% Immigrant Blacks in US Colleges

Parents Forum
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<p>"
i totally disagree with this statement and many of your previous comments on this issue.</p>

<p>Actually, African Immigrants are the one who give support to family and friends far away in Africa. It's rare that you recieve economic support from a relative or friend in Africa for your education.
The students are usually really bright kids who don't want to waste their future in a nation ruled by corrupt govt. so they come here and work their way sometimes alone facing TONS of hardship before they enter their career. Trust me I know!</p>

<p>Are you African American? "</p>

<p>Yes. My mother was African AMerican, was the granddaugher of slaves, and the daughter of a teacher. My dad was black, an immigrant from Jamaica, and the son of a high school principal. My dad came over the US with the help of family members. After he became a dentist, he brought is siblings over.</p>

<p>What I said came from conversations with African and Caribbean immigrants who had had their way paid to the US by relatives and members of their towns in their home country. After they got an education here, yes, they were expected to give back -- big time. However, the sacrifices of their family members and hometown people were what got them here.</p>

<p>For instance, one of my friends, who is Nigerian, said his village chipped in to send him to the US because he was perceived to be the smartest young person in the village. He went to college in New England, and was too poor to even afford a winter coat. He had to wash dishes virtually fulltime in order to help support himself.</p>

<p>He told me that despite his hardships, he knew he could not fail in school. If he had not done well, he would have been such a failure that, as he put it, "I would have had to commit suicide."</p>

<p>Once he got his doctorate, however, he contributed lots of $ to his village.</p>

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<p>*"Racism Without Racists." It has been my observation that this is still a critical problem in many communities (white and black) and lies at the heart of our educational dilemma.*O
Our school district even had definitions of racism on its web site, that discussed how "traditional values" like individualism, and using only one version of standard English as a goal, was racist. Not to mention having " a future time orientation" by which I guess they mean "planning for the future"?
They also indentify whites as the agent group from which racism stems, ignoring that Asians both do better in school than white in Seattle, and often earn more money in the workforce. ( of course they may be including all those from teh Indian subcontinent that work at Microsoft)</p>

<p>My daughter attended an "alternative" public school for 6 years, where we saw teachers giving kids slack, because of their perceived difficulities in background ( sometimes their parents who had college degrees, but that was inconcievable to the teachers), the teachers didn't expect them to want to be n the challenging classes, and their parents actually had to fight with the school to make them available.
I also saw students living down to expectations, when teachers and their parents didnt' feel they were capable, they were less likely to want to try the more academic coursework, and took advantage that teachers would let them hand in work weeks late.</p>

<p>At her present school, AP and honors classes are open to all who want to try. SHe and several of her friends have been in remedial courses, and AP courses at the same time. She was the only white student in her remedial math class and made many friends who have african origins, however, I have to say that the ones who are also in the AP classes are more often than not, not "african- american", but canadian-african- Brazilian-African or immigrants from Senegal, or Eritiria.</p>

<p>It is a lot of work to be in the AP classes, and just my careful observation has been that families who resent that AP classes do not have a large percentage of African Americans in them, also seem to think that it is just too much work.
When parents don't have attendance and performance as a standard, the students aren't going to have it as a priority either.
I am not saying all students need to have 5 APs tobe working hard, but when parents ( with a college background), havent made sure that their kids have taken the classes they need to graduate, and are angry that the school didn't continually remind them what was required for graduation- I don't see that as having education as a priority. If you are a parent with a kid in public school- you have to stay on top of stuff yourself- no body is going to hold your hand whether you are white, black or purple) </p>

<p>I don't disagree that many students need support to reach high standards, thats why her school has several programs to help minority students reach them- Gear-Up, African American Scholars, AVID, but these programs, particulary the scholars, are considered to be "elitist" by certain very vocal members of the community, which may discourage more families from participating.
Instead of saying" oh this program is racist- lets get rid of it", like when she was at a school that had swimming, how about we make sure that all kids have that skill? Same with high academics, I know these kids are smart enough, how about we have high standards for them so they can know it too?</p>

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<p>As I have mentioned every time this subject of minority admissions have come up, I have no problem with URM admissions incentives as long as they are restricted to URM's from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. These students as well as socially disadvantaged, first generation non-URM students deserve considration for adversities overcome. I do not see the social justice/policy of giving the son of a Bill Cosby an advantage over a white student of a displace factory worker from Flint, Mi.</p>

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<p>Well, I can, and in several ways. First of all, it is a huge plus for WHITE folks to see the examples of well-to-do, academically talented non-white students. Many, if most, will never have met any such students in their lives (and may never do so again.)</p>

<p>Secondly, it is a major plus for other, poorer minority students to have examples of such students (and families) within the student body. They may never have met any either.</p>

<p>Thirdly, well-to-do minority students may, in some instances, be better able to articulate the ongoing day-to-day racism that they and their families have to overcome. They enrich the classroom and the campus in a way that well-to-do white students never could.</p>

<p>Let's remember that modern private college and unis for the most part were created for full-paying white customers. Colleges don't admit other students simply out of the goodness of their hearts, or as some kind of reparation, but because it enhances the educational value of the institution for ALL students, starting with their traditional customer base.</p>

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<p>I want to say, that I don't have a problem with affirmative action- however, I would also like to see it expanded to include "white- of whatever nationality- including Hispanic" students who are low income, particulary if they are first generation college.</p>

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<p>Well put, mini. And in any event, Bill Cosby's son would be a development admit.</p>

<p>Ultima, while I am certainly aware that there are, sadly, African Americans who harbor negative views towards Africa and African immigrants, I am also aware of many other African Americans who embrace Africa and all things African from a very sentimental and idealized perspective. I don't know how many middle-class African American homes you've been in, but many proudly display African art. Certainly the reception that former South African President Nelson Mandela received in African American communities throughout the United States would suggest that these communities do not "despise" Africans for any reason, let alone the reasons you describe. Ditto the warm fraternal views held toward Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah (who attracted thousands of African Americans to Ghana, including WEB DuBois and Maya Angelou) and Haile Selaisse in earlier generations. They were and are men and countries that most African Americans were and are intensely proud of.</p>

<p>I've traveled extensively in Africa and the influence of African American culture is on display everywhere (music, hair styles, couture, idiomatic expressions). If America today is open to enterprising Africans, it is because of the struggles of African Americans to make it so. Prior to the civil rights revolution, that would not have been the case. </p>

<p>Africans would be well served to learn that their ability to exert influence on US policy is critically related to their ability to strengthen the pan-African feelings of African Americans. US policy toward Israel, Cuba or Greece is clearly tied to the influence of US Jews, Cuban Americans and Greek Americans, respectively, in this country. Likewise, African Americans must appreciate that until the world sees Africa through new eyes and until Africa rises from its knees, people of African descent everywhere will be judged as less than they truly are.</p>

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<p>I missed this thread earlier. What a marvelous discussion--positively the best thread on race I've ever read on CC. Some of the writing is breathtaking....Dross, NSM, poet, sybbie, dab and others. I've loved reading about the intellectual journeys--journeys taken back and forth--between personal reflections and larger civic outcomes and possibilities.</p>

<p>If the easy comaraderie I see among my sons and their friends is any indicator, then, by and large, the bitter legacy of the past is evaporating with each integrated generation. Before reading this thread, it hadn't occured to me that AfAms gave up a measure of cultural respect for education as part of the bargain for desegregation and civil rights.</p>

<p>I'd love to be able to tell Dross to drop his guard, but I don't dare. Circa 2006, the mainly white upper middle to upper levels of American society seem obsessed with gaining that last inch for themselves and theirs--even though they might be sitting on the top of the pyramid already. CC is one by-product of that super competitiveness. Imagine such a thing as CC in the 1960's! Keen attention serves you well in an environment like the current one. Stay keen would be my advice.</p>

<p>For what it's worth, I think it's too early to toss out Affirmative Action initiatives. It is a worthy experiment, meant to address the crimes of the past--crimes which cause individuals the pain so vividly described in the posts above. Though it has flaws and hardly stands up to the withering competitve atmosphere of 2006, I hope it continues for another fifty years, two more generations.</p>

<p>Like mini, I think it is good for society to see and come to know high-achieving African Americans. How they got there be damned.</p>

<p>For example, I'm a Condi Rice fan even though I dislike her politics--and her boss. I can't help myself, I'm rooting for her to pull out some miracles in the latest crisis. Would Condi have garnered her credentials at Stanford without affirmative action? Doubtful. I'm glad Stanford gave her a boost.</p>

<p>I'm even glad the Jebbies gave Clarence Thomas a boost even though there's nothing about the man that I admire. </p>

<p>Why the laws of pure meritocracy are applied to Affirmative Action when they are hardly applied anywhere else is disingenuous thinking and a smokescreen for latent racism, in my opinion. My family emigrated to the US in 1642. We've had dozens of generations of middle to upper class successes--many of which were built on the back on non-meritocratic foundations; ie who you know and what you know because of who you know. Are you tempted to sue me when you find out that I have a huge stack of non-meritocratic options at my fingertips? No. You might pound sand, but you wouldn't turn to the courts for goodness sakes. </p>

<p>I don't see the problem in offering slightly non-meritocratic funding to a group that deserves it and needs it. If the experiment works and the funding and hiring accelerates the build-up of meritocratic and non-meritocratic assets for AfAms, then all the better for all of us.</p>

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<p>I appreciate your sentiments Cheers, but I need to be very critical of Thomas and Rice (not to get away from the post, LOL).</p>

<p>My distaste for these two people stems from their hypocrisy about Affirmative Action, not their stated ideology.</p>

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<p>Oh, I don’t know if they are being hypocritical. Affirmative Action is a real pickle of an issue. There are legitimate points on both sides of it that could easily attract one’s support at varying times in one’s life. I support Affirmative Action, but even I can see why it ought not exist. And if I can ever see Thomas's and Connerly's point-of-view, and find their position more compelling than my own, I am gonna ditch my view as if it was last month's trash.</p>

<p>I think guys like Thomas and Connerly have a valid role to play in the struggle over this issue. I want to win it, of course, but not at the expense of public consensus and reason. I think reason is on my side of the issue, though it seems to sit there so precariously I wonder if maybe I am just seeing things. People like Connerly and Thomas help keep people like me in check. They make me evaluate whether I really am seeing the truth. They also ensure our ideas and willingness to experiment don’t get out of hand. I personally am glad we have extreme disagreement within the black community on this issue. I welcome it, and I applaud Thomas and Connerly, and others like them, for being such effective and worthy adversaries. Were they pushovers, having no genuine support for their views, I would question their integrity.</p>

<p>We blacks would experience a nice little surge forward if we would make one "small" change in the way we do things. I think we need to allow ourselves freedom to take positions that challenge the status quo. We have just GOT to get to this place. It is a healthy sign when blacks passionately and rationally argue against programs others commonly assume are helpful. It means these blacks are confident enough in the power of blacks in general, to rise unaided above our history. I think it also means these guys love what they think is good and true. You just gotta respect that. It could very well be that these people, who believe as they do so fervently that they are willing to incur the bitter rejection of most of their race, are right.</p>

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<p>Hey Drosselmeier, where have you been? If ever there was a voice of reason, humility, compassion, and clearheadedness on these boards, yours is it. Your posts always make me sit back and think. I think it's important for everyone to do that, especially when he/she assumes themselves to be right.</p>

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<p>Dross, I dislike Thomas,' Rice's and Connerly's hypocrisy, not their opinions on AA per se.</p>

<p>Thomas was admitted to Holy Cross College by means of an AA program. He did well in college and truly earned a spot at Yale Law School. But he got fast-forwarded in by leadership of the R party because of his race.</p>

<p>Rice is clearly talented, but her speech in which she claimed to have 'done it on my own" at the 2000 R convention was nonsense. How does a former music major from U of Denver rise to provost at Stanford so fast? I don't see many U of Denver graduates clerking at the U.S. Supreme Court, regardless of the quality of that institution.</p>

<p>Connerly clearly had/has an axe to grind. All that vitriol from a guy who was an insider in the Pete Wilson administration and whose businesses benefited from set-aside procurement contracts from the state of California. Plus, Connerly turned the AA debate in California into a nasty and disheartening battle. Were obviously unqualified Black students being admitted to UC-Berkely? That's what he said over and over again. </p>

<p>For honest talk about AA and other matters of race, I'd prefer to hear John McWhorter or Prof. William Junius Wilson, or even Walter Williams. By no means are African Americans of one mind.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
For instance, one of my friends, who is Nigerian, said his village chipped in to send him to the US because he was perceived to be the smartest young person in the village. He went to college in New England, and was too poor to even afford a winter coat. He had to wash dishes virtually fulltime in order to help support himself.</p>

<p>He told me that despite his hardships, he knew he could not fail in school. If he had not done well, he would have been such a failure that, as he put it, "I would have had to commit suicide."</p>

<p>Once he got his doctorate, however, he contributed lots of $ to his village.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>so in other words, the village sponsored his coming to the united states but he had to go through hardship to survive on his own once he got here!
That's the situation of many immigrants. people help them to get here but once they get here, they're on their own. No support from outside of the country.
and even it's not even about payback. whether your family helped you or not, you're still required to send them money almost every month.</p>

<p>Whatever the case, it's good to know that you know a lot about this topic. and other threads i see you active in.</p>

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<p>LakeWashington:</p>

<p>How do we know Thomas and Rice benefited from AA? We might speculate about it, but I am not sure we know this for sure. Also, they likely had no control over whether they would personally receive a benefit from AA. They may have been personally against it, but still received the benefit. I don’t think we can really support a case of outright hypocrisy even if we assume they benefited from AA. I think despite receiving the AA benefit, they still retained a valid freedom to reject the program especially if they found AA having a general effect upon other people’s lives that differed from the effect upon their own lives.</p>

<p>Whether we agree or disagree with them, I think as long as these folks are willing to support a point of view on this issue, they ought to be allowed to do so without incurring hatred from us. We ought not call them “Uncle Toms” and “House Nigger” and all this ugly stuff they are getting from us. I can’t readily accept that Connerly suddenly turned hostile to blacks when I have seen and felt for myself just how nasty we can be to each other. I am pretty convinced this cat took some serious and invalid heat just for sharing his view. If he was nasty in California, it could easily have been that he had internalized some of that heat and was sending a little of it back at us. I am just not pleased at all by how we are treating Clarence Thomas. I mean, I don’t like the guy’s politics in the least. But I think a lot of us have been just downright mean to this guy and that there is no excuse for it. I have no doubt that Bush pushed him on us because he is black. But c’mon. Plenty of white guys have sat on that same court, and mostly because they were white. I think Bush’s main reason for selecting Thomas wasn’t race at all. He selected the guy because of his views. That he is black was a bonus because, I suspect he thought the Democrats would be afraid to go after Thomas (boy was he wrong). Anyway, I guess what I am trying to say is that we ought to hammer the view – not the man.</p>

<p>I have been meaning to get John McWhorter’s stuff. His name has been popping up a few times recently.</p>

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<p>Hey, thanks poetsheart. I’ve been around here and there. I gotta say, if you are looking for a real voice of reason, take a look in the mirror.</p>

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<p>I'm not sure that Thomas didn't acknowledge the benefit AA played in his career. He simply decided the benefit wasn't worth the perceived damage. Why insist that he support the policy out of gratitude? That's like saying W3 should support a policy of draft dodging. He certainly benefitted from his draft dodging experience.</p>

<p>I am sure that Condi Rice has acknowledged the boost she got from Stanford and supports AA--although she hasn't dared wave that flag in W3's face.</p>

<p>
[quote]
"My own personal view is that there are circumstances in which it is necessary to use race as a factor among many factors in diversifying a college class," she told the network "And so I've been a supporter of affirmative action that is not quota based and that does not seek to make race the only factor, but that considers race as one of many factors."

[/quote]
</p>

<p>
[quote]
Rice said she had benefited from affirmative action during her career at Stanford University.

[/quote]
</p>

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<p>…</p>

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<p>I knew this would occur. The top colleges will start to see foreign blacks as an ORM and will try to decrease the amount they accept. Have you noticed in the last few years they added a subdivision of the black category into US/Black American, African, and Caribbean/West Indian on college applications? They even have Patois listed as a separate language when it’s just a dialect of English. Many black immigrants take pride in their ethnicity and will check those appropriate boxes not knowing that in this day and age, it will hurt rather than help them. I am a product of an Black American parent, and African parent, but culturally I definitely identify as Black American first. On my common app, I only checked the American box because I knew something was shady about them now separating blacks</p>

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<p>^^ I see this as a pro and a con. </p>

<p>Pro: Colleges can now distinguish who are the descendants of American-born slaves and who are recent immigrants (don’t have the legacy of institutional racism). </p>

<p>Con: Colleges must be careful that they don’t exclusively shut out non-AA students.</p>

<p>When I was went to college, I was amazed to see the proportion of Africans/West Indians on campus to African American students. There is a definite need for more AAs. </p>

<p>LShanti, you may disagree with me, but I have recognized over the years that black people are not a monolithic race. Based on the region we come from, we have different traditions, interests, and experiences. </p>

<p>Let’s not even mention the tensions between the groups (Africans and West Indians who feel they are better than African Americans).</p>

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<p>Don’t get your knickers in a bunch, Lshanti. There are very valid reasons for employing distinctions [in admissions criteria] to African-Americans, i.e. the progeny of enslaved Africans on mainland North America. And that’s the point; the cultural history and consequences of the Colored, Negro, Black, African-American experience in AMERICA. Not better or worse than another group’s experience; just distinct.</p>