Studying Second Generation Africans in the UK and US

This article discusses the methodological challenges that arise from studying race and national definitions of race in two national contexts. I was struck by how second generation Africans in the United States talk about race and the impact of blackness differently from second generation Africans in the United Kingdom. Those in the U.S. are more vigilant about maintaining ethnic boundaries between themselves and other black groups than their counterparts in the U.K. A large part of the reason is differences in national context: U.S. legacies of the past are different from the U.K.’s legacies of the past, especially in the areas of governmental response to past ethno-racial traumas and how the past has bled into national identity. These national contexts affect the experiences of the African second generation and their understandings of their experiences. This presents a methodological challenge on how to study race as it pertains to how the African second generation in each country understand their blackness, the boundaries of blackness, and black-on-black interethnic relations and this paper looks at how these differences in national context affect what race means to these subjects.