Education and the Upward Economic Mobility of African Immigrants in America: The “Mainstreaming” of American Minorities, Part 8

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.

Some more interesting and thought-provoking excerpts from Beyond Expectations:

●       “[Many academics] predict that children of black immigrants (the black second generation) will forge a reactive black ethnicity and black identity characterized by an oppositional culture that devalues schooling and work and stresses attitudes and behaviors antithetical and often hostile to success in the mainstream economy… I find that the Nigerian second generation… have formed a multifaceted identity that combines into more ethnic choices than were previously theorized.”

●       “Because the United States and Britain racialize ethnic minorities, especially black people, and positions them on one side of a stark racial divide opposite white people, little attention is paid to how the black second generation relate with the more established black groups in these countries. In both countries, respondents report that when they were younger, relations with proximal hosts were tense and fraught with conflict and that it was constantly communicated to them that they were different.”

●       “Just as for other immigrant groups, especially Asians in both the United States and Britain, ethnicity is a resource for the Nigerian second generation. A powerful social norm among the ethnic group is that it is “un-Nigerian not to go to college,” which fosters high educational and occupational attainment among the Nigerian second generation. This norm is an outgrowth of the extreme selectivity of first-generation Nigerians in the United States and Britain. Another mechanism is the multiplicity of highly educated professionals in their social networks who serve as role models and against whom the Nigerian second generation measure success.”

●       “[The author finds] that there is an emerging, loose coalition of all middle-class blacks, regardless of ethnicity, in both countries. To summarize their position, they do not contest that they are of the black race, nor are they unmindful of the various ways race affects their lives, but they do not define themselves through the prism of race.”

●       “It is doubtful that contemporary black immigrants and their children can ever become deracialized or whitened in the same way as Europeans, and even to some extent successful Asian and Hispanic groups, largely because they do not have the right bodies to access whiteness and because of the persistence of in-group marriage patterns and racial prejudice and discrimination. But I argue that we are at a time when their racial status does not always have to be a stigma.”

●       “[Black immigrants] have been able to piggyback on the infrastructure built to redress the generational disadvantages experienced by African Americans from slavery to Jim Crow and beyond. Most notably, they are beneficiaries of affirmative action policies, particularly in admission to tertiary institutions and being considered for and awarded minority fellowships and grants, to the extent that affirmative action has worked exceptionally well as a second-generation integration policy, and especially for black immigrants and their children.”

●       “I set out to answer my original research question, whether the experiences of the African second generation of middle-class parents mirror those of African Americans of middle-class parents—who it was found were not replicating their parents middle-class status… After narrowing my target population to the Nigerian second generation, I found that they are doing very well. Over 95 percent have at least a bachelor’s degree, and almost all of them are professionals.” [Emphasis mine.]

●       “The median household income for Nigerians living in the United States is $61,289, compared to the median household income of $53,482. In 2010, Nigerian men who worked full-time earned a median income of $50,000, compared to $46,000 for all U.S.-born men. Almost 25 percent of Nigerian U.S. households make over $100,000 a year, compared to 10.6 percent of African American households; and over 5 percent of Nigerian households earn over $200,000 a year, compared to 1.3 percent of African Americans. The top three regions where Nigerians are located are New York City, Maryland-Washington, DC-Virginia, and Texas. The majority of Nigerians in the United States live in urban areas. They tend to be found in low- to middle-income neighborhoods that are extremely diverse, composed of significant numbers of other African immigrants as well as Hispanic and Caribbean immigrants.”

●       “Data from national surveys show that second-generation Africans are more likely to grow up in two-parent households than their African American and Caribbean peers. Most of the second generation in this study grew up in two-parent households. For some, it took a while for one parent to join the family in the United States or Britain. Some (20 percent) had divorced parents.”

●       “I asked respondents if their parents had shared stories with them about their reactions to life in Britain and the United States on arrival. Some parents had done so, and most of their stories shared themes of how unprepared they were for the cold winters and their experiences of racial discrimination. Many respondents’ mothers in the United States had to retrain as nurses because they could not get good jobs using the skills and educational qualifications they obtained in Nigeria.”

* * * *

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.