Class, Not Race: The “Mainstreaming” of American Minorities, Part 9

One of the main purposes of these posts, sourced mostly from the three books whose covers are shown on the posts, is to help build a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of race in America today.  I also hope that many readers will find the posts to be less polarizing than so much of what we see on the subject from the media and politicians, which often is intended to rile us up and drive us further into our respective political corners. The goal of these posts, like most Lone Liberal Republican posts, is to work towards more sensible, pragmatic and consensus-oriented discussions about difficult issues that America faces today, like race.

This book complements the first two in that it is less statistically oriented, and instead full of very human stories. Some interesting and thought-provoking excerpts from the book follow, including some that I hope will help the reader question the ways we stereotypically classify people based on race.

●       “Every respondent from the United States said they experienced discrimination from African Americans. The region or state in which they grew up made no difference. Nor did the neighborhoods where they grew up or whether they attended public or private schools. Fraught relations largely took the form of being on the receiving end of teasing, ridicule, and social ostracism.”

●       “During middle school, Kemi said, “I had a lot of African Americans giving me a hard time for not doing what they were doing.” They made fun of her “because of the way that [she] talked.” They told her, “‘You talk like a white girl.’ But we did not grow up talking in slang. I had a lot of that.” Kemi told me that her fraught relations with her proximal host peers “made me not like African American kids because they abused me a lot.” Kemi was viewed as an African by many of her African American peers. But at the same time, many of her teachers viewed African students as better academically than African American students. Kemi also actively educated her teachers on the difference. As she put it, “I would educate them about it.” At her school the widely held perception of Nigerians and Africans in general was that “Africans were so studious, that there are so many of us that were trying to go to college and they [some of her African American teachers] wished they could see that in their younger ones.” In college Kemi was again confronted with the social distance between Africans and African Americans when a student organization tried to encourage dialogue between the two groups. She recalled, “African Americans wanted to know why Africans don’t like them.” It was a very emotional meeting that “broke a lot of Africans down because they had to talk about when they were young. They said that African Americans teased us, that you said that we looked a certain way. . . and the African Americans said, ‘You all like to hang out with white people,’ and the African students said, ‘But the white kids did not tease us the way you did.’ I had to explain that the funny thing is it that it hurts more when it’s coming from someone of your own color because you think—you already know the white man is going to act racist against you . . . but it hurts more that the person of your same color is also not your brother or your sister.”

●       “A few respondents mentioned that they had been discriminated against by African Americans working in contract and grant offices, often in the public sector, because they felt that black ethnics did not qualify for the same opportunities as African Americans. Wole, a self-employed contractor in Maryland, frequently finds that his company is removed from consideration for some contracts by African American state workers because he is “not really African American,” even though he is an American citizen.”

●       “Those who attended affluent suburban schools had less fraught relations with their proximal hosts, regardless of the racial or ethnic composition.”

●       “A bad time in school often became better once accents sounded more American, when greater familiarity with how things were done in these countries was gained, when they jettisoned parents’ old-fashioned styles and became more hip, and when classmates got to know them better.”

●       “The nature of their interethnic relations with proximal hosts during their school years is an important reason their racial status did not overwhelm their ethnicity and make them “just black,” as predicted by theories influenced by the racialization perspective.”

●       “He feels there “is too much of a competition to the point where” parents just want their kids to succeed so they can “show off,” When I talk to the younger generation, because their parents send them to talk to me because they think I did well in school, they all basically vent for about two hours about the pressure they are under to perform… While some, like Ezigbe, resented the pressure, others, looking back, said they are grateful for it. They credit that pressure with making them highly educated professionals.”

●       “In general, U.S. respondents reported they received good to great support from their teachers. They said that their teachers (both black and white) had high expectations of them. Some, like Tabira, said teachers had high expectations for them because they were children of recent African immigrants. According to Tabira, teachers had different expectations for her because they knew she was Nigerian or African: “If I started messing up or something like that, they would kind of be a little disappointed and they would kind of be, ‘Tabira, we know you know better than that.’” Kemi recounted, “I had very wonderful teachers. I was in honors classes, and when I was in regular classes they forced me to go to honors. I had teachers who wanted ‘too much.’” However, like Titi, she also experienced racism from her white teachers when she was younger. In many respondents’ experiences, including that of Kemi, moving from a working-class, predominantly black neighborhood and a predominantly black public school to a more affluent neighborhood, whether predominantly black or white or mixed, resulted in having better relations with teachers and African American peers. It was in her mixed high school in the more affluent neighborhood that Kemi had “wonderful teachers” who supported her. Kemi’s relations with her proximal hosts also became much easier: “When we moved and we moved to a more affluent neighborhood, they all talked white. They all talked the way that I talked even though they were black. And this was new because I thought all African Americans talked slang but then realized we were the same.”

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If you find the subject matter in these The Mainstreaming of Minorities posts interesting, check out this link to the late Arthur Schlesinger’s book The Disuniting of America, foreshadowing the difficult place identity politics would lead us. (I used to get scolded for suggesting people read it.) All twelve of the posts can be found in the “For Those With More Academic Interests” section on the Lone Liberal Republican website.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing, and be well.