Did you know that between 1790 and 1965 black people could not legally enter the United States? Was news to me too! Only after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 did that change. Yet, in polls and census stats people are often lumped together in groups by racial markers.
Such stereotypes happen to everyone, and not always on the basis of race. I am regularly amazed at comments that lump all Americans or all Aucklanders or all Asians in one group and then describe them in simple, and simply impossible, terms.
The whole American slagging thing has occurred three nights in a row on Newstalk ZB.
Why do I listen? Cause Radio Live is worse!
Our common bonds, and differences go so much deeper, and are more significant, than our skin or our accent. While appreciating that statisticians have to simplify and group so as to make sense, and charts, a black man of slave origin living in Atlanta may have little in common with a 2nd generation Jamaican living in New Jersey.
I had an African-American friend from Cincinnati visit me in Zimbabwe. He was extremely uncomfortable when the locals assumed he spoke their language. A Nigerian student recently told me of a visit to her family in Philadelphia.
How does all that fit the stats?
"Today, West Indian immigrants at times distance themselves from native-born African-Americans, emphasizing their nationality or ethnicity, not their "Africanness."
Ira Berlin, during a conversation with black immigrants at a radio station after an interview on slavery, realised there was a vast difference in immigrants then and recently. So he's written about it in a history book.
Since 1965, the number of black immigrants has become so large—greater even than the total number of Africans forcibly imported during the slave trade—that they account for one-quarter of the growth in the African-American population. In the early 21st century, fully 10 percent of all black Americans are either immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Slate's review says, "In The Making of African America, Ira Berlin aims to reformulate the grand arc of African-American history in a way that is true to the past and at the same time includes this newest generation of immigrants."
Black immigrants from all over the world, people with no legacy of enslavement or forced migration, are remaking American society today; at the same time, they recapitulate the struggles of previous generations of blacks who entered or moved around within the United States and had to make a life for themselves in a new home that might or might not have been of their own choosing.
Jacqueline Jones uses some mighty big words to describe Berlin's attempt to illustrate the tension; the pros and cons, the conflict and identity struggle inherent in the immigration process.
Onto this new history, Berlin overlays a "contrapuntal narrative" based on the interplay between what the scholar Paul Gilroy calls "routes and roots"—the tension between a peripatetic existence on the one hand and an attachment to home on the other.
Read Black Like Whom? In search of a shareable African-American history,
by Jacqueline Jones, in its entirety on Slate.
In another book that examines immigration in just one state, New Faces at the Crossroads presents the positive impact of immigration in Indiana.
With issues of immigration threatening to become the community and individual moral challenge that civil rights and Black Freedom were in the 1960s, New Faces at the Crossroads could not be more timely.
At first glance, a large format "coffee-table" book, New Faces uses visuals and text to present a great deal of information and to open up the mind of readers to the big picture of immigration. From the haunting endpapers of a world map in shadowy black with countries of origin in red to the thirty beautifully reproduced, full-page portraits, to the small map with each portrait, visual images pull the reader in and expand the reader's consciousness. The great diversity of images by race, ethnic group, country of origin, sex, age, and job/profession open the reader's mind.
Brian Payne of the Central Indiana Community Foundation, writes of, "The energy and innovation that come from different ethnic experiences".
The why of people movements often determines much in the how and the where of their journey and destination. The whole process influences their identity, the legacy future generations receive, and the degree of assimilation or integration they seek or accept.
At the start of the 21st Century, one in every 35 people is an international migrant.
If they all lived in the same place, it would be the world's fifth-largest country. BBC
Without all the different cultural festivals and restaurants, Auckland, Indianapolis, Brisbane, Bloomington, Seattle and Cincinnati would be insipid; lacking in art, music, drama, food, and awareness of the diversity that sometimes makes us more aware of who we are, whatever that means.
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