Is Black Immigration Creating “New Definitions of Blackness”?: The “Mainstreaming” of American Minorities, Part 7

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.

Beyond Expectations (2017)

●       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.

●       “The experiences of the second generation of Nigerian ancestry show that the ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity among black people is being recognized and increasingly so. Their experiences suggest that their presence in the black middle class has the potential to change the largely negative ways black people are viewed and possibly help redefine what it means to be black in both countries.” [Emphasis mine.]

●       [From one of the author’s interviewees:] “My parents worked hard, and they expected us to do well academically. So there were high expectations. My father was the type of father that if you brought home 92 percent he’ll ask you where the other 8 percentage points were. So we were expected to do well. The expectation was just to do well.”

●       [From another of the author’s interviewees, describing her mother:] “’What are we celebrating because you graduated from high school? You are supposed to graduate from high school! I will celebrate when you do something even beyond college.’ Adaora met this expectation by becoming a physician.”

●       “The consensus among respondents [to the author’s survey] is that whites and Asians are becoming more cognizant of differences among blacks, even though ignorance of these differences remains. In the United States, institutional recognition of black group heterogeneity is lagging behind the demographic reality, as the U.S. census form [did] not disaggregate the black racial category like it does the Asian category. However, changes in the race question that will go into effect in the 2020 census allow those who tick the “Black or African American” box to write in their national origin or ancestry, if they choose.”

●       “’I have noticed with Africans that the only time we can consider ourselves one with African Americans is really when we are talking about racism and stuff. We all stand eye to eye on that. We would never understand the whole four hundred years of craziness, but there is this unspoken kinship because anything we experience today is just because of our skin color. And it kind of breaks down the wall a little.’ Dara’s statement raises the notion of linked fate… (For example, “being stopped by the police for DWB [driving while black]” or “being-watched-in-the-store-as-if-one-were-considered-a-potential-shoplifter.”)… “The reality that race cannot be external to their identity formation process is illustrated by what a British respondent told me: ‘I am not allowed to forget that I am a black man. If I do, I will be reminded.’”

●       “Among the second generation of Nigerian ancestry, relations with [African Americans] during adolescence were extremely influential in the fashioning of ethnic identities. Throughout this book, I refer to African Americans in the United States… as the proximal hosts of the African second generation. Proximal hosts are the group to which new immigrants are assigned in the receiving country—or put another way, the group perceived as the new immigrants’ coethnics based on criteria such as race and religion.”

●       “It is not clear whether the Nigerian second generation will always maintain their ethnic distinctiveness from their proximal hosts. The future is hard to predict. It is possible that significant events in the United States and Britain will lead to racial identification increasing in salience, in conjunction with a waning in salience of the ethnic identities held by second-generation blacks. The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States… raises an interesting sociological question about whether such events will have an impact on how the black second generation identifies.”

●       “What I argue is that the demographic shifts… because of continued immigration from nonwhite parts of the world and burgeoning biracial and multiracial populations are creating enough space for the black second generation to create new definitions of blackness. Each of these groups have different strengths that, if leveraged to benefit members across the groups, should help improve the relative position of all black people.” [Emphasis mine.]

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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.