The Making of African America (2 page)

But the Immigration and Nationality Act had a profound impact on American life. At the time of its passage, the foreign-born proportion of the American population had fallen to historic lows, in large measure because of the old restrictions. Not since the 1830s, more than a century before, had the foreign-born composed such a tiny portion of the American people. Whatever the United States once was, in 1965 it no longer was a nation of immigrants. During the next four decades, the transformation set in motion by the Immigration and Nationality Act, its subsequent amendments, and the allied executive orders changed that. The number of immigrants legally entering the United States rose sharply, from some 3.3 million in the 1960S to 4.5 million in the 1970S. During the 1980S, a record 7.3 million people of foreign birth entered the United States. Those entering the United States in 1981 doubled that of 1965. In succeeding years, the admissions continued to swell, so that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States accepted immigrants at rates higher than at any time since the 1850S. In the last third of the twentieth century, America's legally recognized foreign-born population tripled in size. The number of men and women who entered the United States but were not officially recognized added yet more to the total, as the United States was transformed again into an immigrant society.
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The Immigration and Nationality Act not only changed the number of new arrivals, but also their character. This too was something the authors of the new legislation had not expected, as they had promised, in Kennedy's words, that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.” But in the 1970S, the number of immigrants from Latin America and Asia began to increase. Before long, they were joined by Africans. Moreover, many new arrivals from the Americas also claimed African descent, as did black peoples from Europe and elsewhere. Although these immigrants represented a small portion of the total immigrant inflow, their arrival initiated a transformation of black America.
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Perhaps no one paid less attention to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act than the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, many of whom had witnessed President Johnson signing the new voting rights law. They had smiled broadly as the president distributed the ceremonial pens, and then celebrated a great victory for themselves and their people. Not one, however, joined Johnson several months later at the Statue of Liberty to witness the approval of the new immigration legislation. Preoccupied with the struggle for voting rights, which moved out of Congress and into the courthouses and then onto the streets, the black press hardly noted the occasion. Few African Americans imagined that the expansion of immigration might have as profound an impact on black society as the expansion of the suffrage.

They would soon learn differently.

Among the peoples entering the United States after 1965 were millions of men and women of African descent. Prior to that date, the number of black people of foreign birth residing in the United States was so tiny as to be nearly invisible. According to the 1960 census, the proportion was a fraction somewhere far to the right of the decimal point.
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Demographers, noting the small number of African arrivals between the closing of the slave trade in 1808 and the immigration reform of 1965, declared black America a closed population, the product of a century and a half of natural increase.
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The same was not true at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While by then only 3 percent of the new arrivals derived from Africa itself, the changes set in motion by the Immigration and Nationality Act would transform black America as much as white America.
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The arrival of foreign-born black people began slowly in the 1960s, and it increased steadily in succeeding decades. During the 1990s, some 900,000 black immigrants entered the United States from the Caribbean and another 400,000 came from Africa, while Europe and Australasia supplied still others, profoundly altering the African American population. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, more Africans had arrived than during the centuries of the slave trade. Other peoples of African descent—particularly from the Caribbean—joined the influx. The number of black immigrants was increasing faster than the number of American-born blacks, and, between 1990 and 2000, black newcomers accounted for fully one-quarter of the growth of the African American population. Black America, like white America, was also becoming an immigrant society.
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In 2000, more than one in twenty black Americans was an immigrant; almost one in ten was an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. In many American cities, the proportion of black people of foreign birth was double that. In New York City, always an anomaly but often also a harbinger, immigrants comprised better than one-third of the black population and immigrants and their children well over half the city's black population.
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Writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century and speaking only of the Afro-Caribbean migration, one scholar predicted that if the current rate of immigration persisted, first- and second-generation immigrants would soon outnumber native black New Yorkers.
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In many ways large and small, African American society has begun to reflect that transition. In New York, the Roman Catholic diocese has added masses in Ashanti and Fante, while black men and women from various Caribbean islands march in the West Indian Carnival and the Dominican Day Parade. In Chicago, Cameroonians celebrate their nation's independence day, while the DuSable Museum of African American History hosts the Nigerian Festival.
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To many of these men and women, Juneteenth celebrations are at best an afterthought.

The new arrivals frequently echo the words of the men and women I met outside the radio broadcast booth. Some have struggled with established residents over the very name “African American,” as many newcomers—declaring themselves, for instance, Jamaican Americans or Nigerian Americans—shun that title, while other immigrants have denied native black Americans' claim to the title “African American” since they had never been in Africa.
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Black immigrants have joined groups such as the Organization for the Advancement of Nigerians, the Egbe Omo Yoruba (National Association of Yoruba Descendants in North America), the Association des Sénégalais aux USA, or the Federation des Associations Régionales Haïtiennes à l'Étranger rather than the NAACP or the Urban League. Old-time residents often refuse to recognize the new arrivals as true African Americans. “I am African and I am an American citizen; am I not African American?” asked the dark-skinned, Ethiopian-born Abdulaziz Kamus at a community meeting in suburban Maryland in 2004. To his surprise and dismay, the overwhelmingly black audience responded, “No, no, no, not you.”
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Behind this prickly matter of nomenclature stand more substantial issues involving experience and its meaning which emerge in matters as intimate as marriage partners or as public as electoral debates. “Barack Obama claims an African American heritage,” asserted Alan Keyes, the black Republican candidate for an Illinois Senate seat in 2004, about his equally dark-skinned Democratic opponent. But, he continued, “we are not from the same heritage. My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country. My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage.”
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Eventually African Americans embraced Obama, especially when it was discovered that he was too black for some white Americans. The differences that sparked the momentary hesitation created similar controversies. In a like, if less publicized, conflict in the District of Columbia, one longtime African American leader dismissed aggressive foreign-born challengers, noting that “They look like me, but they don't think like me.”
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While important matters of access to resources—jobs, housing, and college scholarships—underlie such contests, the past also looms large in these struggles. Consensus-minded black leaders try to find common ground between those who are historically African American and others who are literally African American, but the differences that continue to emerge and manifest themselves point to how historical circumstances give new meaning to familiar circumstances. When Ethiopian American businessmen proposed to rename the historically African American Ninth Street in the District of Columbia “Ethiopian Boulevard,” longtime black residents responded that “Ethiopian businesses have the money to afford the $45 per square foot that it costs to have business here, but that doesn't mean it's their history.”
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This controversy over who owns African American history and, by extension, what is the meaning of the African American experience and who is (and was) black—although particularly intense at the beginning of the twenty-first century—is certainly not new. The entire African American experience can best be read as a series of great migrations or
passages,
during which immigrants—at first forced and then free—transformed an alien place into a home, becoming deeply rooted in a land that once was foreign, unwanted, and even despised. In the process, they created new understandings of the meaning of the African American experience and new definitions of blackness.

The reemergence of the old struggle over history within the black community suggests how understanding past migrations can lead to a greater appreciation of the changes that are remaking African American life at the beginning of the twenty-first century. More significantly, these migrations provide a glimpse of the future, for the new history has not one story line but many and has not one direction but several. Exploring this complex struggle does not create a single culture, produce an established political goal, or culminate in a preestablished outcome. Rather it raises questions about the character of the master narrative of African American history.

Viewing the history of African Americans as a series of migrations offers an alternative to the linear story that has informed black society at least since the American Revolution. Brilliantly captured in the title of John Hope Franklin's classic text
From Slavery to Freedom,
this master narrative has been articulated in everything from spirituals to sermons, from folktales to TV docudramas.
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Like Booker T. Washington's
Up from Slavery,
Alex Haley's
Roots,
and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “I Have a Dream,” it retells the nightmare of enslavement, the exhilaration of emancipation, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the ordeal of disfranchisement and segregation, and the pervasive, omnipresent discrimination, along with the heroic and ultimately triumphant struggle against enslavement, Jim Crow, and second-class citizenship. Its heroes—real and fictive, from Frederick Douglass to Kunta Kinte, W. E. B. DuBois to John Henry, and Monroe Trotter to Oprah Winfrey—personified the master narrative.
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Such narratives articulate a sense of collectivity and what has been called, in another context, “imagined communities.”
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They affirm social unity by reminding men and women how a shared past binds them together, even when distance and radically different material circumstances and experiences create diverse interests. The insoluble bond of history infuses otherwise innocent events with a collective meaning, for—ultimately—“we are who we were.”

For black people, the slavery-to-freedom narrative also integrates their history into an American story of seemingly inevitable progress. While recognizing the realities of black poverty and inequality, it nevertheless depicts the teleological trajectory of black life moving along what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as the “arc of justice” in which exploitation and coercion yields, reluctantly but inexorably, to fairness and freedom.
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By its very name, the narrative of slavery to freedom suggests that, however slowly, liberty replaced slavery, and the coercive and exploitative system that followed it.

Yet, for a growing minority of African Americans—perhaps a prospective majority—the story of slavery to freedom has little direct relevance. Their forebears did not labor as slaves in the cotton fields of the South, follow the drinking gourd to freedom in the North, thrill at the words of the Emancipation Proclamation, or suffer the indignities of disfranchisement and the humiliation of segregation. Rather than being descended solely from those who were sold, some trace their ancestry to the sellers of slaves. Others interpret the slave experience differently than African Americans, perhaps because emancipation left them as an empowered majority rather an abused minority. Rather than condemn their forced removal from Africa, they celebrate their arrival in America, in the words of Barack Obama's father, as a “magical moment.”
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Fleeing from poverty of the sort rarely experienced even by the poorest of contemporary black Americans and from tyranny unknown to even the most oppressed, many of the new arrivals have little sympathy for the narrative of the freedom struggle and some are quick to embrace a society that offers them far greater opportunity than any they had previously known in their homelands. Rather than dwell upon the grievances of the past, these new immigrants recognize their reality and then seize the opportunities of American life, going about the business of establishing their families, educating their children, and building their fortunes. While subjecting themselves to the grossest sort of exploitation and self-exploitation by working long hours and underconsuming to save for the future, they often ignore the connection between their own travail and that of generations of African Americans.