Beyond “Model Minority,” “Superwoman,” and “Endangered Species”: Theorizing Intersectional Coalitions among Black Immigrants, African American Women, and African American Men

Abstract

This essay brings an intersectional framework to the academic and popular discourse regarding relations of power among African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants. I demonstrate that African American women and Black immigrants are not necessarily and always more successful than African American men. Instead, all three groups share an experience of gendered and ethnicized racism that situates them differently in the labor force, the classroom, and beyond. Most importantly, African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants can forge feminist, anti-racist, and anti-nativist coalitions if and when they recognize that what it means to experience gendered and ethnicized racism is the result of rather than the reason for their politics.

Introduction

Consider a scenario in which African American women, African American men, and Black immigrants¹ come together to challenge New York Criminal Procedure Law §140.50 otherwise known as “stop and frisk.” “Stop and frisk” allows a police officer to stop and search an individual he or she “reasonably suspects is committing, has committed, or is about to commit (a) a felony or (b) a misdemeanor” in a manner that is physically harmful to the officer.² Some African American men might argue that they are “stopped and frisked” by police officers who assume not only that they are racially inferior to Whites but also that their inferiority is manifest in laziness, shiftlessness, and a consequent inability to function as law-abiding patriarchs or “normal” White men. Some African American women might contend they are “stopped and frisked” by officers who assume that their racial inferiority is most evident in their status as immoral, hypersexual welfare cheats whose lives are antithetical to those of “respectable” White women. Finally, some foreign-born Blacks might conclude that police officers’ “reasonable” suspicion is often a function of another kind co-constitutive ethnic,³ racial, and gendered subordination—one which assumes that Black immigrants are racially inferior because of their “dreadlocked” hair, polygamous unions, hijab covered heads, and other practices which are distinct and thus inferior to those of “civilized” White American men and women.

The abovementioned scenario is anything but an imaginary one. New York City police officers stop and frisk a disproportionately high number of African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants.⁴ African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants have, in turn, joined forces to protest “stop and frisk” by participating in numerous rallies and demonstrations including a June 2012 march in which several thousand protesters marched silently against §140.50.⁵ In describing the motivation behind her own anti-“stop and frisk” activism, an African American woman in New York City declares: “We need to collaborate in our demand for justice [because]… [s]ex, gender, race and immigration status informs the unique and destructive impact of policing on women and girls of African descent, as well as transgender people and men” (Burnett quoted in Morris, Greg 2013).

I contend that such “stop and frisk”-related advocacy and activism suggests the possibility of forging simultaneously feminist, anti-racist, and anti-nativist political coalitions among African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants. In advancing this claim, I reject the scholarly and popular discourse that constructs African American men as “endangered” by African American women and Black immigrants’ supposed professional and academic success. Instead, my research uses intersectionality—the analytical framework which illuminates how race, gender, and other processes of identification and categorization are mutually constructing⁶—to demonstrate that ethnicity, gender, and race actually interlock in ways that (1) privilege African American men relative to African American women and Black immigrants and (2) render all three groups victims of a gendered and ethnicized racism.

My argument is not merely that African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants share an experience of gendered and ethnicized racism. It is that all three groups can effectively challenge anti-Black racism, so defined, if and when they forge coalitions that are simultaneously anti-racist, feminist, and anti-nativist. I argue, third and finally, that such coalitions are possible when African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants embrace Linda Zerilli’s (2005) concept of “world-building politics.” A “world-building” politics recognizes that what it means to experience gendered and ethnicized racism is not the cause but the result of African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants’ political interest and agency.

My analysis focuses on two texts. Sociologist Robert Staples’ Black Masculinity (1982) seeks “explanation for the dominance of [U.S. born] Black men in the nation’s negative statistics on crime, unemployment, war, divorce, etc.” (Staples 1982, p. 1). Literary and social critic Cecil Brown’s trade book, Dude, Where’s My Black Studies Department? (2007) examines why the number of African American male college students and faculty is decreasing at the same time that the presence of foreign-born Black faculty and students is increasing. Both texts are widely disseminated and are penned by authors who make multiple and influential contributions to the conversation about African American men’s status vis-à-vis African American women and Black immigrants.⁷ Although there is a 25-year gap between Brown and Staples’ texts, I do not juxtapose the two to demonstrate changes over time in the discourse that constructs African American men as victims of African American women and Black immigrants’ success. On the contrary, the similarity in Brown and Staples’ arguments reflects the discourse’s persistence despite, or perhaps because of, the nation’s growing ethnic diversity, increased right wing attacks on affirmative action, and other socioeconomic changes since the 1980s.

Section one of this essay defines and contextualizes the key assumptions, norms, and prohibitions underlying the discourse that constructs African American men as disadvantaged by African American women and Black immigrants. Section two reveals that the discourse’s proponents ignore the extent to which ethnicity, race, and gender are co-constitutive in ways that privilege African American men relative to African American women and Black immigrants. The third section uses an intersectional framework to demonstrate that race, gender, and ethnicity are mutually constructing in ways that not only divide but also unite African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants. I conclude by suggesting the “world-building” conditions that must be in place for all three groups to forge feminist, anti-racist, and anti-nativist coalitions that can challenge their shared experience of gendered and ethnicized racism.

Mapping and Contextualizing the Terrain

We cannot avoid taking note of the fact that Black women’s ascendancy in the labor force is, in part, white society’s attempt to keep the Black male in check (Staples 1982, p. 155).

New Negroes have arrived in America; the old Negroes have bitten the dust… certainly they, especially the Black men, have no presence in the academic system (quoted in Brown 2007, p. 40).

With these words, Staples and Brown lay bare the central claim in much of the conversation about African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants—that the latter two groups succeed at the expense of the former. Both authors offer a two-pronged explanation of why this is so. The first explanation is that Whites perceive African American women and Black immigrants as more accepting of anti-Black racism and reward these groups accordingly. Brown, in articulating this view, concludes that Whites “unabashedly” deem Black immigrants, particularly “Africans and Caribbean Negroes,” as more “pliant,” less “radical,” and, thus, more worthy of employment than African Americans who are supposedly ‘criminal, welfare dependent, and have too many children’” (Brown 2007, pp. 37 and 41).

The argument here is not merely that Whites perceive Black immigrants as passive in the face of racist exploitation but that foreign-born Black migrants are, in fact, so. Brown cites as evidence Harvard professor and Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson’s (2006) failure to identify “white supremacy” as the motive force behind African American men’s joblessness:

We have already addressed how the Black Caribbean immigrant is favored over the American Black, but Patterson seems unaware of this factor… Since economics are not the problem, he says, why not turn to the cultural explanation for the solution? It turns out to be same old culture of poverty argument that we heard so much about during the Reagan administration. It is a culture of ‘Black male self-destructiveness” that is the culprit. What about the culture wars between literacy and orality? No, for him this is not an explanation because it examines the white supremacy of literacy, an area that Patterson cannot examine objectively because his existence depends on it (Brown 2007, p. 106).

Brown further suggests that Patterson and other Black immigrants’ unwillingness to confront White racism harms the middle class as well as the working class African American man. Brown’s point of departure is the supposed collusion between “conservative” university administrators and foreign-born Black male scholars to displace African American male academics from elite university campuses. Much of this ethnic transformation, Brown asserts, has taken place via the apparently “innocent, well-intentioned expansion” of African American studies curricula to focus more on the African diaspora. However, the effects, in Brown’s view, have been far from innocent. Instead, “African diaspora” has come to function as a “code” word that signifies a fundamental disdain for African Americans in general and African American male scholars in particular. The supposed result, according to Brown, is that African American men chair a minority of the nation’s African American studies departments.

Staples makes a remarkably similar argument. However, he emphasizes that “pliable” African American women share the blame for the growing number of African American men who are excluded from the labor force and the classroom. According to Staples, African American women are more educated and more likely to obtain lucrative private sector jobs than their male peers because “white society” perceives them as “less threatening” than African American men (Staples 1982, p. 19). Put more concretely as,

Off the record, white male employers complain that Black men are arrogant, impatient and unwilling to conform to business standards. Translated, that means that many Black males rebe[l] against the token and powerless character of the positions they [are] given [whereas]… the more pliable female – Black and white – is seen as less of a threat and her entry into the job arena is facilitated (Staples 1982, p. 142).

Staples and Brown posit a second claim—that affirmative action is also to blame for African American men’s disadvantaged status relative to their female and foreign-born peers. Staples argues that because African American women are “twofers (i.e. Black and female)” who “are counted twice on government compliance reports” they are more likely to get professional jobs than equally qualified African American men (Staples 1982, p. 141). Brown, meanwhile, is concerned about university officials who see affirmative action as a means of creating “diverse” classrooms rather than as a vehicle for ameliorating racial inequality. The unsurprising outcome, Brown argues, is that a growing number of White college administrators’ focus on ethnic, geographic, and other kinds of diversity and, in doing so, ensure that fewer African American males and more foreign-born Blacks are on campus.

Brown’s work is a stinging critique of not only “diversity”-based affirmative action but of the broader neoliberal climate in which this particular means of addressing difference has been legitimized.⁸ On Brown’s account, the “economy of neoliberal, global capitalism” has heralded “color blind racism,” couched in the language of “liberal integrationism,” whose negative effects disproportionately harm African American men (Brown 2007, pp. 8 and 82). Brown cites as an example the “California Civil Rights Initiative” or Proposition 209 which, despite its seemingly “color blind” rhetoric, allows universities in California to discount race in the student application process. The supposed outcome is a “pitiful” political climate in which it is perfectly acceptable that 96 of the 4,852 incoming students at the University of California at Los Angeles are African American and that only 7,200 of the 23,800 African American students at the nation’s biggest 4-year university system, California State University, are African American men.

To make matters worse, Brown explains, the federal government’s recent, neoliberal inspired effort to push primarily female welfare recipients into the increasingly service-oriented, low-wage labor market has boosted “low-skilled” African American women’s employment while diminishing their male counterparts’. The purported result is that while African American women succeed in the new global economy “nothing has [been] done to change the plight of young Black men” (Brown 2007, p. 13). Staples, too, concludes that economic changes in the early 1980s and beyond have deprived the “male segment” of the African American population of whatever privileges they had “qua men” (Staples 1982, pp. 135 and 141). He asserts, more specifically, that “[w]hile the number of jobs available to men with a strong back and little else has been shrinking, the white collar jobs designed for women have undergone a great expansion” (Staples 1982, p. 139). Staples suggests here that profit-maximizing corporations who shift traditionally male manufacturing jobs to cheaper overseas and/or suburban locations render African American men economically obsolete while allowing African American women to gain employment in the plentiful feminized service sector jobs left behind.

Rereading the Terrain

How are we to understand Staples and Brown’s claims? One response is that their arguments simultaneously reflect and challenge broader, on-going discourses that posit neoliberalism, immigration, and an ever-expanding “crisis” in American masculinity as fundamental threats to the nation’s well-being. For instance, Staples and Brown do not merely presume, as do other New Right critics (Brewer 2004; Bonilla-Silva 2006), that neoliberalism’s harms are gendered and racialized. They contend that it is African American men rather than African American women who bear the greatest burden of neoliberalism’s negative effects. Furthermore, Staples and Brown do not simply make the case, as do other commentators (Benatar 2012, Faludi 1999; Sommers 2000), for a “crisis” in American masculinity that transcends the boundaries of “age, race or socio-economic class” (Schultz 1996, p. 10). Instead, both authors posit a racial hierarchy among men that renders nonwhite men most marginalized by increasingly “feminized” classrooms, deviant and dysfunctional single mothers, and by the growing number of women in the professional labor force. Finally, in arguing that Black immigrants “come from overseas to oversee” their native-born peers, Brown does more than reflect many Americans’, including African Americans’, anti-immigrant ethos (Sawyer 2008). He also challenges a key assumption in this ethos—that foreign-born Blacks and other “model minorities” are exceptions to the rule who help rather than hurt the nation’s well-being (Medev 2009; Sowell 1996).

It is not enough, however, to conclude that Staples and Brown complicate on-going conservations about American men’s status and about the merits or the lack thereof of neoliberalism and immigration. For doing so ignores what several feminist theorists of intersectionality make clear—that the discursive construction of African American men as always already “endangered” by African American “superwomen” and/or Black immigrants obscures the specific contexts in which native-born Black men are actually privileged relative to the latter two groups (Alexander-Floyd 2007; Legette 1999; Pratt-Clarke 2010; Wallace 1979). Take, for instance, Johnnetta Cole and Beverly Guy Sheftall’s declaration that “the metaphor of the ‘endangered Black male’” ignores the extent to which Black men in “a male-dominant society… experience gender privilege that enables them to oppress Black women at the same time that they experience the ravages of poverty” (Cole and Guy Sheftall 2000, p. 46). The assumption here, contrary to what Staples and Brown suggest, is that because social groups can be intersectionally privileged and oppressed, it is impossible to claim that native-born Black men are necessarily and always disadvantaged relative to African American women or Black immigrants (Collins 2008; Weber 2004).

It is true that Black immigrants are less likely to be unemployed than African Americans and that African American women have a lower unemployment rate than African American men.⁹ There is also evidence that this is so because some white employers assume (1) that Black immigrants possess an ethnically informed passivity that renders them less aggressive than African American men in the face of anti-Black racism and (2) that African American women’s status as “natural” caregivers makes them less likely than African American men to undermine Whites’ well-being (Moss and Tilly 2001; Smith et al. 2007; Waters 2001). Several scholars also affirm Staples and Brown’s contention that systemic changes in the global economy explain African American men’s high unemployment rate relative to other social groups.¹⁰

A closer reading, however, reveals that Staples and Brown neglect important findings when contemplating gendered, ethnic, and racial relations of power among African American women, African American men, and Black immigrants. First, in arguing that racist Whites reward Black immigrants for their culturally informed passivity in the face of racism and punish African American men for their lack of the same, Brown ignores past and present evidence that Black immigrants—from Marcus Garvey to contemporary factory workers—also “challenge white privilege” (Waters 2001, p. 139). Even if we accept that racist Whites nevertheless perceive Black immigrants as less cantankerous than native-born Blacks, the outcome for foreign-born Blacks is hardly as positive as Brown suggests. Black immigrants are still more likely to be poor and unemployed than are Whites. They are also charged with immigration-related crimes at a far higher rate than non-Black foreigners. In other words, like African American men, foreign-born Blacks experience significant anti-Black racism in the criminal justice system, the labor force, and beyond.¹¹

Black immigrants are not only racially subordinated. How they experience racism is gendered and ethnicized. Black immigrants earn less despite being more educated than African American men—an important finding which suggests that it is not native-born Black men but foreign-born Blacks whose labor market status is most harmed by “ethnicized” racism (Austin and Mason 2011; Tesfai 2011).¹² Furthermore, while all foreign-born Blacks earn less than Whites, foreign-born Black women are more likely than their male peers to be relegated to the low-wage “feminized” service-sector of the economy. The end result is that Black immigrant women earn less than Whites and Black immigrant men. This is so even for the many foreign-born Black women who are more educated than their male peers.¹³

Staples’ notion that African American women are necessarily more advantaged than African American similarly ignores how Black women’s experience of racism is gendered. For instance, in advancing the claim that White employers prefer “less threatening” African American women over “aggressive” African American, Staples obscures the reality that Whites also stereotype African American women as hysterically belligerent and aggressive (Fordham 1993). Moreover, even though they are less educated than African American women, African American men are better represented in the uppermost levels of corporate management (Soares et al. 2010).¹⁴ This is hardly surprising given the well-entrenched, mutually constructing racial, and gendered assumption among Blacks and Whites alike that African American men are the “rightful” or “natural” leaders of the race (Carbado 1999).

Staples’ claim that native-born Black women are complicit in their male counterparts’ oppression is also flawed because it focuses on African American women’s access to rather than on their conditions of employment. The outcome is a masculinist mode of analysis that obscures African American women’s (1) widespread experience of sexual harassment in the workplace; (2) similar entry rates but lower levels of tenure and promotion—in corporate management, academia, and elsewhere—relative to African American men (Bell and Nkomo 2003; Pope and Joseph 1997; Soares et al. 2010), and (3) lower wages rate relative to African American men’s (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2009).

Lastly, even if we discount all of the qualifiers above and assume that African American women and Black immigrants are, in fact, more successful in the workplace than African American men, there is no concrete proof that they are successful because African American men are not. “[G]overnment enforcement agencies” do not give employers “double credit” for hiring a Black woman over a Black man (Sokoloff 1992, p. 94). And even if individual employers mistakenly believe that such a “double credit” exists, the evidence that they act on this belief in ways that harm African American men is inconclusive at best.¹⁵

Envisioning Coalitions at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

In pages that follow, I argue that Staples and Brown are not merely inattentive to how and with what effect gender, race, and other processes of identification and categorization intersect in ways that advantage African American men relative to Black immigrants and African American women. Both authors’ inattentiveness also prevents them from recognizing what all three groups have in common—namely, a shared experience of anti-Black racism that is a function of ethnic and gendered oppression. Most importantly, ignoring how gender, race, and other processes of difference gain meaning from each other in African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants’ lives limits Staples and Brown’s capacity to envision how these groups can form the simultaneously anti-racist, feminist, and anti-nativist coalitions necessary to challenge their oppression. I contend, in sum, that Staples, Brown, and other like-minded commentators can and should consider another reality—one in which African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants are not divided but united by co-constitutive ethnic, racial, and gendered processes of identification and categorization.

I draw on two key concepts in the intersectional literature to advance my claim: (1) that African American women are one of several legitimate subjects of intersectional analysis and (2) that an intersectional framework enables those who embrace it to understand commonalities among social groups. In positing the first claim, I embrace intersectionality not as a “a content-based specialization that emphasize[s] the subjectivity of women who reside at the intersections of race-, gender-, class-, and sexual orientation-based marginalizations” but as an analytical framework that illuminates how causally complex interconnections between race, gender, ethnicity, and other identities, categories, and processes of difference “incorporate all of us as political beings” (Hancock 2007, p. 249).

Focusing on the intersectional status of other social groups potentially promotes a “myth of equivalent oppressions” that distracts attention from African American women’s subordination (Alexander-Floyd 2012; Collins 2006). However, this need not be the case if we recognize intersectional analysis less as a zero-sum phenomenon in which exploring the status of one group necessarily nullifies or obscures that of another or other groups and more as a means of deepening our knowledge of African American women’s status, or the lack thereof, relative to other social groups, including African American men and Black immigrants. Intersectionality so defined allows us to interrogate, for example, how heterosexual African American male religious and political leaders benefit from mutually constructing gendered and sexual norms, which dictate that a heterosexual African American woman’s place, is not at the political podium or in the preachers’ pulpit but “behind the scenes” in the home or the church kitchen. Of course, if the African American woman in question is gay she is also ostensibly banned from or deemed inimical to the home or “respectable” Black family life.

Most important for my purposes is that an intersectional framework highlights not only White divides but also what unites Blacks, including Black immigrants, African American women, and African American men (Pastrana 2004). Elizabeth Cole suggests as much when she advocates for a “shift in perspective - from an intersectionality focused on understanding difference to one that seeks to find and make use of [the] less obvious similarities” that arise when social groups are enmeshed in the “social and historical processes” of race and gender (Cole 2008, p. 4). Intersectional pioneer Kimberle Crenshaw argues, more particularly, that understanding the co-constitutive relationship between race and gender is key to “re-conceptualizing race as a coalition between men and women” (Crenshaw 1995, p. 377). The assumption here is that we can use an intersectional framework to find “allies in common cause” or to envision a world in which Blacks join forces to combat the gendered and other dimensions of their racist oppression (Combahee River Collective 1982, p. 52).

I argue that African American women, African American men, and Black immigrants are common “allies” against a contemporary anti-Black racism that is gendered and ethnicized. I have in mind the possibility of a “diasporic linked fate” that is as much about collective gendering and ethnicization as it is about Blacks’ shared experience of racialization (Nunnally 2010). Of course, Black immigrants, African American women, and African American men do not experience gendered and ethnicized racism in the same way. Instead, as this essay makes clear, their subordinated “blackness” shapes and is shaped by their national origins and their gender. Black immigrants and African American women’s respective “foreign” and “feminized” “blackness” may benefit them in the hiring process but limits their chances of attaining incomes comparable to that of African American men. African American men function in a labor market in which their “masculinized” and native-born “blackness” means than they earn more than African American women and Black foreigners but may also more likely to be unemployed than these groups. Nevertheless, the very fact that ethnicized and gendered racism informs African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants’ daily reality suggests common ground from which they might unite to resist their subordination in the workplace and beyond.

The difficulty, however, is that if and when Black immigrants, African American men, and African American women form coalitions, despite the differences in their gendered and ethnicized experiences of racism, there is no guarantee that these coalitions will be or are anti-racist, feminist, and anti-nativist. For instance, nothing in the “stop and frisk” example with which I begin this essay suggests either that African American women necessarily care that police officers deem Black immigrants’ dress, demeanor, and speech as “foreign” and thus dangerously at odds with those of “civilized” White Americans or that Black immigrants are concerned about police officers who stop and frisk African American women on the grounds that their supposed hypersexuality and propensity to cheat the welfare system make them more criminally inclined than other citizens. Indeed, it is easy to conceive of a situation in which many Black immigrants support legislation that bans police officers from asking immigration-related questions during any given “stop and frisk” and favor policing practices that allow officers to stop and search African American women whose clothing, demeanor, other ways of being in the world suggest that they are living above their “normal” means via illegal sex work and/or as welfare cheats. Similarly, some African American men might reject clothing and demeanor as an appropriate police criterion for stopping and frisking African American women but conclude that asking about immigration status during a stop and search is acceptable.

The model of intersectional coalition building I have posited thus far also fails to acknowledge the concrete politics espoused by Staples, Brown, and other African American male “crisis” authors. I have in mind here these authors’ support of the 1995 Million Man March as well as separate schools for African American boys and other public policy initiatives that are arguably informed, in whole or in part, by a patriarchal agenda. That Black immigrants, African American women, and African American men can unite around anything akin to a progressive agenda within the context of this kind of political speech and action appears highly dubious. Instead, the intersectional coalitions I have proposed so far would seem to suggest, at best, that (1) social groups, including African American women, African American women, and Black immigrants are self-interested in ways that are sexist and/or ethnocentric and (2) that these groups can only unite around specific issues if they perceive said issues to be in their respective self-interest.

“World-Building” at the Junction of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

Given these limitations, I want to suggest that African American women, African American women, and Black immigrants can achieve coalitions that are necessarily anti-racist, feminist, and anti-nativist when they recognize something else—that what it means to experience gendered and ethnicized racism is not the source but the consequence of their political speech and action. My point of departure is Linda Zerilli’s (2005) notion of a “world-building politics” characterized by a willingness to speak in others’ name and a concomitant recognition that those in whose name we speak can and will speak back in ways that demand further argument, deliberation, and action. Zerilli guides us to consider that social groups’ capacity to resist their oppression has more to do with making political claims in community with others and less to do embracing a subject/social-centered politics that strives to transform “what” they are (for instance, racially subordinated Blacks, immigrants, and/or women). The assumption here is that the latter kind of politics mistakenly constructs social group members as homogenous subjects whose needs and desires are decipherable in advance of political struggles on their behalf. In other words, subject/social-centered politics is flawed precisely because it is unreceptive to a plurality of viewpoints regarding the very meaning of social group membership.¹⁶

Several intersectional theorists similarly suggest that collectively challenging oppression, of which anti-racist, feminist, and anti-nativist coalition building is presumably a part, is necessarily fraught with on-going conflict, tension, and debate. Bernice Reagon perhaps sums up this sentiment best when she declares: “if you’re really doing coalition work… [m]ost of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing” (Reagon 1983, 343). Other intersectional theorists argue, as does Zerilli, that navigating these tensions entails embracing a plurality of views regarding what it means to identify and/or to be identified as a member of any given social group (Cohen 1997; Cole 2008).

Zerilli’s work differs and is significant because it details the kind of political speech that makes it possible for members of social groups to embrace and navigate the tensions inherent in intersectional coalition building. Central to such speech is making reflective judgments in someone’s name or judging “in the absence of objective criteria or rules” (Zerilli 2005, p. 179). Take, for instance, the judgment that “Barack Obama is a politician who inspires Americans in new and exciting ways.” Chances are that one does not arrive at this judgment by reference to existing knowledge or by means of deductive logic of the following sort: (1) I know that many politicians inspire Americans in new and exciting ways; (2) I also know that Barack Obama is a politician; (3) hence, I can reasonably conclude that Barack Obama inspires Americans in new and exciting ways. In other words, existing rules or concepts about many politicians’ characteristics and how these characteristics influence voters do not provide a definitive basis for ascertaining the qualities of a specific politician—Barack Obama. Instead, if we accept that Barack Obama is an inspirational politician we are likely to come to this conclusion after being swayed by others who use “persuading speech” or “reason, understanding, and imagination” to convince us of the validity of their argument (Zerilli 2005, p. 155). Such speech might include but is certainly not limited to supporters’ personal testimonials or own accounts of how they come to support Obama’s candidacy.

Most importantly, central to this kind of speech and the reflective judgment that informs it is the presumption of a necessary back and forth—a willingness to speak in others’ name and a concomitant recognition that those in whose name we speak can and will speak back in ways that demand further argument and deliberation. Not only that, inherent in the persuasive speech that informs reflective judgment is the assumption that valid political claims are those which are attentive to others’ viewpoints—an attentiveness that encourages us to (1) view the world from diverse, plural perspectives and (2) that broadens “our sense of community, not because it tells us what is morally or politically justified and thus what we should do, but because it expands our sense of what is real or communicable” (Zerilli 2005, p. 152).

African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants can benefit from such “world-building” politics. I argue that they can forge feminist, anti-racist, and anti-nativist coalitions if and when they assume that they share an experience of gendered and ethnicized racism whose meaning is fluid, multiple, and subject to debate. Such debate involves assertively speaking on behalf of each other, on the one hand, and a process of discussion, debate, and persuasion, on the other. The outcome is a collectively determined claim of ethnicized and gendered racism whose validity depends on whether it proves persuasive to others rather than on a priori nativist and patriarchal assumptions about what it means to experience gendered and ethnicized racism.

Let me turn again to “stop and frisk” policing to illustrate my point. Imagine that organizations which advocate on behalf of African American women, African American men, and Black immigrants join forces to make two demands: (1) permanent membership on the Civilian Complaint Review Board (the independent entity entrusted with investigating complaints against New York City police officers) and (2) regularly scheduled public forums or “town hall” meetings with the police commissioner. While African American women, African American men, and Black immigrants may have similar opinions about what is means to experience gendered and ethnicized racism, there is nothing in the abovementioned demands which suggests that this is the case—or that these social groups are necessarily homogenous entities whose collective needs and desires are decipherable in advance of political struggles on their behalf.

On the contrary, their very demand for “town hall” discussions suggests that American women, African American men, and Black immigrants subscribe to a range of opinions about what it means to experience racism that is gendered and ethnicized. In fact, there is nothing to discuss and, hence, no rationale for “town hall” style meetings and debate unless meeting participants assume a multiplicity of views about the causes, manifestations, and effects of the mutually constructing racism, sexism, and nativism that informs “stop and frisk” policing. These views might concern any number of subjects from immigration reform, to civil rights enforcement, to women’s under-representation in the top brass of the police force.

African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants’ demand for town hall meetings and representation on the Civilian Complaint Review Board is also significant because it involves, in Zerilli’s words, “at once the positing of commonalities and the speaking back” (Zerilli 2005, p. 172). Indeed, it is easy to conceive of a “town hall” discussion with the commissioner or a Civilian Complaint Review Board meeting in which African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants make certain claims about what it means to experience ethnicized and gendered racism and challenge each other about the veracity of their claims. An African American woman might demand that the police hire more native-born Black men on the assumption that such men will reject the notion that Blacks are racially inferior because their clothing, mannerisms, and/or demeanor do not comport with that of “normal” Whites. Others at the meeting who resent “being spoken for” might respond with a range of counterclaims.

An African American man might argue that privileging the hiring of African American men rather than African American women mistakenly constructs the status of the former as the “true” barometer of the race’s well-being in the police force and beyond. Another African American man might demand mandatory “sensitivity” training to help the Civilian Complaint Review Board and the police commissioner better understand how co-constitutive racism and sexism informs police officers’ all too-frequent assumption that African American women who dress or behave in a certain way need to be stopped and frisked. Some foreign-born Black women might support prioritizing such training. Other Black immigrant men and women might insist that New York City’s police department should first stop handing over immigration information, gleaned from stops and frisks, to federal immigration officials.

What makes these claims and counterclaims important is that their validity depends on the opinion of African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants themselves rather than on some previously agreed upon guidelines which decree “sensitivity” training, greater representation in the police force, and so on as necessarily the most important means of challenging ethnicized and gendered racism. In other words, within the context of a town hall meeting “proving” that increased numbers of African American men in the police force (or anywhere else) should be African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants’ primary concern depends less on referencing “objective” data and more on persuading each other of the veracity of their claims. The result is the kind of political debate that goes a long way to destabilizing anti-feminist, anti-racist, and nativist assumptions about whose experiences take precedence at the junction of ethnicity, race, and gender. Not only that, implicit in their demand for “town hall” meetings with the commissioner and representation on the Civilian Complaint Review Board is African American men, African American women, and Black immigrants’ presumption, they can and should forge coalitions in which the meaning of ethnicized and gendered racism is debatable rather than decipherable in advance of political speech and action in its name.

Conclusion

This article documents how foreign-born blacks, African American women, and African American men are constructed in popular and academic discourse. It examines sociologist Robert Staples’ and social critic Cecil Brown’s depiction of African American men as victims of Black immigrants and African American women’s educational and occupational “success.” I use an intersectional framework to demonstrate that, contrary to Brown and Staples’ claims, Black immigrants and African American women are not always already privileged relative to African American men. In doing so, I offer those who purport a “crisis” in African American masculinity with a more nuanced, intersectional understanding of ethnic, racial, and gendered hierarchies of power within the boundaries of “blackness.”

My analysis also exposes what African American men, African American women, and foreign-born Blacks do have in common at the junction of race, gender, and ethnicity, namely, an experience of racism that is gendered and ethnicized. Black immigrants earn less than Whites and African Americans not only because they are Black in a racist society but also because how they experience racism is a function of their status as foreign-born blacks in a nation with significant anti-immigrant sentiment. African American women are relegated to low wage, “care giving” work not just because they are Black in a racist labor market but also because their experience of racism gains meaning from their status as women in a patriarchal labor force. African American men are unemployed not merely because some racist White employers see them as overly “aggressive” but because these employers do so in an economy with fewer traditionally male, manufacturing jobs and more “feminized,” low-wage ones.

I demonstrate, finally, that Black immigrants, African American women, and African American men can forge political coalitions premised on their shared experience of ethnicized and gendered racism. These coalitions are anti-racist, feminist, and anti-nativist when Black immigrants, African American women, and African American men recognize that determining what it means to experience gendered and ethnicized racism stems from engaging in political speech on behalf of others and being criticized by those on whose behalf they speak and act. To be clear, a Zerillian-inspired model of fostering intersectional coalitions is not unproblematic. On the contrary, important questions remain about intersectional coalition building so defined. How, for instance, do Black immigrants, African American women, and African American men recognize persuasive speech about their shared experience of gendered and ethnicized racism when they see it? What is evident is that establishing criteria for successful coalition building among these groups is not about validating intersectionality as an abstract ideal. Instead, in a world in which African American women, African American men, and Black immigrants are unemployed and impoverished at higher rates than Whites, elucidating the conditions in which they can challenge their oppression is a most immediate and tangible concern.