Beginning in 1900, colonial railway departments in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria began turning to the Caribbean for skilled labor instead of hiring African workers. When West Indian railway workers began to arrive in West Africa, Africans were indignant, and they voiced their objections in newspapers. West Indians sometimes responded to these grievances with calls for racial unity, yet their appeals were inflected with colonial hierarchies. Such exchanges were centered on railway jobs, but they were also embedded in larger discussions about empire, race, and the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. I argue that these exchanges reveal the significance of colonial hierarchies and diasporic tensions in the intellectual history of pan-Africanism in early twentieth-century West Africa. The article draws on newspapers and archival research from West Africa, the Caribbean, and the UK.

Throughout the twentieth century, Black immigrants from the Caribbean attained greater socioeconomic status than African Americans. Although Black immigrants remain an understudied population, recent studies show that Afro Caribbeans continue to outperform African Americans in the labor market. Given that these groups share a set of racialized physical features, some contend that this gap highlights the role of cultural attributes in the manufacture of Black ethnic and Black-White racial disparities. In this study, I investigate the degree to which cultural attributes associated with a specific form of the model minority hypothesis are responsible for disparities between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I use data from the National Survey of American Life in order to test for the relative roles of work ethic, economic autonomy, oppositionality, family structure and function, and racial attitudes in the manufacture of disparate labor market outcomes between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I find mixed support for the idea that Afro Caribbeans constitute a model minority vis-à-vis African Americans and that differences in model minority attributes are only partially responsible for these labor market disparities. My findings suggest that racial inequality will not be undone if the racially stigmatized and marginalized simply work harder and complain less about race and racism in the United States.