Black America's new diversity
By Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY
BOSTON — The children stepping off school buses in the Dorchester section of this city are black. The owners of the grocery stores, nail salons and cafes are black. So are most of the customers.
But blacks in Dorchester are as varied as the aromas wafting from the Jamaican and Cape Verdean restaurants along Bowdoin Street. In the hip Restaurante Cesaria, diners chat in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Cape Verde Creole, Jamaican English, English with an American twang, English with a British accent. The musicians who entertain diners come from Angola, Nigeria, Senegal and the West Indies.
Diversity has come to many of America's black communities. The diversity is not in skin color but in culture, language and national origin.
Nearly 25% of the growth of the black population between 1990 and 2000 was because of newcomers from Africa and the Caribbean, according to a report being published today. Their populations are growing at a faster rate than that of traditional African-Americans.
The number of African-Americans increased 10% to 31 million in the 1990s. But the number of blacks from Africa more than doubled to 537,000 in the same period. The number of blacks from the Caribbean increased 63% to more than 1.5 million.
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A boom in black immigration
The U.S. population of blacks from the Caribbean and Africa grew at a faster rate in the 1990s than that of native-born blacks. A look at the trends in several metropolitan areas:
From the Caribbean
Where population is largest
New York --- 566,770
Miami --- 153,255
Fort Lauderdale --- 150,476
Boston --- 62,950
Nassau-Suffolk counties, N.Y. --- 60,412
Where this group has the highest share of the black population
Fort Lauderdale --- 43.4%
Miami --- 34.4%
West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, Fla. --- 30.3%
New York --- 25.7%
Boston --- 25.6%
Where the growth rate of this group has been highest
Atlanta --- 323.1%
Orlando --- 186.0%
Fort Lauderdale --- 172.6%
West Palm Beach-Boca Raton --- 141.7%
Nassau-Suffolk counties, N.Y. --- 87.6%
From Africa
Where population is largest
Washington --- 80,281
New York --- 73,851
Atlanta --- 34,302
Minneapolis-St. Paul --- 27,592
Los Angeles-Long Beach --- 25,829
Where this group has the highest share of the black population
Minneapolis-St. Paul --- 15.4%
Boston --- 9.8%
Washington --- 6.1%
Dallas --- 3.6%
New York --- 3.4%
Where the growth rate of this group has been highest
Minneapolis-St. Paul --- 628.4%
Atlanta --- 284.6%
Philadelphia --- 220.6%
Dallas --- 159.5%
Washington --- 148.9%
Source: John Logan, sociologist, University at Albany, analysis of 2000 Census data. For more information:
www.albany.edu/mumford
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The shift is beginning to reshape black politics in some cities and the focus of some black advocacy groups.
"In some major metropolitan regions, these new black groups amount to 20% or more of the black population," says sociologist John Logan, co-author of the report on black diversity. "Local wards are very aware that this is potentially an important voting bloc."
In Boston, one of the 10 metropolitan areas with the largest numbers of African and Caribbean populations, voters elected the first Haitian-American to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1999. In Miami, the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights group, is organizing marches in support of freedom for Haitian refugees who come ashore in South Florida. Many who seek asylum are deported.
"The first implication of this change is that the term African-American, as popular as it has become, is actually a demographic misnomer," says James Jennings, professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University in Boston, who is black and Puerto Rican. "In the black community, you have a lot of people who describe themselves and see themselves as black but don't necessarily see themselves as African-American."
Blacks from Africa and the Caribbean tend to be better educated, have higher income and live in more prosperous neighborhoods than African-Americans, says Logan, director of the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York.
His analysis of 2000 Census data shows:
Blacks from the Caribbean are concentrated on the East Coast. Six of 10 live in the New York, Miami and Fort Lauderdale metropolitan areas. Most are from Haiti and Jamaica.
Blacks born in sub-Saharan Africa are more dispersed. The largest numbers are in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Atlanta, Minneapolis and Los Angeles also have large numbers of Africans. Like African-Americans, blacks from the Caribbean and Africa are mostly segregated from whites. There is also segregation among these black ethnic groups, reflecting social differences.
In a nation where most blacks trace their origins to slavery, immigrants and refugees from the Caribbean and Africa are adding definitions to what it means to be a black American. "They come, except for skin color, with a mentality that's very much like other immigrants, including the view that this is a place of opportunities," says Robert Hall, professor of African-American studies and history at Northeastern University in Boston.
The homelands of many black immigrants have a history of slavery, but the immigrants don't equate that with America's legacy of slavery, says Massachusetts state Rep. Marie St. Fleur, a Haitian-American whose district includes parts of the Dorchester neighborhood. That can disconnect them from traditional black leadership groups.
It doesn't take long for immigrants to realize that if they look black, they'll be treated as a black person, many say. "That's not a good category to be in," Hall says. "Some West Indian families tell their kids not to associate with black Americans."
That's why black immigrants, like immigrants of any color, tend to cling to national identities at first. They gradually embrace racial identities.
For longtime black politicians such as Boston City Councilor Charles Yancey, the demographic changes in the black community cannot be ignored. The black political agenda now must include a push for multilingual education in public schools and multilingual staffing in health care and law enforcement, he says.
Yancey says the recent arrivals are reinvigorating black neighborhoods. Brothers Casimiro and John Barros were born in the USA, children of immigrants from the Cape Verde islands, in the Atlantic Ocean 385 miles west of Senegal. They attended good universities — Howard and Dartmouth, respectively. Casimiro Barros, 31, worked as an engineer before returning to the neighborhood where he grew up to open Restaurante Cesaria. "It's always been a difficult conversation, but the black community and immigrant community are coming together," says John Barros, 29.
Some U.S.-born blacks don't share that feeling. "Sometimes I feel a little left out ... a little inferior," says California-born Erica Nunnally, 28, who owns the Yellow Brick Road cafe in Dorchester. "When an immigrant comes in, they tend to know English and several other languages, and they come in and they say, 'Where are you from?' And you say 'America' and they say, 'Oh.' "
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