More Than Just Black delves into the experiences of second generation Nigerian adults in the United States and Britain, examining how race, ethnicity, and class (both parental and individual) affect their identities and assimilation trajectories. I pay particular attention to how their relations with their proximal hosts, African Americans in the United States and Black Caribbeans in Britain, affect how they identify. I conclude that the Nigerian second generation have more in common with fellow immigrants than they do with their proximal hosts.
OR
Focusing on questions of identity, More Than Just Black examines the nature of second generation Nigerians incorporation in the United States and Britain. I investigate how, in combination, race, ethnicity, and class (both parental and individual) affect the identity formation process and assimilation trajectories of the adult second generation of Nigerian ancestry in both countries. I find that despite living in countries where people are categorized by race and where race and racial categorization still hold great social and political power, the Nigerian second generation in both countries are not defined through the prism of race. They have formed a nuanced identity that balances race, a Nigerian ethnicity (which includes an achievement orientation akin to “model minority” groups), a pan-African identity, and, depending on structure of national identity and perceptions of thoroughness in redressing past ethnoracial traumas, identification with the country of destination.
