Despite the hegemonic status of 'America', however, the United States does not have a monopoly on the cultural production of blackness globally. Because of the worldwide popularity of reggae music and dancehall, and because Jamaican cultural and political struggles have become the dominant referents of black consciousness in other areas of the diaspora (Codrington, 2006; Noble, 2004), representations of Jamaican blackness have come to challenge the hegemony of American blackness as the means through which black Atlantic communities index cultural and political citizenship. Moreover, the boundaries of variant blacknesses are never as rigid as nationalists would have us believe. For example, as key brokers within African American popular cultural institutions like the black music magazines Vibe and The Source, or as well-known hip-hop video directors, people with West Indian background often 'pass' for African Americans. This kind of 'passing' has political dimensions as well, as the recent debate about affirmative action in higher education reveals. The New York Times report on a recent meeting of Harvard University's black alumni noted that celebrations of the increased number of black undergraduates at elite colleges and universities were tempered by concerns about exactly where these black students were coming from. At that meeting, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Lani Guinier argued that 'the majority of [Harvard's black undergraduates] - perhaps as many as two-thirds - were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples' (Rimer and Arenson, 2004). This means that only about a third of the students were 'from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves', prompting several professors to question whether affirmative action policies were benefiting those who they felt 'were intended as [the] principal beneficiaries'. For these professors and administrators