Full Circle
The research of sociology professor Dialika Sall ’08 aims to increase understanding of immigrant integration and Blackness in America.
BY TAYLOR PLIMPTON ’94
Dialika Sall ’08 counts it a great privilege to find herself back home in New York, sharing what she’s gained with her community. After all, it was this very community that helped make her who she is today. An assistant professor of sociology at Lehman College-CUNY, Sall recognizes that her current research was inspired by her own experience being raised as the child of West African immigrants (her parents moved to the U.S. from Senegal in the 1980s).
“Growing up in the Bronx was where I first grappled with immigrant identity issues, which I’m now studying as a professor,” she explains. “Back then, my identity as an African was at the forefront of what I was navigating. Because children — and this is true for children across the board — want to fit in. And so anything that makes you stand out is like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna die.’ For me, that was the African piece of it.”
Upon her arrival at St. Paul’s School, Sall felt like “a fish out of water,” but for different reasons. Almost overnight, her acute sensitivity to the African part of her identity faded into the background.
“Now it was my Blackness, it was my race,” she says, “something I hadn’t even thought about growing up where there was a large Black population.”
At Pomona College, her introduction to sociology began to give Sall the tools to better understand what she’d been going through.
“I really appreciated how sociology gave me the language to start to unpack some of the experiences I had up until that point,” she says. “I realized this thing that I’d been curious about, as far as how racial ethnic identity changes based on context, was a sociological question.”
Sall went on to Columbia University, where she earned her graduate degree studying with Shamus Khan ’96. Now, back in the Bronx teaching sociology at Lehman College, her academic focus remains a personal one — continuing to make sense of what she experienced in her youth and what other second-generation immigrants in New York are still going through. Part of her research has involved interviewing teenagers across the city to explore their experiences navigating adolescence, race, and immigrant identity. These interviews form the core of a book she’s writing, Connecting Black: Second-Generation Africans in America. In Sall’s own words, the book, due in 2024, investigates “not only how we understand immigrant integration, but also how we understand Blackness in America.”
While the teenagers she’s interviewed still encounter some of the negative stereotyping Sall experienced growing up, she mentions that a recent surge in “African influence on American pop culture — from the popularity of Afrobeat music to movies like Black Panther to cultural icons like Beyoncé publicly wearing African-inspired clothing — has helped youth feel prouder about their African ethnic identities.”
Despite this refreshing development, Sall knows all too well that immigrants in the U.S. still face serious challenges. Shedding much-needed light on the immigrant experience, the professor does her part to address these challenges by learning, teaching, and giving back to the community she calls home. After all, if you’re going to change the world, it’s always best to start in your own backyard.