Abstract
The rise in African immigrants to the US provides an opportunity to assess relations between Africans and African Americans in college. An online survey of 322 current and recently-graduated college students (including 45 Africans, 160 African Americans, and 117 whites) assessed respondents’ experiences of racism in US high schools and colleges. Semi-structured interviews of 30 students (10 African, 10 African American and 10 white students) supplemented these data. Even within a sociopolitical context of more visible racial intolerance, Black intra-racial cohesion was absent. Although more first- and second-generation Africans (73%) felt that they had been judged while living in the US compared to African Americans (34%) or whites (20%), for 70–80% of respondents, this had occurred only in high school. Despite experiencing these judgments, Africans’ identity related more to their focus on education than their race, reflected in a higher proportion who felt intense family pressure to attend college (65%) compared to African Americans (37%) and whites (39%). Interview data confirmed previous reports in the literature that African Americans lack a sense of connection to Africans, attributed to Africans’ purported sense of superiority and disregard for African Americans’ ongoing struggle to end oppression. These mixed-methods data suggest that intermingling in the college environment has not resulted in first- and second-generation Africans and African Americans sharing a common in-group, race-based identity. We discuss the implications of overlooking ethnic distinctions due to presumptions of racial homogeneity that deprive Black individuals of their uniqueness.
Highlights
Introduction(Oliphant 2017), piquing interest in their acculturation to the US
The number of African immigrants to the US has roughly doubled each decade since 1970(Oliphant 2017), piquing interest in their acculturation to the US
Within a social context of a rising number of African immigrants and more open disparagement of nonwhite outgroups, we present data from first- and second-generation Africans and African Americans that relate their experiences and perspectives to the tension between intra-racial solidarity and inter-ethnic distinctions that are critical to understanding racial dynamics in the US
Summary
(Oliphant 2017), piquing interest in their acculturation to the US This steady increase raises the question of the extent to which the 2.1 million African immigrants currently in the US identify with. Americans than promoting race-based group loyalty to demarcate “differences from and grievances toward outsiders” who are not Black Advantages of Black inter-ethnic unity are underscored by the salience of Black-White divisions in the US: “[W]hile blacks may make intra-racial distinctions based on ancestry or skin tone, the power of race as a socially defining status in. Prior explorations of Black racial and ethnic identity that are relevant to African-African American relations (e.g., Vickerman 1994, 1999; Zhou 1997) predate significant changes in the US political
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