Abstract

Excerpted From: Bill Ong Hing, Black Migrants and Black Lives Matter: Voices of Tension, Racism, Pan-Africanism, and Prospects for Collaboration, 22 UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice 129 (January, 2025) (289 Footnotes) (Full Document)

In an often-reported story, when Ghanaian-born Kofi Annan was a foreign student in the United States, in the 1960s and early 1970s, he visited the American South and stopped into a white-owned barbershop to get a haircut. The white barber told him, “We don't cut niggers' hair,” whereupon Annan replied, “I am not a nigger, I am an African,” and the barber proceeded to provide a haircut. The story is noteworthy because Annan later became the secretary general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006 and won a Nobel Peace Prize. He served during a decade of turmoil and was admired by many for his “charismatic and measured approach,” while radiating an “aura of probity and authority.”

Although decades old, this vignette is relevant to the main question that this article addresses: where do Black migrants view themselves in the racial justice movement in the United States? As we will see, some Black migrants choose to disassociate themselves from African Americans, and African Americans know that. Some white Americans favor Black migrants over African Americans, and African Americans know that as well. Most Black migrants have a sense of identity based on their ethnic background, while the identity for most African Americans has evolved from the evil history of slavery and discrimination in the United States. Those facts contribute to the challenge of incorporating Black migrants into the Black Lives Matter movement.

In late September 2021, in a grossly dehumanizing manner, U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback chased Haitian migrants back to the Mexico side of the Rio Grande River. Dramatic video and photos showed the agents slinging their horses' long reins around the migrants and violently grabbing at least one man by the shirt. Significantly, Black Lives Matter (BLM) immediately joined the chorus of outrage condemning the Border Patrol's “slave-catching” style “rooted in white supremacy.” With the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and other Black migrant-led social justice groups, BLM demanded that the Biden Administration “grant humanitarian parole to Black asylum-seekers” and to cease their expulsion. BLM reminded readers that “[w]hen we say #DefundThePolice, we mean all the police, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”

The BLM interest in migration issues is not surprising to those who are familiar with the movement's history. One of the three Black queer women who founded the movement was Opal Tometi, the executive director of BAJI. In a 2014 Black feminist manifesto titled “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” another co-founder, Alicia Garza, wrote:

Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes. [ ... ] Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.

BLM's concern and advocacy for Black migrants appears to be reciprocated. Data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) indicates that with the exception of Black natives, no other racial group expressed as high a level of support for BLM as that observed among Black migrants. While expressing their support for BLM, Black immigrants, like African Americans, look beyond their own experiences of police maltreatment and racial discrimination. That is, they focus less on whether they themselves have had such adverse experiences in the past and more on their concerns about the collective fate of Black people at the hands of police. The researchers concluded that this high degree of concern found among both Black groups, as well as its relative distinction from that found among non-Black groups, is what would be expected in the presence of Black racial solidarity.

On closer review, however, the sympathy that African Americans may have for issues related to Black migrants and the affinity that Black migrants have for racial justice issues in the United States are unclear and face challenges. For example, some African Americans feel that their opportunities for advancement are threatened by Black migrants who exhibit an ““air of superiority.” And some Black migrants have expressed the desire to distance themselves from African Americans. In fact, even though the CMPS data revealed that support among Black migrants for BLM was higher than that from other racial groups, the Black migrant support represented less than a third of Black migrants.

Black migration to the United States has received increased attention in the last several years--from the Border Patrol assault of Haitians at the Rio Grande River to the double-barreled targeting of Black migrants through their victimization by racist local police and their disproportionate detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). I have previously written about Black migration to the United States, reporting on demographic numbers and the limited avenues for entry. More recently, I reviewed racist immigration enforcement efforts targeting Black migrants, calling on advocates and allies to devote more attention to the underrepresentation of Black migrants. In that vein, for several years, my students and I have partnered with the BAJI legal staff in case preparation.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the strengthening of BLM, a question has surfaced over the level of involvement of Black migrants in the racial justice movement in the United States. That question is at the center of this article. Where do Black migrants see themselves vis a vis BLM? What are the factors that determine their involvement in the racial justice movement? How do African Americans regard Black migrants in the context of racial justice? What are the challenges to cohesion between these groups in the fight for racial justice? As this article reveals, the answers to these questions are complicated. Although there are commonalities, tension and misunderstanding between the groups are apparent. Black migrants are not monolithic, and their identities evolve in different ways in response to their experiences in the United States. Their numbers are growing: from 3.5 million in 2012 to 4.3 million in 2022--almost by 24 percent. Concepts of Pan-Africanism or Black unity are advanced by some advocates in the hopes of collaboration. These concepts register with some, but not all parties.

This article begins with a review of the literature, social media, and voices that address Black migrants and BLM, Black migrant identity, African American views toward Black migrants, and Black migrant views toward African Americans. Many of the voices are those collected by a team of researchers that worked with me. In the process, the article explores tensions, misunderstandings, opposing viewpoints, evolving viewpoints, and challenges to collaboration. The prospects of vibrant participation in the racial justice movement by Black migrants will be assessed along with the parallel prospect of Pan-African unification between the groups. A corresponding goal is to highlight the voices of Black migrants and African Americans on the issues of Black unity and racial justice collaboration.

[. . .]

The voices collected in this Article reveal the complexity to the answer of whether Black migrants can be expected to support the racial justice movement in the United States. In large part, the answer leans to the affirmative because of the broad perspective that some Black migrants have developed-- including Pan-Africanism, but especially because of the racism that they experience after arrival. However, reaching that position is not accomplished straightforwardly nor clearly for every Black migrant.

The revelations exposed in the review of tensions, misunderstandings, and social distance are a plea for better information and education for Black migrants, African Americans, and the rest of us, too. We need to know the backgrounds of the various Black migrants who have arrived and what pushed or pulled them here. Their backgrounds are likely to include standard migration stories of family, opportunity, and adventure, but also violence and poverty. We also need reminding of the social and economic challenges that have faced African Americans throughout the nation's racist history, plus an update on how those challenges continue today.

The experiences of Black migrants and African Americans are varied and distinct. They readily unite over things that they share, especially the threat of police and the criminal justice system. However, they very clearly recognize that the way they experience their Blackness, apart from the skin-deep implications of color, are not common. When colonialism is identified as the root of both slavery and the destabilization of African politics and economies, and thereby a root cause of the migration pathways of Black migrants and African Americans, there seems to be a deeper sense of solidarity across and within the groups.

The racial experience for Black migrants is distinct from that experienced by other migrants. Because the Black diaspora was so dramatically, forcefully, and physically divided by colonization, bridging that divide is challenging. Yet, one avenue to bridging that divide between Black migrants and African Americans is likely race. Lilian, the 25-year-old Kenyan woman who migrated to the United States seven years ago, put it this way: “I'm Black. My identity revolves around a very open wound .... I'm Black, and I exist off of knowing that that identity comes with a wound.” Her comment is revelatory: It speaks of Blackness, connected not to a shared color, but to a shared wound incurred by a centuries-long legacy of colonialism and anti-Blackness. The reality of skin color as a deep and enduring aspect of injustice in America makes it important for the racial justice movement to include Black migrants, and for those migrants to embrace the movement.

Professor of Law and Migration Studies, University of San Francisco.