Much sociological attention has focused on Black identity within the United States. Less attention, however, has been given to understanding how immigrant and native-born streams of U.S. Black Muslims articulate American identity. In this study I ask: how do second-generation Black American Muslims and indigenous Black American Muslims compare in the ways they narrate connections among race, American identity, and Islam? Using data from thirty-one in-depth interviews with Black Muslims living in Houston, TX, I find that racial double-consciousness complicates American identity for respondents. While indigenous Black American respondents critique racist U.S. histories and structural inequities, I argue that in certain spaces Muslim identity reinforces American identity. For second-generation respondents, however, American identity is reinforced through embracing immigrant status. This study extends Du Boisian double-consciousness by making a case for “layered double-consciousness.” I argue that layered double-consciousness better explains how Black Muslims perceive their racial, religious, and national identities across macro levels within the context of the United States and meso levels within the Muslim American community.

The goal of this research is to provide a diaspora-centered analysis of Black identity politics by illustrating how African populations navigate their diasporic identities and imposed racial boundaries when engaging with social movements like #BlackLivesMatter. Extending scholarship on Black immigration and Black politics, the present study highlights the processes by which racial histories, U.S. racial hierarchies, and gender hegemony guide African immigrants’ and children of African immigrants’ individual conceptions of Blackness as well as their political engagements. Using a qualitative design (N = 28 semi-structured interviews), I examine first-, 1.5-, and second-generation Africans’ connections to #BlackLivesMatter, a racial justice social movement mobilized in response to the police killings of African American men and women. Findings illustrate that while all participants express an implicit connection to #BlackLivesMatter by drawing attention to the visual aspects of their superordinate Black racial identity, there are certain sources of diasporic fragmentation that lead to racial distancing, intraracial group contention, and subsequent disconnections from the movement. Deconstructing the notion of Black political behavior as homogeneous, findings also suggest that political solidarity does not require uniformity in interests: when engaging in collective action, it is possible to express racial linked fate while also expressing substantial differences in culture and knowledge systems.

The Siphithemba Choir, an HIV/AIDS support group at the McCord Mission Hospital in Durban, South Africa, uses songs that conflate “Africa” and “Black Race” (abantu abamnyama) or “Black Nation” (Umnyama yezwe) to perform their experience of HIV/AIDS, thus signaling global ethnic/racial consciousness in the context of the HIV/AIDS discourse. This paper argues that the musical referencing of race and ethnicity by this group of HIV-positive South Africans could be explained as a function of related factors: the nature of the AIDS virus, the history and lingering effects of apartheid, the continuing interracial acrimony in the post-apartheid environment, and the global politics of AIDS. A combination of these factors has inevitably impacted how HIV/AIDS is perceived and interpreted through the lens of race. Hence the Siphithemba Choir's musical performance is analyzed in this paper as an expressive articulation of an African and Black experience of AIDS, and a performance of Black identity in the context of the global AIDS pandemic.

The discourse of “race-blindness” in contemporary France cannot help but engender what it seeks to evade, “race” consciousness. Nowhere, is this dynamic better illustrated than by the current public debate on “Black” consciousness, “Black” identity discourses, and “French Black” activism that have emerge in response to an avoided “race” question in hexagonal France where “Blacks” have now reached a critical mass. In examining these issues, I argue that “French Black” activists are, however, limiting their own effectiveness when its adherents also retreat from a critical concept of “race” in their anti-black struggles. While the potent ideals of French republicanism are intrinsic to “race” avoidance, this stance unwittingly contributes to the prevalent practice of camouflaging the very discrimination and racism that such activists seek to document through controversial ethno-racial statistics, presently proscribed in France. Negated with “race” is the under-stated significance of the semantic particularity of the notion of “black” and its relevance in anti-black discrimination, also explored in this essay. By this, I am referring to those stigmatizing meanings of “black” prior to its incorporation into social categories used to designate and rank people so-perceived and so-denoted in Europe where those meanings crystallized and migrated beyond its shores. The critical use of “race” by these activists, then, would force the recognition, presently occulted, that this construct has played a fundamental role in structuring belonging and opportunity in France, and thereby buttress demands for statistics to demonstrate and analyze that lived reality towards its undoing. Ultimately, the existence of anti-blackness and anti-black struggles serve to illustrate that France has not escaped its “race” question or fulfilled it promises of “race-blind” equality.