Date: Feature Week of March 23, 2003
Topic: Black Press Business/Economic
Author: William Reed
Article ID: article_ema032303a

DIVERSITY AMONG BLACK AMERICANS
African-Americans Trail African and Caribbean Immigrants in Income, Education

The truth is out about Black Americans that speak with accents. Their numbers, incomes and social status are growing. The diversity in America's Black communities is in culture, language and national origin.

In the 1990s, America's Black population grew 10 percent to 31 million. Nearly 25 percent of the Black American population growth was because of newcomers from Africa and the Caribbean; and these populations are growing at a faster rate than that of traditional African-Americans. Blacks from Africa - sub-Saharan countries like Nigeria and Ghana and East African countries such as Ethiopia and Somalia - more than doubled their numbers in to 537,000. The number of Blacks from the Caribbean – mostly Haiti, Jamaica and Guyana - increased 63 percent to over 1.5 million.

In some major metropolitan regions these new Black groups amount to 20 percent or more of the Black population, and in addition to their political impact, are starting to add impetus to the sociological charge that the term "African-American" is actually a demographic misnomer. Currently, in Black communities you have a lot of people who describe themselves and see themselves as Black but don't necessarily see themselves as African-American.

Blacks from Africa and the Caribbean tend to be better educated, have higher income and live in more prosperous neighborhoods than African-Americans. This information comes from a report entitled: Black Diversity in Metropolitan America. It shows Caribbean and African newcomers having numerous advantages compared to African-Americans. Africans' average education level is higher than that of whites or Asians "We are used to thinking in broader racial and ethnic categories, especially when we think of Black Americans," says report author John Logan. "We may be moving into an era where distinctions based on national origins become more visible and we think of our nation as one of many minorities."

In a nation where most blacks trace their origins to slavery, immigrants and refugees from the Caribbean and Africa are adding definitions to what it means to be Black American. "They come, except for skin color, with a mentality that's very much like other immigrants, including the view that this is a place of opportunities," says Robert Hall, professor of African-American studies at Boston's Northeastern University. The homelands of many Black immigrants have histories of slavery, but they don't equate that with America's legacy of slavery, that can disconnect them from traditional Black leadership groups. Black immigrants, like any other immigrant, tend to cling to national identities at first, and only gradually embrace racial identities.

During the 1980's and 1990s about one in three African Americans fled to the suburbs. However, they quickly discovered that the suburbs they moved into soon looked like the all- Black neighborhoods they�d left. In every major metropolitan area the majority of Black suburbanites were re-segregated. Like African-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans and Africans are highly segregated from whites. But, they don�t share the same neighborhoods as other Blacks. Segregation among Black ethnic groups reflects important social differences between them. In the metropolitan areas where they live in large numbers, Africans tend to live in neighborhoods with higher median income and education levels than African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, while Afro-Caribbeans tend to live in neighborhoods with more homeowners than either African-Americans or Africans.

Afro-Caribbeans are heavily concentrated on the East Coast. Six out of ten live in the New York, Miami, and Fort Lauderdale metropolitan regions. Half of Haitians are in Miami; they�re well represented in New York and Fort Lauderdale but outnumbered by Jamaicans. America's African population is much more geographically dispersed. Their largest numbers are in Washington, New York, Atlanta, Minneapolis and Los Angeles.

XXX

© 2000-2003 William Reed - www.BlackPressInternational.com