Several scholars have begun to do this kind of work. In her study of first and second generations of West Indian migrants in New York City, for example, Mary Waters argues that while first-generation West Indians tended to identify themselves across the board in relation to their national origins (and in doing so, to distance themselves from African Americans), their children identified in ways that were shaped largely by their class background and education (Waters, 1999). In other words, those second generation West Indian Americans who identified as ethnically West Indian tended to come from middle-class backgrounds, or had parents who were involved in ethnic voluntary organizations. Those who identified as Americans (and particularly as African Americans), on the other hand, tended to be poorer students whose negative assessments of their own future possibilities were rooted in their conviction that American racial prejudice severely limited their chances in life.  
These findings led Waters (and many of her interviewees) to assert that becoming American, and specifically becoming African American, was associated with poor performance in school, and therefore ultimately with downward mobility. Other researchers, however, are beginning to investigate the ways in which identifying with aspects of African American political history and cultural production has helped second-generation West Indian Americans to succeed beyond the confines of their ethnic enclave, and to negotiate their own relationships to both West Indian and American racial (and national) formations through consumption and political activism (Glick Schiller and Fouron, 2001; LaBennett, 2002; Clarke, 2004; Stoller, 2002). In doing so, they impel a broadened understanding of 'diasporic resources', one that reconfigures West Indian Americans' relationship not only to racial prejudice in the United States, but also to class discrimination and older notions of respectable citizenship in the Caribbean.