<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>" 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. "</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I agree with NSM and I wish I could explain my reasoning as well.</p>
<p>Wow (taking hat off to NSM). Same here.</p>
<p>I mean cmon, yall (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. Yall know this is true. And it doesnt 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 ones own home.</p>
<p>Now, I dont 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. Weve 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 cant even fathom, let alone experience. Im 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 cant 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.</p>
<p>Affirmative Action (AA) is trying to deal with this particular problem. Lets 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.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Black students currently also are hurt by this kind of racism:
"GAINESVILLE, Fla. Whats 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.
DaQuan 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." <a href="http://news.ufl.edu/2005/05/11/names/%5B/url%5D">http://news.ufl.edu/2005/05/11/names/</a></p>
<p>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? </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 elses. 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. Whats 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 dont carry the psychological baggage inherited from the historic mistreatment of native-born blacks, lets toss some kudos their way for the hard work theyve put in to be as successful as they have been. Their parents may have provided them the right environment for success, but theyre still the ones who buckle down and do what it takes to succeed.</p>
<p>"Colleges have done a pretty good job of parsing these issues in the admission decision process. "</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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. ...</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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. "</p>
<p>"While children of immigrant parents dont carry the psychological baggage inherited from the historic mistreatment of native-born blacks, lets toss some kudos their way for the hard work theyve put in to be as successful as they have been. "</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>Virtually by definition, and with extremely rare exceptions, ALL American-born African-Americans are "black mixed with something else."</p>
<p>I still do not get the point of any of this. It all amounts to nothing but utterly idle rethoric. </p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I still do not get the point of any of this. It all amounts to nothing but utterly idle rethoric.</p>
<p>Not to me. I have for years been convinced of many of the same things that are being said here, so convinced I decided to do something about it to save my own kids. But I didnt have a firm way to argue my beliefs. I am almost shaking over here reading some of NSMs posts because they are confirming what I have always felt deep down but could not ever really support.</p>
<p>I wish we could get more AA families involved in the schools
we have a ton of white and other minority families involved- but AA families is much more difficult.
The last school I was involved with, recruited an AA parent to be on the board, even though she hadn't attended PTA meetings previously, nor after the one meeting which elected her as cochair.
A lot of habits seem pretty hard to break.
My daughters high school, has three floors and the surrounding community is fond of saying it is segregated by floors.
But I am in the school almost everyday- and I don't see that.
It may have been in the past, but there are kids in all levels of classes, if you want to try, you can. My daughter who was in special education just a couple years ago, is taking an advanced placement class as a sophomore. Her sports team which has a majority of AA atheletes has an average GPA of 3.5
Yet their previous principal allowed students to hand in work on the sly, because it was not "cool" to complete an assignment.
That is ridiculous</p>
<p>NSM, it would be helpful to hear some suggestions as to what exactly you would like a place like Harvard to do in response to the issues you've raised? It would help to be specific.</p>
<p>I empathize with those African-American parents who feel the system have not benefitted their children. I must say, though, that as parent to two black children, that has not been my experience. Though they have attended suburban white schools, they have always excelled, and in fact, perform at a very high level. They are accepted by both thier black as well as white peers. In our household, we have always emphasized reading, minimized exposure to TV and homework always came first. That approach has paid off, as they are both excelling now and have good study habits. Sure, discrimination exists, and probably always will. But if we equip our children to compete, that should go a long ways toward opening up the door to opportunity and overcoming discrimination.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>The majority of African immigrants have come to the US during the 1990s. The America that they know lacks the blatant discrimination that was the heritage the African Americans whose recent ancestors were US-born.</p>
<p>Consequently, the African immigrants and their children can believe in the US as the promised land. </p>
<p>In addition, the African immigrants have on the whole a much higher level of education than do American-born blacks (and for that matter, white Americans and Asian immigrants!). This allows them to get professional opportunities, housing opportunities and educational opportunities for their children that are not available to a large proportion of American-born blacks.</p>
<p>It's important to keep in mind that only healthy, well off or well connected, aggressive and ambitious people are in general emigrating here from Africa. Those Africans are the cream of the crop of Africa, which is the poorest continent.</p>
<p>For instance, the bulk of African immigrants in the US are from Nigeria. A large proportion of them are college educated and even have doctorates. Meanwhile, the US State Department says that Nigeria, the most populous African country, secondary school attendance is only male 32%, female 27%. The literacy rate is: 39%-51%. </p>
<p>I also have read that Nigerian universities have spaces for only 20% of the students who are eligible to go to college. One can only imagine the level of intelligence and aggression that is needed for students to get accepted into college there.</p>
<p>To compare the African immigrants' perspectives about the US and its opportunities to the perspectives of average African American in this country would be like comparing the perspectives of doctors in Beverly Hills to residents of South Bronx.</p>
<p>In general that may be true, but in working with the reading tutor program, I have been working with children from poorer countries inclduing Sudanese refugees.
But just as earlier european immigrants were pretty motivated to come to america by poverty, hunger, war and the promise of a better place, the african immigrants are pretty motivated as well.
These kids are pretty amazing to work with, obviously great trauma to come here, but determined. Very determined.</p>
<p>
Precisely!!</p>
<p>I suspect that Theodore Cross was motivated by the same temperament as Herbert Apktheker and other white scholars of the Black Experience; an impassionate, objective but deliberate desire to discover the truth.</p>
<p>dabost,
By any chance do you have girls?
Virtually everyone I know who is African American, nonimmigrant, and has sons who are not biracial, has had some major difficulty with their sons' academics. African American girls, though, are doing comparatively well, and often are near the top of their class even in demanding schools.</p>
<p>The youths whom I am referring to have parents who have masters and doctorates, who are college professors or other professionals, are avid readers, and volunteered and did other things to support their kids' education. Many of these parents also were involved in doing volunteer work to support the education of kids in general.</p>
<p>The boys in general underperformed greatly in high school (but tended to be regarded by teachers and administrators as successes since they were not held back, and also were rare black males taking AP and similar courses), dropped out of college or refused to go to college despite having parents willing to fund their education, and having colleges delighted to accept them (even sometimes offering lavish merit aid).</p>
<p>To demonstrate the severity of the problem, here are some stats from 2005 research by the Harvard Civil Rights Project. These stats refer to high school graduation rates. </p>
<p>"In this report, we give special attention to five southern states -- Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina. These states report graduation rates in 2002 ranging from a high of 85% in North Carolina to a low of 61.8% in Georgia....</p>
<p>In keeping with the national trend, graduation rates for Black and Latino students in these five states are substantially lower still. In Georgia, which has a substantial and growing Latino population, the rates for Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans were all below 50%. </p>
<p>"Black, Native American and Latino males fared worst of all. Across the Southern region, the graduation rate for Black males averages only 47.4%, and 50.9% for Latinos. In only one of the five special focus statesLouisianadid more than half (51.1%) of Black males graduate on time. In Florida, Black males had the lowest graduation rate out of the five states, a mere 38.3%. Of the two states where data on Native Americans males is available, North Carolina had a graduation rate of just 31.7%. "</p>
<p>"Not to me. I have for years been convinced of many of the same things that are being said here, so convinced I decided to do something about it to save my own kids."</p>
<p>Saving of ... what? Saving from the fact that we should know the geographical distribution and origin of blacks in higher education? Did Lani Guinier cared to research the distribution of Asians or Hispanics? Did she compare the various ethnic groups? </p>
<p>I called this discussion idle rethoric because I have yet to see any articulation of WHY this is a problem, and obviously no proposals or solutions that address the real issues.</p>