The other day I was helping somebody flip over a boat he was building so he could work on the bottom. One of the other folks helping was a black guy who had his young son with him. I was a bit surprised to see him as we’re talking about some middle-class white surbubanites that don’t gain any hipster cred from having minority friends and would be unlikely to have such friends. It all made sense when I heard his accent and name, indicating that he was an immigrant rather than an African-American (his darker-than-usual skin tone was an initial indicator, but not as sure). That did not seem as improbable and so would be less surprising. Think about that for a second. African-Americans make up about 10% of the population. African immigrants likely make up a tiny portion. Those odds on the surface should reverse the surprise I would actually experience. Those odds overlook the complicating factor that all the African immigrants I’ve encountered are basically like Mormons. I got to thinking why it is they seem more compatible as friends than the average African-American. One obvious possibility is that there are very strong selection effects on immigrants from Africa. Only the most educated bourgeious types that can deal with a modern bureaucracy like the one that oversees immigration get let in and so they are very unrepresentative of their countrymen (I should also add that I’ve disproportionately encountered immigrants from a few African countries like Ghana). Another is that in America there is a history of conflict between The Man and blacks that results in a culture that explicitly rejects the ways of the dominant middle class. Right now I’d place more importance on the selection effect but I’d like to hear the thoughts of others.
September 28, 2008
September 28, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Cultural effect. It takes three generations to revert to the cultural norm. Children of immigrants are halfsies, grandchildren are fully immersed and ungrateful. That guy’s grandchildren will be raving about oppression and about how whitey’s the devil.
September 29, 2008 at 7:47 am
Perhaps, but that would work with either possibility I gave.
September 29, 2008 at 9:06 am
There’s also the point that actual Africans who immigrate wanted to connect to the dominant culture present and actively desired to be here. They chose to depart from the cultural groups they belonged to and join a new one.
African-Americans (or blacks, or whatever) have an established cultural group to belong to already, one that isn’t mainstream.
In terms of belonging to subcultures, then, established AAs are more like the people who stayed in Africa than the people who left to come here.
September 29, 2008 at 11:31 am
One must differentiate between the classes of African coming in, of course.
There are the poor, “refugee” classes who cling to their religion and traditions, to a certain extent.
Somali women with their burkas in Georgia and Minnesota, for example.
Then, there are the upper-class “Obama”-type of highly-intelligent African who has only contempt for his “slave” cousins. They speak excellent English, and write better poetry as well (John Dolan did an article on this, at the old Exile)
September 29, 2008 at 5:29 pm
AAs are more like the people who stayed in Africa than the people who left to come here
I once heard the theory that Europeans were more resistant to neo-liberalism than Americans because they’re the ones who stayed behind.
I’ve never met any Somalians. I moved from Minnesota to Georgia in 92 and from Georgia to Illinois in 96, so maybe I missed out on them.
September 30, 2008 at 4:50 am
The Somalis in Georgia are in Clarkston, a suburb of Atlanta, near Decatur. They aren’t really integrating into the white, middle class/working class mold, nor into the black urban mold. They’re sticking with being Somalis.
A lot of them have since moved to Maine to take advantage of the more generous welfare benefits there. I suspect they aren’t integrating into the lobster fisherman mold either.
September 30, 2008 at 10:41 am
We’ll see if we end up repeating France’s errors (most likely).
September 30, 2008 at 11:37 am
Elaborate on France.
September 30, 2008 at 3:37 pm
IIRC they imported a whole lot of ‘guest workers’ from non-European countries, then failed to integrate them culturally while stuffing them into high-rise projects that became ghettos.
Thus, youth rioting, property destruction, etc.
September 30, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Could’ve been worse. The French might actually have integrated them.
October 1, 2008 at 11:16 am
Steve Sailer argues that the French actually followed the neo-cons advice about having a “proposition nation” opposed to divisive multiculturalism, with things like the headscarf ban in schools and the trumpeting of French Republican ideals.
October 2, 2008 at 10:18 am
I cannot think of a worse way to persuade women to give up headscarves than to make them illegal. That’s almost guaranteed to make them identify further with the practice and resent the system.
October 11, 2008 at 4:03 am
Melendwyr,
excellent insight.
I’m not sure African immigrants will regress to the black mean (if anything, they’d be more likely to regress to the white mean, unless m’s implication is that if you put a white person’s brain in a black person’s phenotype, that white person would start ” raving about oppression and about how whitey’s the devil.”)
October 11, 2008 at 10:32 am
I’ve heard some people say that West Indians in America after the first few generations become more like af-ams. What I find more interesting is the half-black half-whites raised by whites that come to identify strongly as black, “more Catholic than the Pope” being a nice phrase. Steve Sailer blegs for examples here and Glenn Loury gives one from his youth here.