Disintegration (20 page)

I came to read this letter because Bemnet’s father handed me a copy in exchange for a used towel.

At that time, Bemnet’s proud papa, Sentayu, was the locker-room attendant at the gym where I exercise. He picked up the dirty laundry, cleaned the sinks, made sure there was enough soap and toilet paper. His English was rudimentary, heavily accented, and somewhat improvisational, which is one reason why few of the members even tried to converse with him beyond “Good morning.” Many didn’t seem to notice him at all. Sentayu was, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

But his daughter won’t be.

With little fanfare, the United States is experiencing the biggest wave of black immigration the nation has seen since the importation of slaves was outlawed in 1808. These newcomers from Africa and the Caribbean constitute one of two distinct segments of an Emergent black America that is beginning to challenge traditional notions of what being “black” even means.

According to the Census Bureau, about 8 percent of U.S. citizens and legal residents who identify themselves as black are foreign-born—roughly one out of twelve. This figure is somewhat misleading, however, because it masks the fact that black immigration is a regional phenomenon. In much of the South, which is still home to the majority of African Americans, black immigration is negligible; not even 1 percent of black people in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, or Arkansas are foreign-born. But in the states where African and Caribbean immigrants do settle—and where black people are a smaller percentage of the overall population—the numbers give a different sense of the newcomers’ impact. In New York, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, one of every four black people is foreign-born; in Florida and Washington State, it’s one of every five.
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Well over half of these new black Americans come from the Caribbean, with the biggest contingents coming from Jamaica, Haiti, and Trinidad, but with all the islands substantially represented. In historical terms, this is no surprise. Caribbean immigrants have long played major roles in black America. Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey, the would-be Moses who tried to lead his people back to Africa, was one of the most prominent and influential black voices of the early part of the twentieth century. Everyone is familiar with the contributions of such second-generation overachievers as Colin Powell, the first black secretary of state, whose parents are from Jamaica, and Eric Holder, the first black attorney general, who is the son of immigrants from Barbados. Going back much further, many thousands of African slaves were “cured” on Caribbean islands—acclimated to the New World environment and “broken” to their new masters’ will—before being brought to America to work on the plantations. Oral history in my family says that a distant ancestor arrived, as did many other Africans, via a long-established route from Barbados to the teeming port of Charleston.

What is something of a surprise is the stunning increase in the flow of immigrants from the African continent, with the biggest national groups being Nigerians, Ethiopians, and Ghanaians. These newcomers, many of them as invisible as my friend Sentayu, defy expectations. Here is a supreme historical irony: For nearly two hundred years, Africans were kidnapped, brought here in chains, forced to work without pay, bought and sold like pieces of property, and deliberately kept untutored and illiterate for fear that knowledge would make them uncontrollable and dangerous. Today, Africans coming here voluntarily on wide-body jets are the best-educated immigrants
in the United States—better-educated than Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans, or any other regional group.

The Little Ethiopia business district in Washington’s U Street corridor is also a Little Eritrea, and the grievances between the two countries, historically one nation, have survived the journey. If you take a taxicab in the capital, see from the ID tag that your driver has a name like Ghebreselassie, and decide to make small talk by saying something nice about Ethiopia, you risk spending the rest of your ride being subjected to a stern lecture—from the Eritrean point of view—about geopolitics on the Horn of Africa.

In most U.S. metropolitan areas, Nigerians constitute by far the biggest national group of African immigrants, which makes sense because Nigeria is by far the most populous nation in black Africa. The cultural norms that dominate in most African immigrant communities are West African. In Washington, uniquely, the Ethiopians and Eritreans predominate. They provide the African immigrant community’s flavor and set its Abyssinian tone.

The restaurants, record stores, and other businesses near Howard University are the most visible manifestation of the Ethiopian presence in Washington, but actually the community is widely dispersed, living mostly in the Maryland suburbs of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Throughout American history, immigrant groups have tended to cluster around particular occupations or industries; once you would find a disproportionate number of Irish police officers, just as now you will find a disproportionate number of Korean dry cleaners. In the Washington area, Ethiopian immigrants have gravitated toward livelihoods involving automobiles.

As anyone who visits the city can see, quite a few are making
a living as taxi drivers—one of the quintessential just-off-the-boat jobs. What is not immediately apparent is that D.C. cab companies with names like Action, Alert, Ambassador, and Atlantic—and that’s just the A’s—are owned by Ethiopian immigrant entrepreneurs.
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It’s no exaggeration to say that Ethiopian immigrants are becoming Washington’s taxicab kingpins. As proof, in 2009 two Ethiopian cab-company owners were implicated in a scandal involving alleged kickbacks paid to a city official. Having the juice to be accused of pay-to-play municipal corruption is perhaps the surest sign that an immigrant community has arrived.

Ethiopian immigrants have also moved into the parking industry, although more as employees than employers. Whenever you use one of the city’s overpriced lots, it is likely that the gentleman who parks your car and the polite woman who deprives you of your money will have been born in Ethiopia.

Still, taxicabs and parking lots do not leave a particularly large footprint for such a fast-growing, highly educated immigrant group. That imprint is yet to come: It is the children of these African and Caribbean newcomers who, I am confident, will soon make their presence known. I can make that prediction because I know that there is not just one Bemnet Faris. There are many.

My first body of evidence is largely anecdotal but quite voluminous. Several years ago my wife, Avis, started a nonprofit whose mission was to funnel high-achieving African American high-school students from the Washington area into the nation’s top-ranked colleges and universities, with all the support and financial aid they needed to succeed. The first step in the process was getting the high schools to identify these students, based on a well-defined set of criteria—grade point
average, SAT or ACT scores, letters of recommendation. When the first set of applications started rolling in from students considered by their high-school principals and guidance counselors as the best of the best, nearly 40 percent were from students with surnames like Tsegaye, Olatunde, Arowojolu, Agboke, Getachew, and Diallo—identifiably African names.

This presented an obvious question. The program was clearly a form of affirmative action. But was the purpose of affirmative action to compensate the descendants of people who were enslaved and oppressed? If so, that would exclude the sons and daughters of recent immigrants. Or did affirmative action have the forward-looking purpose of fostering diversity in a society where soon there will be no racial or ethnic majority? If that was the case, then immigrants should be treated like everyone else.

Avis decided, and I concurred, that it would be wrong to try to draw some kind of bright line between students who presumably were the children of immigrants and those who presumably were not. For one thing, presumption is an inexact science; using names as a proxy for country of origin would miss almost all Caribbean immigrants (although you could argue that immigrants from the West Indies shouldn’t be excluded in any event, since they, too, were the descendants of slaves). Relying on names as a filter would fail to “catch” some African immigrants as well. And why shouldn’t a special exception be made for Liberians, since the country was settled by the descendants of American slaves? But then wouldn’t a distinction have to be made between Liberians who were descended from freed American slaves and Liberians who weren’t?

Leaving aside the practical question of whether sorting out the immigrants would even be possible, it became obvious
that some of the students with African-looking surnames came from extremely low-income households, while some of those with non-African names came from families whose income and net worth made them solidly Mainstream—or, in some cases, just plain affluent. It would not make sense to offer help to the black daughter of a corporate vice president but withhold it from the black son of two parking-lot attendants, no matter where their parents or grandparents were born.

The trend we were seeing was evident around the country, wherever African immigrants had settled in substantial numbers: Their children were performing so well in school that they were overrepresented, relative to their overall numbers, in the lists of overachievers. In 2009, sociologists Pamela R. Bennett of Johns Hopkins University and Amy Lutz of Syracuse University published a paper in the journal
Sociology of Education
that revealed just how well the immigrants were doing. Bennett and Lutz looked at data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, which follows a large, nationally representative sample of students who were eighth-graders that year. Crunching the numbers, Bennett and Lutz found that black immigrant children—defined as those who were immigrants themselves, or were the children of immigrants—were stellar academic achievers not only when compared to native-born blacks but when compared to whites as well. They reported that 9.2 percent of immigrant black students went on to enroll in elite colleges, such as those in the Ivy League, versus 7.3 percent of whites and 2.4 percent of native blacks. Immigrant black students also had the highest rate of overall college attendance, including non-elite as well as elite schools—75.1 percent of the immigrant blacks enrolled in college, compared to 72.5 percent of whites and 60.2 percent of native blacks.
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The sociologists discovered that the immigrant black students were more likely than native black students to come from two-parent households, and that they were also more likely to have attended private high schools—two factors that increase a student’s chances of attending an elite college. That finding about two-parent families requires some elaboration. Remember that black immigrant families, particularly those from African countries, are generally not just intact but also highly educated. For a variety of reasons, the parents may not have been able to find jobs in this country that are fully commensurate with their skills; home-country professional qualification in medicine or law, for example, obviously does not allow an immigrant to land at JFK or Dulles one day and start practicing as a doctor or lawyer the next. But even if the father is an accountant who has to work as a security guard while he studies to become certified in this country or the mother is a teacher who is putting food on the table by working as a custodian, the family has a history of education and a reverence for learning. They are likely to know what it takes to guide and motivate a child toward excellence because they will have undergone the process themselves—a process that may involve strict parental discipline, researchers have found, and that may be notably successful in inculcating children against negative peer-group influences. And while each parent maybe working long hours to make ends meet, perhaps even holding down two jobs, having both parents in the household means stability and predictability—and creates the expectation that the children will lead stable and predictable lives.

There are also cultural norms that come into play. Not just in Africa but in much of the third world, subjecting the family to shame or disgrace is an awful transgression—if not
unthinkable, then certainly unacceptable. Respect for parental authority, and for one’s elders in general, is not so much demanded as assumed. Based on evidence that I admit is wholly unscientific and anecdotal, the many African immigrant or first-generation high-school students that I have met in recent years have been adept at walking the tightrope between being “normal” teenagers—loving hip-hop, wearing the right clothes, fitting in—and acceding to heavy-duty academic and social demands at home.

I believe there is an important psychological factor as well. Most immigrants who surmount all the obstacles and make it to the United States are accustomed to success. Whatever degree of political and economic dysfunction their home countries might be suffering, the immigrants managed to master or escape the local context. By virtue of their presence, they are among the winners in their societies. Optimism comes easily, and with it a certain sense of entitlement. All or some of this gets passed down to the next generation.

African and Caribbean immigrants come from societies where there may be ethnic tension but only rarely is there racial tension. The question of whether the black majority would hold political power, and at least share in holding economic power, was decided long ago in source countries such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Ghana, and on islands across the Caribbean. In effect, the immigrants are coming from societies that in some ways are similar to the all-black Orangeburg in which my sister and I were raised—not wealthy, to be sure, but proud, economically diverse, and socially integrated.

There is ample evidence that the first-generation, American-born sons and daughters of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean perform better in school than their
African American counterparts. Much less clear is what happens to second-generation black immigrants; some studies have found a drop-off, with the overachieving determination and drive of the immigrants having been passed down to their children but not their grandchildren.