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Book Review: Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community by Tamara M. Brown

As H. Arendt (1958) notes, freedom means, among other things, freedom from the labor that is commanded by necessities, that creates nothing permanent and must be perpetually renewed so as to sustain life. With women’s growing participation in the labor market, there is growing demand for this type of labor, i.e., for childcare services and domestic work. Usually, this demand is met by immigrant women who are looking for a better fortune outside their home countries. Freedom is achieved and the burden of biological existence is eliminated by pushing it onto the shoulders of immigrant workers. The immigrants’ presence usually causes some cultural, economic and social tensions – both in the host country and in the host home. The growing academic coverage of immigrant domestic labor illuminates both the increasing scope of immigrant domestic labor and increasing awareness of its socio-cultural implications. The book Raising Brooklyn by Tamara Mose Brown is a fascinating ethnographic account of Caribbean childcare providers in Brooklyn, NY. It provides in-depth descriptions of Caribbean childcare providers’ daily life in the gentrified, predominantly white neighborhood. The first chapter, ‘West Indians raising New York’, illuminates the role of female Caribbean immigrants and the childcare services they provide within the economy of New York. Taking into account the invisibility, low status and low pay for childcare labor, and racial differences, many of the care providers themselves argue their situation replicates the historical experiences of colonialism and slavery. The book tells a lot about reinventing race and how certain experiences and inequalities are attributed to the fact of blackness. Although immigrants are of varying ethnic and geographical origins, they are seen, identified and categorized as ‘Caribbean’ – through a typical process of reducing differences and exaggerating shared characteristics, which leads to a simplified understanding. The imposed shared identities and shared position of subalternship intensifies feelings of pan-ethnic Caribbean nationalism (us, people from the islands, versus them, whites of New York). The second chapter, ‘Public parks and social spaces’, illuminates typical routes and spaces used by the sitters; as well as techniques of surveillance employed by their hosts. As the author notes, hiring a babysitter is an act of conspicuous consumption and manifestation of personal status. Their visibility, their presence and their loving attitudes towards the white child become the symbolic asset of the family. The babysitters use public parks both for the needs of children and for the needs of their own; that is, breaking through the emotional isolation of domestic labor, connecting with people outside home and developing temporal communities of belonging. The public parks, along with playgrounds and other public spaces, constitute a reverse model of the Habermasian (1962) public sphere, where citizens, white men of wealth and privilege, meet as equals beyond any bonds of social and economic dependency and discuss common issues – here, the sitters, non-citizens, disprivileged females of color, meet as equals and discuss their common issues; the private 516408 CRS0010.1177/0896920513516408Critical SociologyBook reviews research-article2013