A Diverse -- and Divided --
Black Community
As Foreign-Born Population
Grows, Nationality Trumps Skin Color
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post
Staff Writer
NEW YORK -- Nearly two decades have passed since Odehyee
Abena Owiredua arrived here from Ghana, yet she can't
truly say she has lived the black American experience.
She once rented an apartment in Harlem, but "I didn't
feel comfortable around African Americans," she said. And though
friends believe she resembles the strikingly attractive
hip-hop singer Lauryn Hill, she said, "I have not dated an African
American, because very, very few approach me."
"I love black people, but there is a negative
relationship between immigrants and African Americans," said Abena
Owiredua,
34. "They look down at me, not at me. I feel inferior
around them. It's the ignorant questions I get. 'Do you guys live in houses
over there?' When I get those kinds of questions from black
Americans, I feel very hurt."
As she talked on the dimly lit mezzanine of the Times Square
hotel where she works, Abena Owiredua described a little-known reality:
America's black community, which now includes more West Indian and African
immigrants than ever, is no longer the monolithic group that many politicians,
civil rights advocates and demographers say it is.
A new African American community is being forged,
sociologists and anthropologists say, in which culture and nationality are
becoming more important than skin color. It is as diverse --
and as divided -- as the Latino community or the Asian American
community, each made up of migrants from numerous nations.
In Miami, the West Indian population -- now 48 percent of
the black community -- is expected to surpass the native-born
African American population within eight years, according to
Census Bureau projections. In New York City, nearly one-third
of the black population is foreign-born, according to an
analysis by demographer William H. Frey. And an analysis of census
figures by the Boston Globe showed that one-third of the
black population in Massachusetts is foreign-born.
The foreign-born black populations of Washington and
Maryland are steadily growing, according to Frey's analysis of 1970
Census data and the 2001 Current Population Survey.
In Washington, nearly 8 percent of the black population is
foreign-born, up from 1 percent in 1970. In Maryland, more than 5
percent of black adults are foreign-born, compared with
one-half percent three decades ago. Virginia's black immigrant
population remains small, up to only 2 percent from one-half
percent in 1970.
"This is an important story for demographers and
policymakers who are used to lumping together the black population," said
Frey, a white University of Michigan demographer. "The
foreign-born African Americans and native-born African Americans
are becoming as different from each other as foreign-born
and native-born whites, in terms of culture, social status, aspirations
and how they think of themselves."
In New York, the brown-complexioned man or woman on the
street could easily be Haitian, Jamaican, Senegalese or
Nigerian. In Boston, they may be Cape Verdean. In
Washington, they might be Ethiopian, Eritrean or Somali.
Yves Colon, a Haitian immigrant who grew up in Brooklyn and
now lives in Miami, said black students at his high school
thought "I was just another brother until I opened my
mouth." Donnette Dunbar of Harlem said black Americans seem
surprised when she returns their greetings with an accent
flavored by Jamaican patois.
"Black is very diversified," said Flore Zephir, a
Haitian who is an associate professor of Romance languages at the University of
Missouri. "White people don't see it because they lump everyone together
and don't take into account nationality and culture. Haitians resent being
lumped together with other groups. This doesn't mean they don't know they're
black. They consider the classification that you're either black or you're
white very nefarious."
And therein lies the root of the conflict.
That black-white classification is uniquely American, a fact
of history that has persisted since it was laid down by Virginia
slaveholders in the 1700s. Black Americans, no matter how
dark or light complexioned, were united in their suffering.
By the 1950s, historians say, black unity led to the
formation of the modern civil rights movement and created a powerful
Democratic voting bloc to fight white oppression. In the
'60s, black unity became "Black Power" and "Black Is
Beautiful."
Black people acknowledged each other as
"brothers," developed elaborate handshakes ending in hugs and spoke
slang to
communicate dissenting thoughts past the ears of white
people.
But the fact of black unity in everyday life, and the
history that led to it, was lost on many of the black foreigners who started
arriving in droves after the 1965 Immigration Act -- which
African Americans were instrumental in getting passed.
Unlike black people in the United States, West Indians and
Africans grew up among black majorities that were ruled by black
governments. "Black Is Beautiful" was a given, as
was black pride, because there was no white-imposed segregation after their
liberation from slavery and colonialism.
It almost goes without saying that black people of all
persuasions also share a bond, said Jemima Pierre, a Haitian American
and doctoral candidate in the African diaspora program at
the University of Texas in Austin. She mentioned Jamaican Marcus
Garvey, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement
Association and its Black Star shipping line during the Harlem
Renaissance for return trips to Africa.
Randall Robinson in 1977 founded TransAfrica, an
organization dedicated to black causes and bringing together people of
African origin. In Ghana, the Pan African Congress concerns itself
with African American affairs every time it meets.
In pop culture, two of the most popular black hip-hop
artists are a Haitian, Lauryn Hill, and a Jamaican, Trevor Smith, also
known as Busta Rhymes.
While researching a book on Haitians, Flore Zephir found
that those who grew up in the United States were less critical of
African Americans than their elders.
"They tend to want to identify with African
Americans," she said. "They do not have an accent, so they know they
can pass as
African American. They change the pronunciations of their
names. Michel becomes Michael, Pierre becomes Peter, Mathieu
becomes Matthew."
Garry Pierre-Pierre, editor of the Haitian Times in New
York, said he grew to see America differently than his mother, who
was slightly suspicious of African Americans.
"You see white Americans point to foreign-born blacks
as role models," he said. "But there's a hypocrisy in their selection
of
this role-model immigrant. Haitians are being shot down by
police just like African Americans."
The New York chapter of the NAACP joined Haitian and African
organizations in protesting New York police treatment of
Haitian Abner Louima, who was sodomized with a nightstick in
1997, and Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea
who was shot dead by detectives on the front stoop of his
Bronx apartment building two years later.
But lately, the issues that divide the black community in
New York have attracted almost as much attention as the incidents that
bring them together.
Last year's Democratic primary between Una Clarke, a
Jamaican American, and Rep. Major R. Owens, a black American,
ranked as one of the nastiest fights ever over a
congressional seat in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.
During a forum, Clarke, a former City Council member,
declared, "I'm not a black American. I identify as a black person, but
you cannot take my identity and call me something
else." She also said Owens was almost dismissive when it came to
immigration issues West Indians care about.
Owens won the race by garnering votes from black and white
Americans. In the process, he labeled Clarke, his former
protégé, a liar. He also compared her campaign for West
Indian votes to Nazism.
"Whether it's [Joerg] Haider in Austria or Adolf
Hitler," Owens said, "when you appeal to ethnic loyalties as a way to
ascend to power, it is the worst possible way to come to power." Owens is
a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, made up of black politicians who
campaign hard on black issues to get black votes.
In North Miami, Josaphat "Joe" Celestin, a Haitian
American, became the city's first black mayor after an election in May. It
was an extraordinary achievement for Haitians, who were long
denied immigration status by the United States even as white
Cubans were welcomed into South Florida. But along with
cheers, Celestin was greeted by a barrage of telephone threats and
racial epithets -- from black Americans.
"It's shocking, the amount of animosity and
suspicion," said Marvin Dunn, chairman of the psychology department at
Florida
International University in Miami. Dunn studied the divide
between African Americans and West Indians when Haitian and
black American students brawled in Miami public schools in
the 1980s.
"Whether you talk to Haitians, Bahamians, Jamaicans or
Africans about African Americans, you hear the same things," Dunn
said. " 'They are violent, they don't respect their
elders, they have no sense of family, they don't want to work, they depend on
welfare.' "
Black Americans are no more tolerant of immigrants, Dunn
said. "When you talk to African Americans about the immigrants,
you hear, 'They're here to take our jobs. They'll work for
nothing. They're cliquish. They smell. They eat dogs. They think
they're better than us,' " he said. "There's no
moral high ground here."
Sometimes, even love doesn't lead to an answer, Dunn said:
"There's much more intermarriage and dating between black
groups than blacks and whites, but not all that much. I
wouldn't overstate the point.
"A Haitian wants his daughter to marry a Haitian. A
Bahamian wants their daughter to marry a Bahamian. The reverse is also
true. African American mothers tell their sons that Haitian
girls are not clean."
Courtship Amid Conflict
Detroit native Sunni Khalid learned that things were not so
different in Africa when he interned at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi
in 1982. While walking to work one day, he saw Zeinab Said,
a striking Somali, from across the street and followed her to
work.
He quickly learned that like most Somalis, Said is
extraordinarily proud of her heritage. It took everything he had learned of
African history at Howard and Johns Hopkins universities to
convince her that he could understand her more than most
foreigners.
But that was only the first barrier the couple had to
overcome. Said's relatives, especially her brother-in-law, frowned on the
affair, calling Khalid the son of a slave.
"They wanted me to marry a Somali," she said.
Soon, Somali men she did not know were knocking on her door. "I didn't
want
to marry someone simply because he was a Somali," Said
said. The brother-in-law forbade Said's sister from attending the
wedding.
When Khalid and Said moved to Washington in 1983, she was
startled to see so many black people in her new home. But she
quickly discovered that they were not nearly as
knowledgeable about Africa as her husband.
Once, Said mentioned to an African American woman that she
is a Somali and had lived in Africa. When the woman asked,
"Do you speak the ooga-booga language?" Said was
startled. "What's that?" Said asked.
She speaks three languages -- Somali, Swahili and English --
and at the time knew nothing of Tarzan movies, where such
insulting characterizations of African language can be
heard.
Meanwhile, Khalid had his own problems at Howard University.
Black women he knew looked past his wife's
chocolate-colored skin and focused on her narrow nose,
straight hair and thin lips. "Sunni has gone and married a white black
woman," he recalled a friend saying. He lowered his
head for shame while recounting the story at his Baltimore home.
His wife stiffened with indignation. "What is a
European feature?" she demanded. "What is an African feature? It is
an insult to a Somali for someone to ask if you are half-Indian, the way
African Americans do. I am not an Indian. I am not white. Only in
America. When I walk in London, no one would mistake me for
a Nigerian. They look at me and say, 'You are Somali.' It's
education, education, education!"
But little is taught of Africa or African Americans in U.S.
schools, said Pierre, the anthropologist -- an almost exclusive
emphasis on white American and European history is a legacy
of second-class citizenship that African Americans endure.
After arriving in America, masses of impoverished West
Indians and Africans see a land of plenty -- and don't understand why
black natives haven't flourished. The immigrants don't
realize that black Americans were enslaved the longest, and that after
emancipation, they lived under legal segregation.
What most African Americans know of black immigrants comes
from foreign news accounts and Hollywood, Pierre said. She
was hard pressed to recall a major motion picture about
Africa -- "Out of Africa," "Gorillas in the Mist," "I
Dreamed of Africa," "Congo" -- that was not set in the jungle.
"Think about it," she said. "If you're being
bombarded by these images of poor, destituted countries, you don't want to be
associated with that. Think about Tarzan in Africa. You
don't want to be associated with all those people who were depicted
as savages. All you know of Africa is primitives, war,
destitution, hunger."
Last year, Will Smith, the black American actor, traveled to
Mozambique for the first time during the filming of "Ali."
"Everything I knew about Africa was a solid 80 percent
false," he told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. "I was
embarrassed when I realized there were tall buildings and
Mercedes and big cities and fine women.
"I was so miseducated," Smith said. "It has
the best and worst of everything. It's like God visits everywhere else, but he
lives in
Africa."
Ethiopian Lily Assegid said Africans also stubbornly hold on
to stereotypes. But as in Smith's case, she said, they can fade
away with time.
"When our parents came to this country in the
1950s," Assegid said, "many of them went to white schools, the better
schools,
and didn't interact with African Americans. What they were
learning about African Americans was very prejudiced.
"But they didn't see themselves as what they were
hearing African Americans get called," Assegid said. "They said, 'No,
no, no, we're Ethiopians. We're Africans. We're different.' They would go back
home and spread these stories."
Now, living in Washington, Assegid doesn't believe a word
her parents and others said. "As far as I'm concerned, African
Americans are as much a part of Africa as a newborn child
right now," she said. "They're a part of the people. The only
difference is the culture they were born into. I believe
that for all black people."
© 2002 The
Washington Post Company