in the U.S. are foreign-born. The top six sending countries in this context—Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, Ethiopia, and Dominican Republic—contributed more than two million of the total in 2013. American history indicates that immigrants often go through a period of otherization before becoming integrated, sometimes incompletely, into the society. By 1855, according to the Atlas of Human Migration, “roughly half of the inhabitants of New York were immigrants [mostly from Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, and Ireland]. In the city there were loud murmurings against the immigrant population, who were over-represented in the jails and hospitals, but in the country at large immigrants were still very much in demand.” Regardless of that fact, it is difficult to separate some of the post-1965 outrage against immigrants from a new sense of the immigrant as synonymous with the idea of the other. Although this otherization traces a path back to when destitute Europeans—the Irish, the Italians, and Jews, for instance—arrived in the 19th century and first clustered in ethnic neighborhoods before becoming assimilated into the larger American community, assimilation was apparently made less arduous then by racial affinity with the ‘native’ European-American population. Since 1965, a significant number of immigrants originate from non-European countries with sometimes markedly different cultures and some of them are increasingly conflicted about the idea of assimilation, preferring instead to parenthesize their Americanization process by preserving or even projecting some of their cultural particulars. Those who favor assimilation are sometimes discouraged by the recognition that unless they accomplish an impossible racial transformation they may never become “American” enough, regardless of the rhetoric about diversity or the American melting pot.
Increasingly, even race as a generalized category is becoming less effective as an analytical lens for the examination of the dynamics of the contemporary flow of black migrants in all directions, especially into countries with an uneasy history of black presence or pre-existing black diasporas. Blackness was always a racial form of differentiation that often also functioned as a social category. In South Africa, under Apartheid, the racial distinction between black, colored, and white was the basis for a policy of segregation that practiced unequal development for different races or groups. In Britain and the USA, racial distinctions – between black and white – furthered theological and social claims that empowered transatlantic slavery. In these countries, racial differentiation was a form of social categorization that redefined and limited possibilities available to black people. The apparent demise of these systems opened up social categories in ways that sometimes advanced mobility, resulting in a thriving black middle class and, in the USA, even a black President. As continued agitations such as the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa and the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA suggest, however, blackness remains a disadvantaged racial and social category. It is also progressively a heterogeneous and complex one.
This diversity is evident in studies such as Toyin Falola’s The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity, and Globalization; The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (edited by Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali A. Mazrui); The Other African Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Families in the United States (edited by Yoku Shaw-Taylor and Steven A. Tuch); Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (edited by Joseph. E. Harris); Michael A. Gomez’s Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora; and many other instances, including oral performances and literary texts. Notably, the folkloric frame of Maya Angelou’s presidential inauguration poem in 1993, “On the Pulse of Morning,” encompasses not only a reference to the “African” (as well as other identities) but also a tonal invitation:
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought,
Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
The rooting progresses. Two other African American presidential inauguration poets – Elizabeth Alexander in 2009 (“Praise Song for the Day”) and Amanda Gorman in 2021 (“The Hill We Climb”)—variously ground the overall vision of a more inclusive and restorative world that Angelou previously highlighted. While Angelou’s poem recognizes cultural and racial specificities, it ends with a collectivized “Good morning” that transcends race or difference. Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day” closes with a ringing line, “praise song for walking forward in that light,” and Gorman concludes “The Hill We Climb” with a corresponding vision in a different cadence:
For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it
If only we're brave enough to be it
This dawning or “Good morning” consciousness—the movement from seeing-light to being-light—can be furthered by a reconsideration of the trajectory of American or human history, including its multiple diasporas, past and present. However the contemporary African or black diaspora is dated—whether it is traced back to the 20th century or farther back to the 15th or 16th century or even as far back as that ancient era when homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and successfully settled in other parts of the world—its phases and pluralities tell an expanding story that also constitutes an experiential argument for inclusion and transcendence.
The idea of blackness as a singularized category has always been a simplification or negation of the available evidence, and nothing seems to have made that clearer than recent black migration flows. This projection of the idea of heterogeneity regardless of racial simplifications may well be one more step toward the rethinking of unsustainable racial binaries or rigidities founded on the assumptions of discredited homogenizing systems. While the idea of the diversity of blackness does not immediately promote a post-racial euphoria, it signposts the possibility of transcending racialized reductionism. Historically, blackness was always at the bottom rung of the classifications of social classes. The slave was three-fifths of a person, so he was at the lowest possible rung. The black native was said to be primitive, so he was at the lowest possible rung. These classifications were often results of the ill-motivated imagination. As Benedict Anderson points out in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, communities “are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” Blackness as an idea driven by a racialized imagination was always an imaginary used to overinterpret and homogenize differences in skin color for socioeconomic reasons. The reimagination of the idea of blackness began ahead of the collapse of systemic institutions such as slavery and Apartheid and is being furthered by the significant diversities within black – and other racialized – diasporas in the renewed age of migration.
Dr. Maik Nwosu is Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, Colorado, as well as Executive Editor (Arts and Humanities) of ILORA.