% Immigrant Blacks in US Colleges

[Northstarmom]

I am not saying that every African immigrant is doing fine. I am saying that as a group, they are probably the most highly educated immigrant group in this country and therefore do not need the benefit of affirmative action to get opportunities. They are disproportionately being accepted to elite colleges, scoring high on the SATs and going to medical and other professional schools. This is true even of those struggling to make ends meet.

Also, some of those who are struggling making ends meet in jobs like being cab drivers actually are professional educated but have to work blue collar jobs because they aren't able to get licensed in their professions in this country.

They may not be able to give their kids much money, but they are able to oversee their kids education and provide a home environment that allows their kids to flourish more intellectually than, for instance, African American kids whose parents may be high school drop-outs or functionally illiterate graduates of substandards high schools.

African immigrants and their offspring are doing a fine job of getting to college and professional schools, and I see no evidence that they need any kind of additional boost any more than more work needs to be done to boost the numbers of well heeled whites or representatives of most Asian cultures who are in elite colleges and professional schools.

The group that does need the tip and that does need to be recruited are US born black Americans who aren't biracial and don't have immigrant parents.

Those are African Americans who are underrepresented in college and in professional schools. Those also are the largest proportion of black Americans. And in this group of African Americans, the group most disadvantaged are the low income ones who also are likely to have had weak secondary and elementary schools and to have lacked enrichment opportunities and parents with a sophisticated knowledge of education.

Due to their weak public school educations, many highly capable native born African Americans do not have the scores to get into elite colleges even though they may be bright enough to be able to handle the academics there. They also are not as likely as are the offspring of immigrant Africans to get from home the intellectual tools that would help them do well on the tests and supplement their curriculum so as to boost their scores and help them get into top colleges.

If one's parent is educated as an engineer, a physician or holds a doctorate (as is the case of many offspring of African immigrants), one is going to get things at home ranging from language skills (many of the African immigrants are Nigerian, and speak excellent English) to knowing about enrichment activities -- that will help one be on track for elite colleges and professional schools.

"According to the United States Bureau of Census, migrants born in Africa have the highest level of educational attainment in the United States when compared to other migrant groups like Asians, Europeans and Latin Americans.

Census figures for 2000 show that 49.3 percent of African migrants in the! 25 years and over age bracket have a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to Europeans, 32.9 percent, Asians, 44.9 percent and Central Americans, 5.5 percent and South Americans 25 percent (Bureau of Census, 2000).

This represents an increase from 1997 when 48.9 percent of African migrants in the 25 years and over age bracket have a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to Europeans, 28.7 percent, Asians, 44.6 percent and Latin Americans, 5.6 percent (Bureau of Census, 1997). ...

" The fact that 49 percent of African immigrants have college degrees while only 14 percent of African Americans graduate from college adds a class dimension to the problem. The Bureau of Census reports, for instance, that the median household income of African immigrants is $30,907 compared to $19,533 for Black Americans (Bureau of Census, 1997)...."
http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/468.html

[LakeWashington]

Northstarmom, the only disagreement I have with your perspective is that you generalized a bit about the historic perception of education in the Black experience. One needs to keenly and distinctly look at the experience of southern Blacks in America. Yes, overall the message that American society pressed upon the its Black citizens was that they shouldn't bother with anything beyond a rudimentary education. But just as many 19th century slaves secretly passed along the skill of reading and writing whenever they found the chance to do it, contemporary southern blacks, say post-1920, who chose to stay in the south kept reinforcing the goal of education. Northern indifference about conditions in northern ghettoes restricted student achievement, but it is quite amazing how the the folks struggling in the segregated south kept their eye on enhancing educational opportunities for their children, despite "massive resistance." I think we downplay the educational achievement of Black pupils of immediate southern heritage because so many families left for the north. But many stayed, got their children educated once legal Jim Crow was eliminated, and achieved much success. Not every successful Black resident of Houston, Dallas, Birmingham, Memphis, Nashville and Atlanta are from north of Mason's and Dixon's Line or are the children of Black immigrants.

[xiggi]

NSM, if all of that were true, I still do not get how it would benefit anyone to highlight the differences. I said "were" true, because the evidence is flimsy at best. For instance, I consider most of the JBHE to be questionable on historical basis. They are know to take quick snapshots and build up cases without separating facts and fiction. But, again, that is not even the issue!

Why we should try to reduce the number of succesful black students in higher education puzzles me!

[Northstarmom]

"I think we downplay the educational achievement of Black pupils of immediate southern heritage because so many families left for the north. But many stayed, got their children educated once legal Jim Crow was eliminated, and achieved much success. Not every successful Black resident of Houston, Dallas, Birmingham, Memphis, Nashville and Atlanta are from north of Mason's and Dixon's Line or are the children of Black immigrants.":

Of course that's true. At the same time, the southern blacks still were handicapped because the parents/grandparents had horrendous educations under the Jim Crow system which had them learning from secondhand text books (that incidentally sometimes seemed to deliberately contain wrong information) and having a much shorter school year than did white students.

Unless they chose to leave the South in order to get higher education, they were relegated to historically black colleges, which lacked resources because the public universities were disproportionately underfunded and the private universities were struggling because the lacked a support base of well off alum, and also had a hard time getting grants.

The impact of these inequities still is being experienced by African American families in the South.

The point of highlighting the differences is to make sure that educational programs including college recruitment ones and enrichment programs designed for disadvantaged blacks are including the black students that are most in need of recruitment, enrichment and admissions boosts due to being disadvantaged because of the legacy of racism. IMO it's fine to accept and provide opportunities to immigrant Africans and their offspring on their merits.

Meanwhile, I have been very impressed by the information and research in the Journal of Blacks and Higher Education, which I have found to be the best source of information about blacks and education. Indeed, it tends to be the only publication where one easily can find detailed information that includes information about blacks and performance on the SAT, APs, black students' performance in certain college majors, the numbers of blacks getting doctorates in the hard sciences, etc.

Everything that I have seen in the Journal is that its small staff must devote a lot of time analyzing and obtaining statistics that are very hard to get. The editor and publisher, Theodore Cross, is white, and I have always wondered what inspired him to devote his life to doing this hard, and often unappreciated work.

[TutuTaxi]

I agree with NSM and I wish I could explain my reasoning as well. How AAs view education is contingent on our upbringing and that of our parents. My SIL was born in Chicago but her parents were Jamaican immigrants. Her views on education and life in general are different from most AAs I know. She complains that we limit our expectations, always assuming something or someone is going to prevent us from succeeding.

At my SIL’s dad’s funeral I heard how he came to America in his twenties with only a couple of dollars, lived with another Jamaican family, worked hard, started his own business, and became wealthy. I remember thinking about my dad in his twenties – joined the army and was sent to the Pacific Theatre. While there he became a sergeant. He and his men (all black) were placed in the front while the white soldiers followed. Of course this maneuver didn’t fool the Japanese who waited until after the black soldiers had passed before they started shooting. The US Army was then forced to integrate the fighting units. After he returned from the war, soldiers were offered jobs with the USPS – but in Chicago, neighborhood postal jobs (even in black neighborhoods) were reserved for the returning white soldiers. The black soldiers had to take jobs at the downtown station, requiring hours on public transportation to get to and from work. My reason for telling these two stories is an attempt to explain why my SIL and I view America and it’s opportunities for our children differently.

[catherine]

Colleges want URMs not just for affirmative action but to have a balanced class. Just as they don't want all women or all whites or all kids from NY, they want blacks, regardless of where they are from.
The fact that these blakcs may be disproportionately immigrants is no surprise - their parents are more likely to be educated.
The fact that so few American blacks - especially black men - are in college is just another example of how difficult it is for blacks born poor in this country to make it.

[dabost]

I would think that colleges interested in increasing their numbers of blacks will pull from whatever qualified black pool they have, be they African or Carribbean immigrants, or African-Americans. Not every black admitted to a college such as HYPS are products of AA. Some truly do qualify based on the strength of their applications, including high GPAs and SATs. Perhaps if the numbers of qualified blacks were higher, colleges would have the luxury of preferring American-born blacks to immigrants. However, the numbers are just not large enough to justify this.

By the way, what about chilren of middle and upper class American blacks? Are they represented at top colleges at the same rate as children of immigrant blacks? If they are not, surely the reason cannot be due to racism or past injusticies, as these children are from families with well-educated parents who themselves hold professional jobs. Unfortunately, what I see in my community are children of middle and upper class blacks still underperforming their peers, even those black children in good suburban school systems. Perhaps we need to focus on not only past injustices, but on work ethics and putting education first. I know this may not be politically correct to say, but I see too many "privileged" black teens still not studying as they should or putting enough emphasis on doing well in school. Yes, underprivelged black children are suffering from poor educational systems and in some cases disruptive family structures; but also, there are also black children who are just as privileged as any upper-middle class family, are are still underachieving.

[Northstarmom]

" The US Army was then forced to integrate the fighting units. After he returned from the war, soldiers were offered jobs with the USPS – but in Chicago, neighborhood postal jobs (even in black neighborhoods) were reserved for the returning white soldiers. The black soldiers had to take jobs at the downtown station, requiring hours on public transportation to get to and from work. "

This is basically what happened to my husband's dad. He is clearly a very smart man, but was not able to go beyond 10th grade because there were very few secondary opportunities for blacks in his segregated, southern community where the only job available was working in the coal mines.

He had the courage to move to another state and find industrial work, and then was drafted into the Army during WW. After serving his time, he moved to Chicago and used the GI bill to get electrician training. Due to race, however, he wasn't able to get into the union. He ended up having to take a low paying job outside of his field.

While my father-in-law encouraged his kids to go to college, which they did, I can fully understand why there are many African Americans who may think that encouraging a kid's sports talents is a better way to ensure a good life for their kid than is encouraging a kid to get As in school.

My father-in-law's experience, however, was very different from what my father, a black Jamaican experienced. My father was raised in a society in which if one got higher education, even if one was black in skin tones, one obtained white privileges.

I remember one of my Jamaican uncles telling me that in Jamaica, if one was educated, spoke standard English, had good manners, essentially, one was regarded as being "white" even if one were black as coal.

Consequently, Jamaicans who came to this country saw education as their path to success, and moved heaven and earth to get that education. Since they lacked ancestral ties here, they also tended to go to places like NYC or to Toronto, where they weren't as hobbled by racial discrimination and where they also had large networks of Jamaican immigrants who could support their educational endeavors and businesses.

They also had the confidence that came from not having been raised by generations of people who had had to abide to the Jim Crow laws (such as having to get off the sidewalk if a white person approached, not being allowed to use public libraries or to even walk on the lawn of public universities that were for white people) and who also were raised in a society that literally taught that blacks are of inferior intelligence and character.

[Drosselmeier]

“I agree with NSM and I wish I could explain my reasoning as well.”

Wow (taking hat off to NSM). Same here.

I mean c’mon, y’all (ggg). American blacks reading this know this woman is telling the truth. Probably 100% of black southerners have seen or actually experienced withering ridicule simply because they tried to adopt standard English and learn stuff outside the traditional black box. A black guy who tries to think differently and who tries to experiment with stuff is often called a “F_G” or told he is trying to act white. Y’all know this is true. And it doesn’t take being smashed like this too many times before a black kid shuts up and then slumps back down into the black pack. It is just some seriously brutal and crippling stuff, especially when it takes place in one’s own home.

Now, I don’t want folks reading this to get upset, at least not straight out. I want you to just take a deep breath and count to ten. The phenomenon we are talking about here grows directly out of slavery and Jim Crow. We’ve gotten so crushed by history that we are recoiling from anything that looks like it comes from our oppressors. It is understandable, but it is just killing us. We are not allowing our people the freedom to express as they wish. They are now generally trapped. Oh yeah, when a black guy finally does some great thing in science or whatever, we pile on the praise. But from infancy that guy has had to slog through an awful amount of adversity that other Americans can’t even fathom, let alone experience. I’m talking about adversity that is right in his own home, coming from his own grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters and friends and neighbors. Most people just can’t overcome this sort of pressure. I am convinced that we blacks need to encourage our culture to permit freedom, real freedom. If we would do this, we would become as well-represented in the sciences, in math and everywhere else, as we are in music and sports.

Affirmative Action (AA) is trying to deal with this particular problem. Let’s forget for the moment whether it is fair and whether it actually works. The issue under discussion has to do with the purpose of the program. It is trying to address issues that have come out of American history, not African, Canadian and Caribbean history.

[Northstarmom]

"By the way, what about chilren of middle and upper class American blacks? Are they represented at top colleges at the same rate as children of immigrant blacks? If they are not, surely the reason cannot be due to racism or past injusticies, as these children are from families with well-educated parents who themselves hold professional jobs. Unfortunately, what I see in my community are children of middle and upper class blacks still underperforming their peers, even those black children in good suburban school systems."

I agree that African American parents and the African American community could do much more to encourage success in education. I also wish that the African American community would make addressing this problem a priority.

Still, part of the reason for the problems that you describe is past racial injustices. Even highly educated African American families can lack the inside knowledge about enrichment activities that can help kids get ahead. That's because when the parents were growing up, they are unlikely to have come from families that could have afforded those activities or if they could afford them, their race may have prohibited their participation.

Despite coming from educated backgrounds and living in the suburbs, the African American students still face prejudice. I know, for instance, a lot of clearly intelligent black adults who either were misdiagnosed as mentally retarded when they were children nor who had to save their own kids from being unnecesssarily put into special education classes.

One such person is a 50somethng man who was Phi Beta Kappa undergraduate and then graduated from Stanford's Medical School. It's only because his parents had the guts to fight the school system when he was misdiagnosed as having low intelligence that he became the high achieving professional that he is now. His experience, incidentally, happened in Ohio in the late 1950s. Imagine what happened to black students in more overtly racist regions.

Even now, black kids also tend to be disproportionately steered into special education programs and overlooked for gifted programs. Once I had my college students gather information about the racial composition of such programs in our city. At one school that was 99% black, the only student in the county's gifted program was white. Regardless of the overall racial composition of the schools, their special ed programs tended to have black students in the majority.

Black students currently also are hurt by this kind of racism:
"GAINESVILLE, Fla. — What’s in a name? Quite a lot for black students with exotic names who do not make the grade in school and are often overlooked by gifted programs, a new University of Florida study finds.
Da’Quan or Damarcus, for example, are more likely to score lower on reading and mathematics tests and are less likely to meet teacher expectations and be referred to gifted programs than their siblings with more common names such as Dwayne, said David Figlio, a UF economist who did the research.
“This study suggests that the names parents give their children play an important role in explaining why African-American families on average do worse because African-American families are more inclined than whites or Hispanics to give their children names that are associated with low socio-economic status,” Figlio said.
Such boys and girls suffer in terms of the quality of attention and instruction they get in the classroom because teachers expect less from children with names that sound like they were given by parents with lower education levels, and these lower expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, he said." http://news.ufl.edu/2005/05/11/names/

Anyway, that research was on names. If black student can be negatively affected by having a black name, what is the impact of having a black face?

I suspect that being black can in general lower the grades that students get on subjectively graded assignments, lower the amount of positive attention that they may get for being assertive, intelligent and creative.

I am the mother of two black sons, both of which scored exceptionally high on standardized tests (97-99th percentile on the SAT), yet had unweighted gpas of about 2.9.

Despite my kids scores, and even their coming from well educated, professional homes, well meaning teachers and people of all races would act like something was wrong with me for being alarmed at my kids' academic performance. By being simply black males who were college bound and had no criminal record, people seemed to view my sons as successes. The same people would become upset if their (black) daughters got Bs or their white kids got Bs.

I think those kind of attitudes and expectations are a reason why even middle/upper middle class black males who are African American nonimmigrant kids frequently are performing so far under their academic potential.

[Drosselmeier]

“Anyway, that research was on names. If black student can be negatively affected by having a black name, what is the impact of having a black face?”

Indeed, and what is the impact of having a black face, a black name and a black accent? All of it together makes a recipe for academic failure. There are intense pressures both in and out of vast numbers of black homes that push black American students toward low performance. When we mix all of this with fatherless black American males who desperately need affirmation, we are talking a recipe for disaster. This is why I homeschooled my kids. I just had to find some way to get them up and strong before having them subjected to all of this mess. It has is limitations, to be sure, but so far, it has worked almost miraculously.

[Zuma]

Colleges have done a pretty good job of parsing these issues in the admission decision process. The end result may not be to everyone's liking, but it think it as good as can be wished. The disturbing tone of some of this discussion is the suggestion that hard working children of immigrant parents are stealing an opportunity that should rightly be someone else’s. At Harvard, children of immigrant parents from Africa and the Caribbean have played a large part in the leadership of Harvard's Black Students Association and used their leadership roles to advance issues pertinent and helpful to all blacks regardless of origin. They are active in Harvard's outreach efforts towards the native black population and would be tickled to death to see more native blacks admitted. Elite colleges take many factors into account in the decision-making process and will not admit anyone of any national origin who, in their opinion, will not survive in the academic environment at these schools. The judgment is not perfect. What’s needed is an effort that starts at the elementary school level to prep students for success in the highly competitive game of college admissions. While children of immigrant parents don’t carry the psychological baggage inherited from the historic mistreatment of native-born blacks, let’s toss some kudos their way for the hard work they’ve put in to be as successful as they have been. Their parents may have provided them the right environment for success, but they’re still the one’s who buckle down and do what it takes to succeed.

[Northstarmom]

"Colleges have done a pretty good job of parsing these issues in the admission decision process. "

Until this current academic year, I haven't seen colleges do anything to reflect these considerations in admissions. If the colleges had been including this information as part of admissions, their black students admissions would not so disproportionately consist of immigrants, immigrants' offspring and biracial students.

"While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor [and the daughter of an immigrant black dad and white mother], and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. ...

"Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities (including theirs, as well as Yale, Columbia, Duke and the University of California at Berkeley), found that 41 percent of the black students identified themselves as immigrants, as children of immigrants or as mixed race.

Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton sociology professor who was one of the researchers, said the black students from immigrant families and the mixed-race students represented a larger proportion of the black students than that in the black population in the United States generally. Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, says that among 18- to 25-year-old blacks nationwide, about 9 percent describe themselves as of African or West Indian ancestry. "

http://www.uh.edu/ednews/2004/nytime...24harvard.html

"While children of immigrant parents don’t carry the psychological baggage inherited from the historic mistreatment of native-born blacks, let’s toss some kudos their way for the hard work they’ve put in to be as successful as they have been. "

Very true. Through hard work, many have achieved at an impressive level and are well deserving of praise and of academic rewards by admission to highly selective schools.

I also think that the African American nonimmigrant community could learn a lot from the African immigrants including about how to work as a community to support children's education.

[mini]

"My own D is bi-racial, and she knows of a number of other students at her school who are black mixed with something else."

Virtually by definition, and with extremely rare exceptions, ALL American-born African-Americans are "black mixed with something else."

[xiggi]

I still do not get the point of any of this. It all amounts to nothing but utterly idle rethoric.

Is there a smoking gun here? What should be done if there IS a problem? Is there really anyone disagreeing that blacks are under-represented in higher education? Is there anyone disagreeing that the real issues start in K-12?

So, why not devote your energy to issues that truly matter. The AA system is what it is. Why worry about what it is or was SUPPOSED to stand for. Isn't it better to worry about the reasons behind its current LACK of success. The fact that the current system might help a small number of immigrants of second-generation immigrants is trivial at best and mostly irrelevant in the overal scope of college admissions.

Maybe we ought to ascertain why immigrants come to the United States with suitcases filled with hope of a better life while the minorities who have lived here for generations seem to have lost hope eons ago.