Immigration and the Journey: Two Narratives on How Immigration Shapes Identity

The current national debate on immigration reminds us of a story Alex Haley tells in the epilogue to The Autobi-ography of Malcolm X. In the story, Haley is standing with Malcolm at the airport when a group of children dressed in their traditional clothing get off a plane from Europe. "Pretty little children, ” observes Malcolm X, “Soon they're going to learn their first English word: Nig-ger." Forty years later, Malcolm X’s observation still speaks to the ubiquity of the U.S. racial hierarchy and the inter-nalization of the hierarchy is part of the acculturation process for all immigrant groups. Im-migrants are confronted with institu-tional racism and the corresponding racial hierarchy from the moment they first set foot on U.S. soil. In this con-temporary racial Zeitgeist, many White immigrants, like their non-immigrant White counterparts, deny both the existence of institutional ra-cism and their own personal racial biases. In their defense, they cite their staunch color-blindness (or support of affirmative action), their diverse social circle (usually consisting of members of different immigrant groups), their own mi-nority-group status and victimization, and their unfailing good intentions. They don’t want to be racist, they say, and so, in their own eyes, they’re not. And yet, despite these good intentions, White immigrants are not insu-lated from learning racism, just as immigrants of color are not immune from experiencing it (see Roediger’s 1999; 2005 for a sociological treatise on this phenome-non). “Nigger ” may not be the first word immigrants learn today, but, in our opinion, negotiating the U.S. ra-cial hierarchy remains one of the primary and most sali-ent experiences for most immigrants, Black and White. In keeping with the tenets of a multicultural ideology, we use this space to offer two personal perspectives on immigrants ’ racial socialization – the first by a White European immigrant, the second by an immigrant of African descent