The Importance of Good Schooling, Always, Everywhere: The “Mainstreaming” of American Minorities, Part 10

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 stuff from Beyond Expectations:

●       “I have a lot of cousins who are physicians, architects, and engineers; so my whole thing was to hide that I was a good student [because of the teasing she got from her African American peers], not to stop it… Titi also had duties at home that made her “very responsible.” But Titi found out that although she had been her teachers’ pet in middle and high school, with some emphasizing her as ethnically different from African Americans, she was nevertheless lumped in with all the other black students when she attended an Ivy League university. Like African Americans, she was seen as not good enough. She thought her professors and other colleagues believed she had only been admitted because of affirmative action.”

●       “She recalled being asked by a friend of a friend what college she attended. When Titi told her, she said that the person expressed surprise: “‘Oh, how? I didn’t know you can go to Princeton.’ And I was like, ‘What does that mean? Why are you so surprised?’ Little things like that broke me down.” She started “getting a lot of smack from white people,” which made her realize that though she was a foreign black, in some situations she was “just seen as black.”

●       These issues do not only arise in the United States. “Sam found life in Britain in the 1980s difficult: “I lived the life of an ethnic minority. By this I mean, I was sidelined and I did not feel ‘mainstream.’” Growing up, he and his siblings had very low self-esteem. They were “not doing well at all in Britain” because they did not expect much from themselves. They developed these low expectations through interaction with their white peers and teachers in school… The ability to send children back to the home country is an example of a resource immigrants can access even in the face of constrained financial circumstances. (The United Kingdom’s Conservative Party leader, and perhaps next Prime Minister, Kemi Badenoch, grew up similarly.) Even though Sam’s parents did not have a lot of disposable income, they were well educated and middle class, and their social location greatly influenced who and where Sam is today. They were hands-on parents who were invested in their children doing well academically.”

●       “They came to view doing well in school as something they could hold on to—something that would give them a better basis for differentiation from their proximal host peers and that would give them a positive sense of self. In short, they felt that being smart, being one of the best students in class, was an achievement that made them feel that even if they were not popular, even if their schoolmates didn’t want to date them, even if they were miserable in school, at least they had this one thing: they were going to be successful.”

●       “While my respondents associate being Nigerian with graduating from college, they did not report strategies as well organized and community-wide as those reported in sociological research on some Asian communities. Strategies promoting high educational and occupational attainment among the Nigerian second generation in this sample remain primarily at the level of individual efforts among parents. Only in Boston did respondents report that after-school and exam preparatory classes are organized through ethnic associations.”

●       “My mother always told me, “I am not your mate.” And that is when it comes out that, look, you know, how you guys run your home is a lot different from how my parents run their home. When my mother says no I can’t start asking why. Once she says no, it’s no. I’ve learned that she cannot always offer me explanations. She doesn’t have to… In Adaora’s home, as in most homes of the second generation who lived with their parents, parents were revered and even feared. There wasn’t much room to negotiate with a parent once a decision was made. This is quite different from how most children of [native] middle-class parents are raised.” [See the funny, but profane, short clip of comedian Russell Peters comparing these differences in one respect.]

●       “Within Nigeria, groups are mobilized generally on the basis of ethnic group; for example, being Yoruba, Hausa, Ibo, or Ijaw; or being Muslim or Christian; or being a southerner or a northerner. It is only outside the country that the Nigerian national ethnicity has become an ethnic identity that Nigerians from different ethnic groups are happy to claim.”

●       “Race complicates the process of identity formation and the lived experiences of the Nigerian second generation in ways that cannot be equated with the Asian and Hispanic second generation. An example of the differential ways race impacts identity formation of the black second generation is that even as the Nigerian second generation celebrate and interpret their successes in regard to their presumed cultural distinctiveness, they are racialized. They are embedded in the global racialization process of black people that continues to propagate “dehumanizing and racist representations of Africa and the people of African descent.”

●       “As they assimilate into the black middle class, the adult Nigerian second generation acknowledge that they share things in common with other middle-class blacks. It is leading to an emerging loose coalition of all middle-class blacks. While it blurs the ethnic boundaries between the groups, it does not erase the cultural differences; it only reduces the urgency to signal difference.”

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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.