When political scientists address public opinion on immigration in the United States, they are, with important exceptions, most often talking about white Americans. Because whites have long been and continue to constitute the majority of the population in the United States, it is also usually the case that the racial modifier for the default category goes unstated, such that generalizations about US public opinion on immigration are drawn based on the sentiment of white Americans while holding constant attitudes among minorities. As a result, much of what we know about public opinion on immigration is what scholars have uncovered over the years about what white Americans think about immigrants and the policies that govern exclusion. Important as this scholarship has been, it is time to move beyond the politics of belonging within the domain of white Americans. Enter Niambi Carter’s expansive and insightful book, American while Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship. Prepare to be fully reoriented to the subject of public opinion on immigration when you read this book.
Carter’s argument is nothing short of a revelation, implicating the historical context of structural racism in US democracy in shaping political attitudes on immigration. This insight is analyzed for African Americans in particular, as Carter argues that immigration policy and immigrants themselves serve as a constant reminder of the limited inclusion of blacks in US politics. Principles animating an “American ethos” of procedural fairness and equality ring hollow to African Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom descended from enslaved people brought to US shores in forced migration. Public opinion on immigration thus cannot be understood in isolation from the ideology and practice of white supremacy in the United States.
Carter grounds American while Black in empirical observations from a range of sources and methodological techniques, including historical, qualitative, and quantitative survey data, to conceptualize and reveal the tensions in African American identity as American. Carter articulates a theory of “conflicted nativism” for blacks that reflects the negotiation between African Americans’ national identity as American while simultaneously acknowledging the incomplete status of their incorporation in the body politic. Privileged as they may be based on being born in the United States, this status for African Americans does not translate in the same way as it does for some white Americans into nativist and anti-immigrant attitudes in support of restrictionist policy. Instead, and because blacks understand immigration exclusion to be a racist enterprise, the fact that people of color are targeted for exclusion is a recognition that tempers anti-immigrant sentiment among African Americans. Instead, blacks turn the focus of policy attitudes on immigration toward the constraints of white supremacy. Situated within the context of racial antipathy and discrimination, African Americans do not organize politically around immigrant restriction as do substantial portions of their native-born white counterparts. This is true for African Americans, despite the companion recognition that new immigrant groups might indeed be crowding out economic and political opportunities once available to blacks.
The writing is elegant, and the argument is simultaneously concise and conceptually expansive. Carter explains that being African American means that blacks can never be only American, but instead exist as perpetually modified in their national identity as a function of race. Black identity thus operates as a superordinate identity, acting as a prism through which African Americans understand both the majority population of whites and their own conflicted nativism. The persistent denial of full citizenship for black Americans means that public opinion on immigration among African Americans can reveal support for creating a path to citizenship while at the same time evincing discontent with increasing numbers of immigrants to the United States. Rather than a contradiction, Carter’s analysis demonstrates persuasively that “blacks, as Americans, do not weaponize their national identity to harm others” (p. 165). She goes on to restate one of her central conclusions: “What I have argued throughout this text is that immigration, even when it is inconvenient for black people, is about justice and doing the right thing even when it may cost their group. Not because black people are altruistic but because as a group, they know the dangers of white supremacy” (p. 170).
Carter’s arguments have important implications for the study of political attitudes on immigration for the majority white population, as well as for other minority Americans. Latinos and Asian Americans—in addition to other nonwhite groups, including the descendants of those native to current US soil, Native Americans—are also described as “hyphenated” Americans by a racial or ethnic modifier. One might expect attitudes on immigration in these groups to follow a similar pattern to that of African Americans, given the conditional welcome that minority Americans have received as a result of white supremacy in politics. Other studies have provided strong evidence to support Carter’s argument, and even simple distributions of survey questions on immigration policy support by race show that white Americans are by far the most supportive of restrictionist positions. The implications of Carter’s work thus also extend to explanations about public opinion among white Americans, a group for which there is still substantial variation in support and opposition for policies such as birthright citizenship, border security, and a path to citizenship. Carter’s research draws attention to the significance of white supremacy—its recognition, its consequences, and its daily enactment—in public opinion among the majority of the US population. Although scholars of political attitudes have spilled much ink on the role of “racial resentment” of black people among whites, even this hugely important predisposition dances around that which underlies such hostility. American while Black makes it patently clear that an embrace of white supremacy is what lies beneath restrictionist attitudes on immigration. It is racial animus against nonwhites that stokes anti-immigrant sentiment and makes even the most extreme of policies such as family separation at the US southern border defensible by its advocates. To argue otherwise, for example, that these restrictionist attitudes are a function of a long-standing commitment to an ethos of egalitarianism and therefore are orthogonal to white supremacy, not only has dubious empirical support but, more importantly, flails blindly in the midst of substantial evidence to the contrary.
American while Black is one of those rare books that forces the reader to think about a topic in a new way. Carter’s identification of the continuing legacy of white supremacy and its effects on political attitudes can be and should be applied to a host of other politically relevant groups. That this work remains for future studies is testimony to the relevance of Carter’s arguments beyond the race and politics field to educating scholars in more traditional subfields, including public opinion.
