Miami serves as a heightened case to explore such contradictions as I look closely at tensions between African Americans, white Cubans, and Black Cubans.
“My observations offer lessons from the past that illuminate the white supremacist roots of interethnic conflict.”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Monika Gosin. Gosin is Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of William and Mary. Her book is The Racial Politics of Division: Interethnic Struggles for Legitimacy in Multicultural Miami.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Monika Gosin: If we were not already convinced during the President Obama years that America is far from being post-race, the Trump years put a major exclamation point on this fact. But despite the racist rhetoric and policies that the Trump administration spewed forth and even enacted, some of Trump’s ardent supporters were from ethnic/racial minority groups—African American, Latinx, Asian, etc. While it is true the vast majority of African American voters, for instance, did not vote for Trump, my book lends additional insight into why people who have been historically targeted by powerful whites might feel compelled to align themselves with those same oppressive forces. In my book, Miami serves as a heightened case to explore such contradictions as I look closely at tensions between African Americans, white Cubans, and Black Cubans in Miami during historical periods of radical transformation. Though the situation in Miami is unique compared to other parts of the country, my examples offer lessons from the past that illuminate the white supremacist roots of interethnic conflict. I illustrate how “zero-sum” discourses which pit minority groups against one another come to be utilized by members of these groups themselves, particularly when they are compelled to align with the current normative order to contest their marginalized inclusion within the nation.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
There is plenty of reason to be optimistic about interracial coalition building within the political arena. For instance, we saw people from all colors and walks of life joining in the fight for Black Lives Matter. Yet, there are also prominent political fractures between and within various ethnic and racial groups. We as activists must be attentive to these divisions and to the specificity of the concerns emanating from each of our communities. In one of the chapters in my book, for instance, I examine the dilemmas local African Americans faced in Miami as the population of Cuban immigrants rose dramatically. Many African Americans saw the growing immigration as contributing to a loss of jobs for Blacks. In this context, African Americans struggled to preserve a civil rights agenda, which promoted the idea of advocating for justice for all marginalized groups. This is because the US government’s clear favoritism shown to Cuban migrants during the Cold War, and the anti-black sentiments expressed and acted on by some white Cubans further complicated the tensions that existed between African Americans and (white) Cubans. My analysis of local Black press reveals the frustrations African Americans expressed, which included problematic nativist discourses, such as those imploring the government to “send the Cubans back.” While I argue their quarrel was more with the white power elite, which continued to ignore black concerns, than with the Cuban newcomers, I also make the case that we as activists must further expose the faulty logic of divide and conquer. We must challenge nativist discourses, regardless of who is speaking them, in order to promote greater inter-minority coalition.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
I hope the book can remind us that recognition by the power elite is not our ultimate goal. As I say in the book, despite demographic shifts making our population more diverse, “white racial power continues to reproduce itself by requiring the complicity of minority and immigrant groups in exchange for a tenuous claim on US citizenship.” To earn the privileges of citizenship, members of racialized communities are asked to prove they are “worthy” by conforming to “proper”—that is, Anglo, middle-class, moral—standards, such as being hard-working, self-reliant, law abiding, and freedom loving (Aihwa Ong, 2003). I contend that when we reproduce this logic by exalting “pull yourself up by your bootstrap” mentalities and a false morality, we legitimate the terms of “worthy citizenship.” The normative values embodied in worthy citizenship then compel subjects not only to police themselves, but also to police others.
Towards avoiding this trap, we can examine, as I do in the book, the nuanced ways identities taken to be discrete and fixed are constructed and negotiated. I emphasize the porousness of the boundaries drawn by divisive politics by foregrounding the presence and voices of Black Cubans, who, like other Afro-Latinos, trouble the boundaries presumed to exist between “Black” and “Latinx.” Paying attention to how the stigma attached to blackness and the need to negotiate multiple identities complicates Afro-Latinx lives provides a challenge to the exaltation of whiteness in both the US and in Latin America, and reveals overlapping concerns crucial for dismantling conflict.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
I bring together and am inspired by scholarship in several fields, including in race and in immigration studies, African American and Africana Studies, and Latinx and Afro-Latinx studies. Further, I am grateful for the limited but growing scholarship that focuses specifically on post-1959 Afro Cuban immigrants in the United States.
As I read local African American press in Miami, I was inspired by Black public intellectuals like Manning Marable, and activists like Bayard Rustin and Jesse Jackson, who for decades have been making arguments similar to those I highlight in the book. The voices of the Afro-Cuban immigrants I interviewed, of Guyana-born journalist Mohamed Hamaludin, and Afro-Cuban journalists Rosa Reed in the Miami Times, and Dora Amador in El Nuevo Herald also served to remind me that some of the best theorizing about race and power happens outside the walls of academia.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
Along with the critiques the book makes, the book also illuminates the complexities of Afro-diasporic life in Miami as a possible roadmap for the future of many places in the US. It foregrounds the voices of African Americans and of black Cubans, which are often absent in analyses of the impact of Cuban immigration on Miami race relations. By broadening our understandings of the complexities of black identity and dispelling the notion of a monolithic (white) Cuban American community, the book helps us reimagine all our identities and see them as always in flux. We can thereby challenge the limitations of racial categories and anti-blackness, and the oversimplifications characteristic of the politics of division as manifested in the US racial hierarchy. Our continued challenge of this political order, which divides people into worthy and unworthy citizens, allows us to reimagine new ways to constitute US belonging.
Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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