Brooklyn representative Major Owens hasn't just fought the good fight; he's rapped it. Known as "the rapping congressman," Owens has broken into spontaneous verse on the House floor to express his opinions on death-row inmates, impeachment, and public schools. Owens says he raps "as an outlet for political frustrations," and his frustrations are easy to understand. As Congress, and even his own party, has shifted right in recent years, Owens, an unreconstructed lefty who got his political start running former New York Mayor John Lindsay's anti-poverty program and in 1998 earned a perfect 100 rating from Americans for Democratic Action, has increasingly abandoned practical action for symbolic protest. He's demonstrated in support of higher wages for New York cleaners and this spring responded to the Amadou Diallo verdict by calling for "outrageous actions" throughout the city. Two years ago, when the Daily News asked Capitol Hill staffers which members of the New York delegation wielded the most clout, Owens finished last.

In a poor, largely black district where many residents themselves feel marginalized from mainstream politics and economics, Owens may represent his constituents. His problem is that those constituents are changing. The eleventh district, overwhelmingly African American when it first elected Owens in 1982, is now between 25 and 40 percent West Indian--perhaps even more. This year, that growing community threw up a challenger, Jamaican-born City Councilwoman Una Clarke, who charged, essentially, that while Owens's protest-oriented style may have suited the district once, it no longer does. And, while Owens last week beat Clarke in the Democratic primary 54 to 46 percent, he can't rest easy. Given that the number of West Indians in New York has dramatically increased in the last two decades and that many of them are represented by African American politicians, Clarke's challenge is probably a harbinger of things to come.

Conservatives sometimes overstate the ideological differences between African Americans and Caribbean Americans. Just as the largely working-class West Indian community does not represent the "black success story" often portrayed in the press, most West Indians, like most African Americans, are on the political left. Colin Powell may have Caribbean roots, but so do Louis Farrakhan and Stokely Carmichael. Abner Louima was from Haiti, and the small boy accidentally killed by a Hasidic driver, sparking the Crown Heights riot, was from Guyana.

But while West Indians generally agree with African Americans on the issues, their experience as recent immigrants has fostered a radically different political style. Most African American politicians see themselves as heirs to the civil rights movement--ever-conscious that they owe their careers to a defiant public struggle for broad social change far from the corridors of power. West Indians generally take a shorter-term view. Often in the United States to earn a livelihood, with an eye to returning to the Caribbean to retire, they are apt to see American politics less as a grand clash between good and evil than as a way to negotiate the specific roadblocks that impair practical advancement.

Clarke's central critique of Owens was that he didn't get things done. Unlike Harlem Representative Charles Rangel, Clarke's supporters noted, Owens hasn't landed his district a federal empowerment zone. While admitting that Owens has spoken passionately about the discrepancy between the treatment of EliAn GonzAlez and the treatment of refugees from Haiti, Clarke charged that when constituents contacted the congressman's office seeking assistance with their practical immigration problems, his staff often referred them to hers. Even The New York Times' editorial page, in endorsing the congressman for reelection, noted that "Mr. Owens has not kept up with constituent services."

Owens responded, in part, by trying to link Clarke to New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a deeply unpopular figure among black New Yorkers of all ethnic backgrounds. Owens noted that while he was getting arrested for his anti-Giuliani protests, Clarke was brokering deals with the mayor. One prominent Owens campaign poster featured Clarke and Giuliani in a warm embrace and accused Clarke of being "Giuliani's puppet."

But Clarke claimed her work with the mayor as a badge of honor--because it showed she could get results. As one of her main accomplishments in office, she touted a Giuliani directive she engineered allowing private commuter-van services, mostly driven and owned by West Indians, to operate legally. Justifying her relationship with the mayor, she explained, "What he [Owens] sees as an alliance, I see as a negotiation. I needed to deliver computers to schools in Brooklyn [a reference to another deal she brokered] , and I was able to do that by working with Giuliani." She refused to be arrested protesting the Diallo killing, she said, because of the hassle an arrest record would cause her, as an immigrant, in international travel--a message that resonated with other West Indians, who are often hassled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service when they return to the United States from the islands.

It's unclear whether Clarke, who will give up her city council seat next year in accordance with term limits and is already 65, will challenge Owens again. But it's almost certain that the divide her campaign exposed will return in future races. And not just in New York. In cities like Miami and Newark, growing West Indian communities could threaten African American political fiefdoms as well. In many ways, it's the old American story of ethnic succession--a new ethnic group moves into the neighborhood and brings forth its own representatives and political style. And ethnicity remains a driving force in American politics--even, it turns out, when both ethnic groups are black.