Immigration, movement to the suburbs, and gentrification run through this collection on the shifting terrain of Black politics in the United States. Candis Watts Smith opens it under the heading of Black flight; Christina M. Greer closes by asking where things go from here.

One group of chapters stays in the city, taking up relations among African American, Black ethnic, and Dominican constituencies in New York, the different shapes ethnic respectability assumes in New York and in Los Angeles, what sanctuary policy has meant for the Black public sphere, and how political incorporation works where no single group holds a majority.

The rest follow Black residents outward — into majority-white suburbs, into multiracial neighbourhoods, and across regions — weighing how time, place, and class shift political attitudes, what sets neighbourhood change in motion, and how its effects settle on African Americans. Contributors include Sharon D. Wright Austin, Niambi M. Carter, and Reuel R. Rogers, among others.

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.