Lots of Progress, But Race Still Generally Affects The Lives of Black People More Than Other Minorities: The “Mainstreaming” of American Minorities, Part 12

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.

Last of these posts. Thanks for reading and sharing.

●       “Scholarship on the ethnic identities of the second generation in both the United States and Britain is discovering that single ethnic labels are increasingly incapable of capturing the complexities of identity formation. Some of the reasons for this increasing complexity are burgeoning biracial and multiracial populations; the predominance of ethnic hybrids due to meshing of local, foreign, and global influences among the second generation; situational ethnicity, where the identity chosen is contingent on the situation or goals that need to be accomplished at a particular time; and transnationalism.”

●       “Their position is summarized by the words of a U.S. respondent: “I see myself as black, but I don’t think ‘black’ and ‘African American’ are synonymous. Respondents consider “black” an umbrella category holding all people assigned as racially black.”

●       “[She believes] that as long as African immigrants and their children enjoy the benefits of affirmative action, they will not really push to be disaggregated from the black/African American/ Negro category.”

●       “However, even as ethnicity is a source of progress for some groups, including Nigerians, a key difference that cannot be overemphasized is that race affects the lives of black people in distinct ways when compared to other ethnic minorities. We see some evidence of this in the fact that black people assimilate into the mainstream at a much slower rate as measured by their proportion in middle-class professional jobs, intermarriage rates with white people, and residential integration compared to Asians and Hispanics. Even though nonwhites are assigned racial or ethnic identities distinguishing them from whites, who are still treated as the racial norm, there are signs that the racial/ ethnic boundaries between whites and Asians as well as Hispanics are becoming increasingly blurred. The same cannot be said for the boundaries between blacks and whites.”

●       “As more attention is being paid to the class diversity among black people, with many pointing out that not all black people are poor, from dysfunctional families, or welfare dependent and that middle-and upper-class blacks exist in both the United States and Britain, I argue that we also have to start talking about a multiethnic or variegated black middle class that is diverse both in terms of class and in terms of ethnicity. The key point that must be made here is that this ethnic diversity is coming not just from first-generation black immigrants in the United States and first-generation African immigrants in Britain; it is being maintained by the second generation.”

●       “For example, Africans, and particularly Nigerians, in both the United States and Britain are well educated. It will be good to think creatively of ways this strength can be leveraged to improve the educational attainment levels of other black groups. In the United States, African Americans wield considerable political power. Even though black immigrants mostly vote for the Democratic Party as African Americans do, how can black immigrants’ interests be elevated and introduced into the public arena to receive political attention by African American political leaders?”

●       “There is a need for more programs, initiated from within the Nigerian community, that link their members, especially the more successful ones to poorer blacks, be they coethnics or members of the proximal hosts. Such programs will provide role models who can encourage their less fortunate partners; they can provide tutoring help, provide timely information about jobs or other opportunities that will lead to socioeconomic success, and activate links in their own social networks that can assist their partners get better jobs, know what schools to apply to in order to improve their admission success rates, and so on. In these ways, there will be a multiplier effect where the resources possessed by middle-class members help increase the human capital levels of poor and working-class black communities.” [We have another Lone Liberal Republican project percolating along these lines. Any readers interested in moving that project along, please email me at theloneliberalrepublican@gmail.com.]

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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.