OPINION

@ISSUE: Williams: Blacks less homogeneous because of immigration

Hettie V. Williams
Hettie V. Williams

The most significant changes in the African-American community in the last 25 years including social, economic and political developments should be understood as incremental strides toward equality.

Historically, social change for marginalized groups in U.S. society has not always meant a unidirectional tilt towards improved circumstances. The history of African-Americans has been shaped by positive achievements and glaring setbacks that have been punctuated by racial violence coupled with persistently high levels of black economic inequality. Nonetheless, there have been noticeable changes, particularly in the ethnic composition of the African-American community and in black politics.

African-American society has become increasingly more ethnically and economically stratified in the last quarter of a century. This has been due largely to the influx of black immigrants coming into the U.S. and the emergence of a noticeable black middle class.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of black immigrants arriving in the U.S. from countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia and Haiti more than tripled between 1980 and 2005. The PEW Research Center has recently projected that 82 percent of the U.S. population growth between 2005 and 2050 will likely come as result of immigrants entering the country from nations with nonwhite majority populations.

By 2007, some 3 million of the nation's black population were foreign born. Haitian immigration to the U.S. quadrupled between 1980 and 2005 while Ethiopian immigration to the U.S. increased more than a dozen times during this era. At about the same time, in 2009, the black middle class made up about 38.4 percent of the total black population, with a median income between $35,000 and $100,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In this same year, slightly less than 25 percent of the black population was in poverty and roughly 28 percent of African Americans were identified in the Census as working class.

These numbers present a portrait of a black community that has become more economically stratified. The black middle class has grown considerably since 1960, although black median income and net worth have in fact declined in the last decade (white net worth is currently 13 times greater than black net worth), while black unemployment has remained routinely twice as high as the national average.

Conversation on Race

The term African-American has come under scrutiny given the increased ethnic heterogeneity of the black community in America overall. And, this phenomenon has only been compounded by the fact that some indigenous (biracial) African-Americans have begun to mark more than one racial category on the U.S. Census or self-identify as other than African American.

The election of Barack Obama to the office of president in 2008 is reflective of larger political changes that have taken place in the society since the civil rights movement. Obama is a part of the increase in black office-holding in the U.S. since the mid-1960s, when the nation had 103 black elected officials. By the 1990s, there were an estimated 8,500 black elected officials in the U.S. with 400 black mayors leading towns or cities across the country by 1994. The number of black elected officials nationwide increased to 10,500 in 2011.

In 2013, the U.S. Congress had the greatest number of black senators serving at one time, including Tim Scott (R-S.C., Mo Cowan (D-Mass.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). The 114th Congress is the most diverse Congress in U.S. history with 46 African-Americans in total, one of whom is Mia Love (R-Utah) the first black Republican woman to be elected to Congress.

Hettie V. Williams is a lecturer in African American history at Monmouth University.