Greer examines what ethnicity does politically among Black Americans, distinguishing recent immigrants from those born in the United States.

The evidence comes from a survey she designed for a labour population in New York City, set alongside several national data sources. Her conclusion is that racial and ethnic identity together shape how different Black ethnic groups understand their prospects for advancement and where they place themselves within the American polity.

Ibrahim collects and extends his work on continental African newcomers to Canada and the United States, a group he says immigration research has largely passed over. His organising claim is that nobody is born Black: Blackness is performed daily through speech, dress and bearing, and immigrants become Black through a process that ties their sense of themselves to non-immigrant Black populations.

Language carries much of the argument. Learning Black English, treated here as a second language, is inseparable from that becoming, and hip-hop functions as a curriculum schools decline to teach while young people invest in it heavily.

Other chapters borrow from Deleuze and Guattari to insist that Blackness is multidirectional rather than uniform, use Derrida to propose unconditional hospitality as a model for how teachers should receive students, and reconsider research ethics in immigrant communities, arguing that fieldwork should humanise rather than extract.