The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.

DIVA theoretical troubling of the assumptions of uniformity in Blackness, comparing writings by and about African diasporic subjects from the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany./div

Anthropologists widely agree that identities_even ethnic and racial ones_are socially constructed. Less understood are the processes by which social identities are conceived and developed. Legalizing Identities shows how law can successfully serve

Jas M. Sullivan and Ashraf M. Esmail’s African American Identity: Racial and Cultural Dimensions of the Black Experience is a collection which makes use of multiple perspectives across the social sciences to address complex issues of race and identity. The contributors tackle questions about what African American racial identity means, how we may go about quantifying it, what the factors are in shaping identity development, and what effects racial identity has on psychological, political, educational, and health-related behavior. African American Identity aims to continue the conversation, rather than provide a beginning or an end. It is an in-depth study which uses quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods to explore the relationship between racial identity and psychological well-being, effects on parents and children, physical health, and related educational behavior. From these vantage points, Sullivan and Esmail provide a unique opportunity to further our understanding, extend our knowledge, and continue the debate.

Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany--these figures stand out in the annals of black protest for their vital antislavery efforts. But what of the rest of their generation, the thousands of other free blacks in the North? Patrick Rael explores the tradition of protest and sense of racial identity forged by both famous and lesser-known black leaders in antebellum America and illuminates the ideas that united these activists across a wide array of divisions. In so doing, he reveals the roots of the arguments that still resound in the struggle for justice today. Mining sources that include newspapers and pamphlets of the black national press, speeches and sermons, slave narratives and personal memoirs, Rael recovers the voices of an extraordinary range of black leaders in the first half of the nineteenth century. He traces how these activists constructed a black American identity through their participation in the discourse of the public sphere and how this identity in turn informed their critiques of a nation predicated on freedom but devoted to white supremacy. His analysis explains how their place in the industrializing, urbanizing antebellum North offered black leaders a unique opportunity to smooth over class and other tensions among themselves and successfully galvanize the race against slavery.

As students navigate learning and begin to establish a sense of self, local surroundings can have a major influence on the range of choices they make about who they are and who they want to be. This book investigates how various constructions of identity can influence educational achievement for African American students, both within and outside school. Unique in its attention to the challenges that social and educational stratification pose, as well as to the opportunities that extracurricular activities can offer for African American students' access to learning, this book brings a deeper understanding of the local and fluid aspects of academic, racial, and ethnic identities. Exploring agency, personal sense-making, and social processes, this book contributes a strong new voice to the growing conversation on the relationship between identity and achievement for African American youth.

Ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic that aims to center black women and their philosophies. Book jacket.