Duke University Sociologist Notes ‘Reorganization of Black’
NEW YORK
As an active member of his Brooklyn community, Roy Hastick takes plenty of inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr. and his dream of racial peace.
Hastick, originally from Grenada, carries that vision today — but it’s more complicated now than 40 years ago, when it was a case of Black and White. Today, Blacks born in America, Africa and the Caribbean — often viewed as a single entity by outsiders — reflect contrasting cultures that transcend their common skin color.
“It is important for leaders … to continue the legacy of Dr. King,” Hastick said. “I feel what he did was bring Blacks and Whites together. We as Caribbean-Americans have to reach out to African-Americans. We can learn from each other.”
That intra-racial interaction was rarely mentioned by King and others in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Although the differences existed then, the racial dialogue was framed starkly in terms of Black and White, said Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociologist at Duke University. Immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa were simply categorized by racial group rather than ethnicity.
But that’s changed in the decades since then, Bonilla-Silva said. “There has been a reorganization of ‘Black,”’ he explained. “There is a space that wasn’t there 40 years ago.”
