The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia

Abstract

Most Black people in the United States now live in the suburbs. To some this may be surprising. Suburban development in the postwar period has usually been understood as a history of the formation of entirely white communities that segregated themselves spatially, legally, and socially with the aid of local and federal administrations from the majority-minority cities they often orbited. But the crabgrass frontier that suburban historian Kenneth Jackson described in the mid-1980s was always more porous than it appeared. To date, scholars of Black suburbanization since Jackson have focused primarily on the “complex role of race and class for Black people” in suburban spaces (p. 5). Books like Living with Racism (1996) and Black Picket Fences (1999) have demonstrated the extent to which Black Americans who made it through the wringer of social mobility in the United States experienced the social and economic benefits of suburbia unevenly and irregularly. For them, white picket fences and green lawns did not translate to the stereotypical expectations of class stability and safety. They also have examined the ways in which Black Americans negotiated racial identity, racism, and the culture of class in these spaces.Orly Clerge's ethnographic study, The New Noir, heads in a different direction. It takes into consideration the fact that “since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, the flow of hundreds of thousands of Black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa have transformed Black mobility and cultural geography” (p. 7). The New Noir expands our understanding of immigration, the Black middle class, and suburban culture through an exploration of the development of what Clerge has termed the “Black diasporic suburbs” (p. 2). To understand “the localized identities and practices of the Black middle class in the twenty-first century,” Clerge saliently argues that we must break the mold of the nation state and “use a more global and comparative perspective” that considers international histories of race, migration, and politics (p. 13). In doing so, Clerge reconfigures the boundaries of the literature on the Black middle class by exploring how diaspora and migration shaped the ways in which members of the transnational Black middle class in New York City negotiated racial identity and class formation.The introduction lays out the stakes of the book, particularly focusing on consumption practices and the culture of food. Clerge focuses on seemingly quotidian tasks and activities that provide a window into the “cultural worlds of [the] multiethnic Black middle class” (p. 5) A trip to the local store, she points out, “is an opportunity to see the multiplicity of regional and national culture that animate suburbia” (p. 3). The second and third chapters take the reader through the historiographies of migration and place through the lens of suburban placemaking and Black Atlantic world diasporas. They explore how cross-national racial formations and migrations shaped trans-geographical journeys of “Black Americans, Haitians, and Jamaicans from slavery to the middle class.”Chapter 4 examines the cultural economies of the Black middle class and the importance of inter/intragroup differences created by successive waves of migration to make sense of the “structure and culture of class” in diasporic Black suburbs. The next chapter builds on the ideas of the previous one to examine the experiences of being a first-generation member of the Black middle class. Her interviewees articulated class origin stories of “downward, lateral, and upward mobility.” The final two chapters unpack the meanings of “race, nationality, and regionality” for the Black middle class through an exploration of how residents of these places, individually and collectively, understood and negotiated racial identity. Chapter 6 outlines Clerge's term “racial consciousness spectrum,” which is a “framework for categorizing interethnic and intraethnic racial identities and practices.” While sociologists often claim that middle-class Black immigrants “distance themselves from Black identities,” this chapter challenges that argument by analyzing the “diversity of definition and performances of Blackness” among residents of the diaspora suburbs. Chapter 7 investigates the “centrality of nationality and regionality in the lived experiences” of “Black Americans, Haitians, and Jamaicans” in the workplace, neighborhood, and at home. Finally, the conclusion, “Mustard Seeds,” rehashes the main interventions of the book and provides a strong agenda for future researchers to look into how “suburban Black millennials,” both immigrants and those born in the states, negotiate race and class in the twenty-first century.