Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African Diaspora

Travelling Blackness

Manoucheka Celeste

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317431275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the National Communication Association's 2018 Diamond Anniversary Book Award

With the exception of slave narratives, there are few stories of black international migration in U.S. news and popular culture. This book is interested in stratified immigrant experiences, diverse black experiences, and the intersection of black and immigrant identities. Citizenship as it is commonly understood today in the public sphere is a legal issue, yet scholars have done much to move beyond this popular view and situate citizenship in the context of economic, social, and political positioning. The book shows that citizenship in all of its forms is often rhetorically, representationally, and legally negated by blackness and considers the ways that blackness, and representations of blackness, impact one's ability to travel across national and social borders and become a citizen. This book is a story of citizenship and the ways that race, gender, and class shape national belonging, with Haiti, Cuba, and the United States as the primary sites of examination.

1 Framing Cubans and Haitians in the New York Times

Enduring Imprints of Political History¹

After travelling in small boats for more than 700 miles across the open ocean,² approximately two hundred people from Haiti swam ashore in the United States in October 2002. The US Border Patrol detained twenty of those people, including a pregnant woman, at Miami’s Krome Detention Center. The next day, many sympathizers gathered to protest the official immigration policy toward Haitians, which they said did not afford Haitians the same opportunities or treatment as other groups. Among the people protesting was an unidentified man who told a pointed story to PBS reporter Kwame Holman on camera to acknowledge how hard it is for Haitians to gain any kind of welcome in the US.

In 1992, a Haitian boat came in and rescued some Cubans who were drowning. INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] came in and took the Cubans and said, “thank you for the Cubans,” and took the Haitians back to Haiti.³

While his statement risks oversimplifying a complex issue, it captures the stratification that often characterizes representations, and actual treatment, of Haitians and Cubans immigrating to the US. The Newshour story uses the Cuba as a point of comparison to contextualize attempted immigration by Haitians to the US. According to the story:

Under US policy, most illegal immigrants are detained on arrival, but a small number can avoid detention as they seek asylum based on the judgment of immigration officials. For the most part, immigrants from Cuba are not held in custody, and qualify for special provisions in immigration law. And most Cuban immigrants eventually receive asylum in the US; most Haitians do not.⁴

While the experts debate whether there was intelligence that suggested conditions in Haiti would lead to mass migration, the rationale that was used to justify differences in policies (political refugees were welcome, economic refugees were not), according to former assistant commissioner for refugees, asylum and parole at the INS during the first Bush Administration Jan Ting, “It almost doesn’t matter.” Ting continued in saying that their entry into the country was not permitted and processing new immigrants would only strain law enforcement agencies on alert from 9/11. Rather than Cuba being the only exception to US immigration policy, Haiti also was a special exception and in 2002 the policy was to deter Haitians immigration to the US.

The twenty-first century has already seen three critical developments: the explosion of media technologies, heated debates about immigration, and a global economic crisis that has driven waves of people from some nations to others. While the confluence of these developments is not historically unique, it means that US consumers engage with the globalized world, and particularly with immigration issues, based on information from a variety of media sources. However, owners of those media sources, which control 90 percent of US media, have consolidated from fifty major corporations in 1983 to six in 2015, partially due to increasing deregulation. As some US residents—particularly those of Arizona, Alabama, and Florida—make a case for limiting access to US borders through legislation, others fight against these measures. Both sides plead their case to the public through various media outlets. In the media, the changing demographics of the US population remain a topic of conversation and, at times, of heated debate. Notably, at other points in history, journalists have framed immigration as a crisis, blaming it for economic problems in host countries.⁵ The visible anti-immigration fervor that facilitated the passage of Arizona Immigration Law SB1070 corresponds with ongoing demographic changes. That the US will continue to become more diverse necessitates nuanced representations of the histories and lived experiences of the nation’s different immigrant and ethnic groups as well as the complexity in depictions of its immigration history.

In this chapter, I examine representations of Haitians and Cubans in the US in the New York Times, considering how this leading newspaper frames Haitians and Cubans in terms of belonging and legitimacy. The Times is considered the most prestigious national newspaper, and its coverage is arguably the most indicative and influential national media coverage.⁶ As a part of the US’s elite press, it serves as a fruitful site for examination, particularly because of the argument by scholars including Jane Rhodes, Todd Gitlin, Noam Chomsky, Howard Friel, and Richard Faulk that the elite press functions to reinforce political ideologies.⁷ The Times was selected in lieu of the Miami Herald because it provides a broader national view. The Times occasionally is accused of being too liberal by some and too conservative by other news sources, but that is not the focus of this project. I chose the Times because of its reach across the US and abroad. I chose these groups for their complex and related immigration and political histories, and because conversations about immigration often invoke them, although they position them differently. My goal is not to further stratify these groups but to bring attention to the overlapping ideologies that inform their disparate representations and realities. I am interested in how the US media positions ethnic and cultural groups in relationship to each other, and in relationship to power and dominant ideologies. This chapter suggests that media, through its portrayals of members of immigrant groups and their countries of origin, exceeds its mandate to report on immigration legislation and actively shapes the national debate, then policy and eventually people’s experiences.

Cubans and Haitians constitute two of the fastest growing immigrant groups in the US. In 2009, an estimated 830,000 people of Haitian ancestry lived in the US, with two-thirds of that population concentrated in Florida and New York.⁸ In 2010, the Cuban population was 1.8 million.⁹ Both countries are located within the US sphere of influence, and the US government has substantial interest in the political governance of each country. Additionally, Haiti and Cuba have complex and interwoven histories with the US; these influence recent US media coverage, especially of the resignation of Fidel Castro (2011) and the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti (2010).

The PBS story from the introduction underscores some of the nontangible resources for immigrant groups. The most noticeable are space, permission to be in the US, and favorable public opinion in the discourses around immigration. Who belongs in the US? The media play a crucial role in informing societies about their members, particularly distinguishing between those who “belong” and those who do not. In the story of US immigration, they identify, highlight, and reinforce differences between “us” and “them.” “Us” takes the shape of an ideal, Western, legitimate citizen, while “they” appear as foreign, non-Western, and illegitimate interlopers. Paying particular attention to the binaries of citizen and foreigner, normal and deviant can help us understand how the media frame Cubans and Haitians. I situate the study of these particular moments of representational relationality alongside historical and contemporary accounts of immigration,¹⁰ and I ask

1 What frames does the New York Times use in the sample coverage of Haitians?

2 What frames does the New York Times use in the sample coverage of Cubans?

3 Are they framed differently? If so, how?

Qualitative Framing Analysis

A frame is a central organizing idea for news content. Journalists use frames to select, emphasize, exclude, and elaborate particular details.¹¹ Indeed, these practices are essential to the presentation of news.¹² The concept of framing offers a consistent way to describe the power of communication text.¹³ According to Gitlin, we all use framing. As individuals, “we frame reality in order to negotiate it, manage it, comprehend it, and choose appropriate repertoires of cognition and action.”¹⁴ Media framing is different in that it seeks to influence this individual process. Journalists, and other media producers, use familiar cultural symbols to frame information in ways that appeal immediately to the target audience.¹⁵ Media also perform a crucial role in the public representation of unequal social relations and the play of cultural power. Audiences take part in framing when they construct meaning as they read newspaper articles or watch television presentations.¹⁶ Engaging with media representations, the audience can construct a sense of who we are and are not in relation to us and them, insider and outsider, citizen and foreigner, normal and deviant.¹⁷

I conducted a qualitative framing analysis of Times news coverage of Cuban and Haitian immigration from January 1, 1994, to December 31, 2004. The 177 articles, 81 for Cubans and 96 for Haitians, were sampled from the LexisNexis Newspaper database using the search terms Haiti or Haitian and Cuba or Cuban. I read and qualitatively coded articles about each group and identified frames. I collected 20 more articles (10 per group) from the same newspaper from January 2005 through July 2010, in order to include events with significant media coverage: the resignation of Fidel Castro, the removal of Jean Bertrand Aristide from office, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This sample includes news and features articles with claims of objectivity, and excludes editorials, reviews, and letters to the editors, which do not claim to be objective. I analyzed these articles holistically, primarily to identify any similarities with or differences from the earlier framing.

A key qualitative strength of framing analysis as a method is that it allows scholars to pay attention to the context¹⁸ of the story to identify frames. With this approach, a critic examines media coverage of a particular issue by uncovering markers such as key terms, and then analyzes how journalists include or exclude those terms in order to frame the issue.¹⁹ I categorized stories on immigration first by whether they portrayed a group or individual positively or negatively. Scholars including Jhally and Lewis warn about emphasizing negative and positive coverage,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Citizenship and Belonging: *Some Restrictions Apply
• 1 Framing Cubans and Haitians in the New York Times: Enduring Imprints of Political History
• 2 Communists and Immigrants: Images of Cubans and Haitians
• 3 Negotiating Media Representations and Cultural Icons: Audience and Group Identity
• 4 A Love Story: Media and a (New) Exceptional Haitian American Political Subject
• Conclusion: The Destination of Blackness
• Index