Though native-born black Americans
and the black immigrant population share phenotypic resemblance, and
often are victims of racism and discrimination as a result, there is
quite a chasm between the two groups. I witnessed a bit of this divide
while pursuing undergraduate studies at NYU, and often felt a slight
cultural gap between myself and my Black peers during college, not only
because I was from the South, but also because I was American-born.
And while the differences I noticed were along superficial lines (i.e.
I did not understand certain words/phrases used, had never eaten certain
foods, and did not experience nostalgia for a homeland as I still resided
in my native country), I recognize that the division between the two
groups is quite deep in the reality and only exacerbated by the tone
employed by the media to report the findings of a recent achievement
study.
Uncharted land, wild animals, safari rides, and the AIDS crisis are,
unfortunately, often the first images that come to mind when most Americans
think of Africa, so as you can imagine a recent high academic achievement study didn't exactly
find itself in their thought bubbles. However, according to a recent
study produced by Douglas S. Massey of Princeton University and Camille
Z. Charles of University of Pennsylvania entitled "Black Immigrants
and Black Native Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the
United States," the black immigrant population, which, in this
case, includes black Africans and black people from the Caribbean and Guyana,
“make[s] up 13 percent of the nation's college-age black population,
[and] account[s] for more than a quarter of black students at Ivy League
and other selective universities" (Fears, "In Diversity Push").
While reflecting on these statistics, I wasn’t exactly surprised.
Many
of my black friends during college had emigrated from Caribbean or African
nations, and I had always simply attributed the high population of black
immigrants to the simple fact that I attended school in New York City,
a final destination for many immigrant populations. However, when I
continued to read news articles regarding what the media seemed to assert
as a “new” phenomenon of educated Blacks, I paused when I came to
the following:
The nation's most elite
colleges and universities are bolstering their black student populations
by enrolling large numbers of immigrants…the large representation
of black immigrants developed as schools' focus shifted from restitution
for decades of excluding black Americans from campuses to embracing
wider diversity, the study's authors said. The more elite the school,
the more black immigrants are enrolled
(Fears, "In Diversity Push").
In
a time when conservative college political groups hold rallies with
the purpose of ridiculing immigrants, legal and otherwise, and students
protest Affirmative Action policies by way of lawsuits, I found it odd
that universities were somewhat adding fuel to the fire. While there
is already considerable tension and competition between blacks and whites
on college campuses, the act of increasing their black student population
by enrolling a high percentage of black immigrants seemed like an early
stage in the “divide and conquer” process we see all too often in
a society where people of color are at constant competition for resources.
Last time I checked, Affirmative Action was a government policy with
the intention to “right the wrongs” of slavery by providing more
opportunities for black American descendants of slaves, who, for centuries,
have been systematically barred from equal access to resources and active
participation in American society, not necessarily to assist immigrant
populations. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Lani Guinier, two Harvard professors
and well known scholars in the area of black American issues, argue
that affirmative action may have lost its course as schools “are skirting
long-held missions to resolve historic wrongs against native black Americans
by enrolling immigrants who look like them." Guinier goes on to
state that high black immigrant enrollment “. . . has to do with coming
from a country, especially those educated in Caribbean and African countries,
where black students were in the majority and did not experience the stigma
that black children did in the United States," and thus challenges
the notion of whether Affirmative Action programs should include black
immigrants at all (Fears, "In Diversity Push").
However,
the universities themselves are not entirely to blame for this shift
in focus. With the multiculturalism movement in the 1970s, Affirmative
Action became less neo-Reconstruction, if you will, and more an open
embracing of diversity in all forms. This definition of diversity was
not only limited to race. It included gender, ethnicity, and, more recently,
class, sexual orientation, and nationality. After all, we cannot view
the “black experience” in a vacuum, or, in other words, continue
to address only its effects on black Americans. If we wanted to be more
specific about who deserves what from whom, we could expand government
programs to a global level, so black Americans would receive a form
of reparations from Spain, Portugal, England, West Africa, and many
Middle Eastern countries, as they all played a role in slavery, and
most Africans would receive a form of reparations from Western European
nations as well as the United States, for the role they played during
imperial expansion, as well as mass land displacement and apartheid.
This
suggestion is unreasonable in that its scope is far too broad and controversial
to ever happen. Yet however absurd the suggestion may be, suggesting
that only black Americans experienced "stigma" as children
or civil rights-related challenges is equally, in my opinion, absurd.
While sociologist Philip Kasinitz notes that “most evidence would
seem to argue that the African American experience remains poles apart
from that of other groups in the United States” and that “there
would be no African American identity had it not been for a history
of massive oppression and stigmatization” to define them, one could
argue, just as well, that black immigrants have their own shared history
regarding the adversity they faced as immigrants arriving in the United
States (i.e. the rigorous application for citizenship, cultural differences,
and language barriers) and their respective nations’ own troubled pasts
(one word: colonialism), both factors that may connect their struggles
more closely to those of black Americans than Guinier and Gates want
to acknowledge (Foner, "Introduction"). When I took
more time to digest the news, I recalled how the degree of inclusiveness
applied by a university to its definition of diversity had a positive
correlation with the strength of the campus learning environment. However,
what is troubling about this unraveling of Affirmative Action’s original
intentions is how the end result plays out on a more interpersonal level.
In
hopes of providing some qualitative analysis behind the data they extracted
from the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen, the authors of the
study considered several differences between the black American and
black immigrant communities on college campuses. The first difference
relates to educational background. Though educational resources in many
African nations and the Caribbean may not be as readily available as
they are in the United States, the quality often far surpasses primary
and secondary education here, ironically enough, as a result of colonialism.
So even if an immigrant student may not be of a high class status, he
or she is more likely than not to be prepared for collegiate studies
than his or her American peers (Fears, "In Diversity Push").
The authors noted that in comparison to their American-born black counterparts,
black immigrant students were more likely to have attended private school.
The authors also found that "Black immigrant fathers were far more
likely to have graduated from college" than the fathers of American
blacks. Indeed, many had received their college degree in the United
States (Wu, "Immigrants Comprise").
Lani
Guinier, a black Harvard law professor, takes this statistic one step
further, implying that classism is the most significant difference
between black Americans and black immigrants on college campuses. In an interview, Guinier
said that the chasm has less to do with immigrants and more to do with
admissions officers who rely on tests that wealthier students, including
black immigrants, can afford to prepare for . . . "The fathers
of these students tend to be much better educated. This is not just
true of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, this is true across
the board. We have an admissions system that prefers wealth, that rewards
wealth and calls it merit" (Fears, "In Diversity Push").
Other studies also demonstrate
similar findings. In a study regarding divisions between African immigrants
and black Americans, Howard Ph.D. candidate Msia Kibona Clark, conducted
several interviews among black (native-born and immigrant) college students
and residents of the Washington, D.C. area. One interviewee, who was
originally from Washington D.C. but attended Princeton, remarked that
“most of the black students at Princeton were upper middle class African
and Caribbean immigrants whose parents could offset the cost of their
educational expenses,” and says, in conclusion, that “there’s
a deep class divide amongst African and African American students at
predominately white universities" (Pailey, "Students Study").
 Another
difference that commentators writing on the study noted, though that
was not explicitly stated in the study, involves work ethic. As a direct
result of pressure to succeed, many black immigrants, much like immigrants
from other nations, outperform their American peers. According to U.S.
census data from 2000, “black immigrants from Africa averaged the
highest educational attainment of any population group in the country,”
with 43.8% of African immigrants having attained a degree at an institution
of higher learning in comparison to 42.5% of Asian-Americans, 28.9%
of immigrants from Europe and Canada, and 23.1 of the entire U.S. population
(Page, "Black Immigrants Collect"). In addition, black immigrants
make up 40% of the black student population enrolled in Ivy League education
institutions, while they only comprise 13 percent of the black population
in the United States as a whole (Wu, "Immigrants Comprise").
What’s
shocking about this statistic is not so much the high percentage of
African immigrants who attain degrees, but the fact that the statistic
was not widely publicized until recently. In the United States, Asian-Americans
are still viewed as the “model minority,” much to the chagrin of
many Asian-Americans. While the stereotype is certainly positive, it
does harm as well. For one, it places an immense amount of pressure
on Asian-Americans to perform well academically, raising expectations
unfairly. Secondly, it creates tension between Asian-Americans and whites,
some of whom view Asian-Americans as direct academic and occupational
competition. Lastly, and most importantly, it sets Asian-Americans apart
from other people of color, galvanizing pre-existing problems between
Asian-Americans and the other minority groups with whom they would need
to collaborate in order to make gains against white supremacy. This
is a classic example of the problem that those who have written about
the recent academic study, particularly Clarence Page of the Chicago
Tribune and native-born black scholars like Gates and Guinier, fear
may rear its ugly head in blacks’ struggle for equality if black immigrants
are viewed as the model minority.
The
biggest problem in analyzing studies like the one presently at hand
is attempting to do so through the lens of commentators, many of whom
have an agenda of their own. With each additional piece of information
regarding the study I found, the previous claims of the vast differences
between black American and black immigrant college students became less
and less credible. For example, the researchers in the achievement study
found that black immigrant and black American student groups had similar
social and economic backgrounds, and that "once enrolled at the
college or university, Black immigrants perform no better than their
native counterparts." Somehow, once in the same environment, the
students' performance seems to plateau, "implying that the factors
influencing the performance of black students in higher education affect
immigrants and natives alike" (Wu, "Immigrants Compromise").
The representation of black Americans vs. black immigrants at public
universities as opposed to private, Ivy League institutions, was of
little to no concern to writers commenting on the story, nor was the
percentage of black Americans vs. black immigrants who applied for admission
to Ivy League schools in the first place. Lastly, I questioned the study's
definition of "immigrant," later discovering that the definition
encompassed all black students who were immigrants themselves and/or
had at least one immigrant parent. I find it interesting that the students
accounted for in the research may have thought of themselves in the
same way as their "native-born" peers. Why were the students'
opinions of self missing from the data?
Despite
these similarities, however, one difference I was surprised that neither
the research authors nor the media addressing the research considered
was what "blackness" means to black Americans vs. black immigrants
residing in America. Immigration is, without a doubt, a voluntary act.
No matter how dire the situation may be in one’s homeland, the act
of leaving one’s own country to have a better life elsewhere is embedded
in the American consciousness as heroic. It falls in line with the idea
of pulling oneself up by his or her bootstraps, fits in perfectly with
the American Dream ideology, and even exhibits characteristics of the
Protestant Work Ethic (in short, hard work yields positive results,
and the harder your work, the greater your reward). It is the idea on
which our nation was built, or so our elementary school history classes
tell us.
Enslavement,
on the other hand, is not viewed in such a positive light. The very
word turns those who are slaves into victims— objects receiving action,
as opposed to those committing an act. So despite similarities in physical
characteristics, black Americans and black immigrants have less in common
with regard to their migration stories than, say, black immigrants and
“white ethnics” who immigrated in the 1800s from Ireland, Italy,
and Eastern Europe. All were fleeing poverty, poor labor markets, political
unrest, and/or famine in their homelands in order to find a better life
in the United States, whereas black Americans did not choose to come
here, nor did they arrive at their own free will.
While
some tend to poke fun at the differences between black Americans and
black immigrants, others weigh in on the gravity of the divide, noting
that stereotypes dominate perceptions of what black Americans signify
to black immigrants, and vice versa:
In her informal interviews,
Kibona Clark encountered more deeply entrenched notions on both sides
of the divide. “African Americans think of African immigrants as arrogant
and pompous. And African immigrants often view African Americans as
lazy, shiftless, and overly race conscious,” said the Ph.D. candidate.
Kibona Clark found that African immigrants time and time again shunned
Reparations and Affirmative Action as examples of a preoccupation with
slavery. In a similar vein, she noticed that African Americans failed
to acknowledge that their fate as Black people in the U.S. is ultimately
tied to the status of Africa on the international world stage (Pailey,
"Students Study").
Black Americans had defined
themselves as counter to the stereotypes they held of black immigrants,
and black immigrants had done the same. This act of "distancing"
oneself from black Americans is not exclusive to Africans. Indeed, other
immigrant groups who resemble black Americans or even share direct racial
ties (like many Latinos and West Indians) are "the most active
in drawing the divide as a way to avoid being mistaken for African Americans,
especially poor African Americans" despite their being literal
geographic and economic neighbors as a result of discrimination via
ghettoization in the United States (Foner, "Introduction").
So
the question of whether or not the new research will contribute to the pre-existing strain between black Americans and black immigrants remains.
Despite any evidence that challenges the assumptions of the authors
who addressed the research study regarding academic achievement, these
assumptions are most likely exactly what will remain as truth. Now is
the time for native-born blacks and black immigrants to work together
in their efforts to confront the obstacles that limit their rights on
a daily basis. Though our cultural, socio-economic, and academic backgrounds
may differ on some levels, our black faces all look the same in a sea
of white. There is no mark especially assigned to black immigrants or
black Americans that would allow either group to benefit over the other,
and I worry that the manipulation of statistics regarding academic achievement
may allow for the tokenism and essentialism that has torn the black
community apart for centuries, and, in turn, silence us for good against
the very powers that keep us divided.
Works Cited:
Fears, Darryl. "In Diversity
Push, Top Universities Enrolling More Black Immigrants" The
Washington Post. (March 6, 2007)
Foner, Nancy and George M.
Fredrickson. "Introduction" Not Just Black and White: Contemporary
Perspective on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States.
Russell Sage Foundation Publications: New York, NY (2005)
Page, Clarence. "Black
Immigrants Collect Most Degrees, but Affirmative Action Is Losing Direction"
Chicago Tribune (March 18, 2007)
"Pailey, Robtel Neajai.
"Students Study African American-African Immigrant Connections"
The Washington Informer. (December 15, 2005)
Wu, Suzanne. "Immigrants
Comprise a Disproportionate Number of Black Students at the Most
Selective Universities" Press Release Archive. The University
of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL (2007)
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