The Warmth of Other Suns

Or, why I never understood why I only saw Black people in other places

While I was growing up in upstate New York, we would sometimes visit small cities like Rochester and Buffalo, and I would see Black people. This was a departure for us, because where we lived in our suburban enclave of Tioga Terrace, there weren’t any minorities around except us and eventually a Filipino family that moved in up the hill. But in Rochester and Buffalo, there were Black people, and no one ever explained to me why that was. My parents had watched Roots with us, and that taught me more about the history and evils of slavery than any textbook ever had (and turned me into a lifelong fan of LeVar Burton, who really should host Jeopardy), but why there were Black people in Rochester and Buffalo but not in Tioga Terrace was not part of that mini-series and never revealed to me.

My morning read over the past two weeks has been The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, who also authored Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Wilkerson chronicles The Great Migration, something I am ashamed to admit I knew relatively nothing about before picking up her book. I had a striking moment of clarity while reading it: In as much as my family were immigrants, along with all the families who gathered at Chinese school on Saturdays and the Civic Association for potlucks, the Black families in Buffalo and Rochester (and Detroit and Oakland and Minneapolis) were also once immigrants. My family had escaped war and political strife to seek opportunity in America and these Black families had done the same, only they were escaping oppression, violence, and poverty in the Jim Crow South.

Between the turn of the century and the 1960s, some six million Black southern immigrants left their homes and migrated to nearly every corner of the country. Often the men left first, their lives as sharecroppers grinding them further into poverty with each year, then when they settled and found work, they sent for their wives and families.

This had profound implications for the Southern economy, which lost its source of cheap and exploitable labor; for the urban north, which was transformed by profound demographic shifts, with some cities like Chicago going from barely three percent to over one third Black in just two generations; and for our national culture, where the spirit of immigration and the quest for a new life gave us the likes of James Baldwin, Miles Davis, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, and Michele Obama, all of whom were the products of this mass movement of people. 

Unlike European immigrant stories, which are part of our national lore, this one is undertold and undersold by our history books and our popular culture, as untaught as the tragedy of Chinese immigrants left to languish for years on Angel Island. How different my own understanding of America might have been had I learned that my Chinese family and the Black family on the bus in Buffalo shared a common trait: Our parents or grandparents were both literal outsiders who uprooted themselves by choice and spent decades struggling to find a new identity and build a new community with their fellow outsiders.

It’s often said among Black families that going “home” to their Southern roots is a rite of passage, one that can be both shocking and humbling, just as it was for me and my family to visit China for the first time in the early 1980s. When we made the pilgrimage to our laojia—our “old home”—It seemed inconceivable that my parents once lived in a place so poor and backwards, that such sophisticated and worldly adults once ran barefoot through farms and fields there. 

Learning and experiencing my own origin story was profoundly meaningful to me, and America as a nation could benefit from the same spiritual pilgrimage. Where we come from holds an important key to who we are today. We are not just a once slave-holding nation that then fought a civil war and emancipated millions. There was the vital story of what happened after, one that we have barely explored and begun to tell.

My own parents, too, sought the warmth of other suns and in their case found it in the quiet and supportive suburbs of upstate New York. No Black families lived there due to restrictive laws and lending practices I learned about long afterwards. Pick up Wilkerson’s work if you have the time, and absorb the stories of immigrants within our own borders. It has changed the way I see us.