Duke University Sociologist Examines
Intra-Racial Interaction in Black Community
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 says. “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, says Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociologist at Duke University. Immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean were simply categorized by racial group rather than ethnicity.
But that’s changed in the decades since then, Bonilla-Silva says. “There has been a reorganization of ‘Black.’ There is a space that wasn’t there 40 years ago.”
Dr. Frank E. Dobson has observed the evolution on the campus of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he is executive director of the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center. While the African-American student group has been around for years, it was joined in recent years by a Caribbean students’ group and an African students’ organization.
The problem now is getting those groups to speak with one another, Dobson says — a concern shared in the larger society as well.
