Are Africans and Black Caribbeans the Latest “Model Minorities?”

Since African Americans have not addressed the psychological chains that bind us, it is easy for the dominant culture to keep playing collective mind games on African Americans and other minorities. Let me explain what I mean. Briefly after slavery in the New World –North and South America and the Caribbean archipelago –many governments encouraged emigration from East India and other Asian countries like China, Vietnam, and Japan. In some places, especially in the Caribbean islands, these new immigrants were given contracts for their work whereas freed Black slaves were not. The new immigrants were given pieces of land and were allowed to open businesses that served mostly Black communities. These things were denied to most newly-freed slaves. In the Mississippi Delta, many Asian people were also allowed to vote and send their children to majority white schools –two things denied to Delta's large Black population.

In exchange for their privileged minority status, many Asians and Indians were told simply to work, earn money, get a good education for your children, shut up, and above all, don't mix with Black people socially. And in many places, this worked. However, it often created tense situations in these communities: Indians and Asians stayed away from Black people socially. Newspapers like the Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee dangled images of industrious Asian populations before African Americans as if to say, "Why can't you be more like these people? They know how to work for peanuts and shut up" (I'm not sanctioning this. I've always said that instead of punishing immigrants, we should craft policies that would go after and punish those businesses who routinely hire, abuse, and underpay them).

Meanwhile, especially in the United States, Africans were not allowed. African Americans and other Black populations could not travel to Africa, either (especially during the Cold War). Once the immigrants got here, however, Black Caribbeans and African Americans did not experience much tension. As a matter of fact, many of the people who we think of as African American activists had West Indian backgrounds: for example, W.E.B. DuBois, Stokely Carmichael, and Marcus Garvey (DuBois's and Carmichael's parents were from the West Indies and Garvey was from Jamaica). During Jim Crow and segregation ALL Black people in the United States experienced the same oppression. Those people from Africa and the Caribbean, many of them living under colonialism, experienced direct white racism for the first time in the United States. Black Caribbean writers like George Lamming and C.L.R. James wrote about it. They began to make connections between the situation in the United States and their colonial states at home. They eagerly joined their African and African American brothers and sisters in the fight for equality for Black people the world over.

That was BEFORE the Civil Rights Movement. Post-Civil Rights Movement…what in the Hell happened? It seems that African Americans hear a type of condescension coming from our African brothers and sisters that quite frankly chaps my ass. I get so tired of hearing about how we African Americans waste our opportunities and how we are lazy, dumb, and ignorant. What is even more insulting is they don't even seem to know anything about us our struggles. Nor do they want to. Most of the Africans and Black Caribbeans who come here arrive with their eyes wide shut, and make no effort to talk with African Americans on a more intimate or academic level. They let it be known that we're not their brothers and sisters. I once went into a braiding shop where I tried to speak to the young lady who was braiding my hair, and she ignored me. I have never been back and for now, I refuse to patronize any African or Dominican shop. They don't respect me so why should I hand them my damn money?

For our part, we shun our Africanness and can be really rude to African and Black Caribbean brothers and sisters. We often make fun of Africans, talk about how they smell, and ask them silly questions about wrestling tigers and running around Africa naked. Most of us thank God we're not African and we proudly say that we're not African. Often, we don't understand that our Caribbean brothers and sisters have color issues. Period. It's nothing personal against African Americans. Most of us have never heard of the Parsley Massacre, and we certainly don't know of Puerto Rico's long and twisted history concerning Black people. And when African Americans think of slavery and suffering, we want to be unique. We ignore the brutality of slavery in Panama or Jamaica, and are completely unaware that slavery lasted in Brazil until 1889. We suffer from American exceptionalism and refuse to hear anybody else's story.

Now, I'm not writing this to start anything. ALL SIDES ARE WRONG! There's a divide and conquer strategy at work here, and after centuries of enslavement and second-class citizenship, we can't see it. Sadly, many of these tensions begin with ignorance. What do most African Americans know about Africa? Years after the end of the Civil Rights Movement proper, we know less about Africa than our parents. And where do Africans and West Indians see stereotypes of African Americans? The same place other folk learn them from: tv. On television, America is shown as the land of opportunity. If African Americans are not rich, it's our own fault. For some reason, tv fails to mention poverty in America or its long history of discrimination.

Before many African and Caribbean groups come here, they are often required to take an orientation class. Various organizations offer these classes and material is available at websites such as http://www.cal.org/co/index.html. These videos and classes teach groups, before they enter the United States, how to be good American citizens: make money, work hard for less money than your African American counterpart, get a good education for your children, stay away from American politics, and shut up. They also show them the types of citizens they don't want to be. Take a wild guess at what ethnic group is shown as undesirable for imitation.

Sadly, divide and conquer is very effective. Instead of Black beauticians learning the blow-out technique from the Dominicans, they say we shouldn't patronize their shops. Instead of many African braiders and Caribbean beauticians actually getting to know more about the African American clients they serve, they don't say anything to us. Even in my personal life, when I tried to explain some African American history to an African from the Ivory Coast, she said I was being negative. So, here we are in the 21^st century divided. And as long as we're divided, we'll always be conquered. Will I ever patronize African or Caribbean businesses or beauty shops again? Maybe. But right now, I'm just nursing my hurt and wondering why Black people can't do something as simple as talk to one another and share our expertise.

White Flight and Black Followers

For the first time in its history, Hattiesburg,Mississippi is experiencing the phenomenon of white flight. In its past, Hattiesburg was a small college city which could boast of producing an NFL quarterback. It is home to the University of Southern Mississippi and Brett Favre. Since Hurricane Katrina, it is also one of the fastest growing cities in America. African Americans as well as whites have been moving into Hattiesburg in rapid numbers, swelling the small city at its seams.

As with any influx of new people, some of the old guard of Hattiesburg have decided to move to the outskirts of the city. They are running to a smaller suburb called Oak Grove, Mississippi. These mostly white people move, taking their children and their tax dollars out of the city and its school system.

Normally, in these situations, Black middle class members tend to follow their white counterparts. If the white people move to the suburbs, we also move there, automatically thinking that the what's contained in the suburbs is somehow magically better than what we already have in our own neighborhoods. Their schools somehow educated better. Their neighborhoods are somehow cleaner. Their houses somehow house better. Their stores magically have better clothes. Their grocery stores somehow have better food. So, we take our much-needed dollars and revenue outside of our neighborhoods, too for better, better, better. Everywhere is better than our own neighborhoods.

This is why we follow white people into the suburbs. This leads to ghettoization and impoverishment of Black neighborhoods. We cease to care about our own schools and making them better with the assumption that if we can just get to the suburbs, everything will be all right. We allow people to throw garbage on our grounds while keeping the suburbs pristine. We allow all types of criminal elements into our neighborhoods without so much as picking up the phone to call the police. And the worst part is, the children become miseducated because no one has any educational standards that they care about; thus, a cycle of poverty begins that is almost impossible to break.

But, and this is a big but, I am so proud of the people of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Instead of abandoning their own neighborhoods to follow the white folk out to Oak Grove and Petal, they have decided to stay in the city proper. Instead of abandoning their own school system, they are steadily investing in it. They are steadily recruiting the best teachers they can find from the surrounding universities. And even though it is now a majority-Black district, it remains one of the best educational districts in the United States.

I think Hattiesburg, Mississippi can be a model in resisting the ghettoization that follows white flight. Instead of following white populations, thinking that what they have is somehow inherently better than what we have in our own neighborhoods, we should focus on improving our neighborhoods and our own schools.

Sometimes Race is Just a Smokescreen

As a politician, how would you go before thousands of poor/working class white voters and say, "Even though most of you all don't have insurance or access to quality healthcare, I'm going to repeal and/or block any legislation which will help you to buy/purchase/receive quality medical care?"

How would you tell poor/working class white people, "Even though you are already struggling financially, I'm going to increase your taxes so that you pay even more while giving my campaign contributors, who may be your bosses, a tax break and they will pay taxes at a rate lower than yours?"

How would you tell poor/working class white people, "We need to start and fight endless wars, put boots on the ground all over this globe and use only your kids to do that?"

How would you tell poor and/or working class white people, "I know the economy is terrible, but I'm going to make it even more terrible by allowing our businesses to take more manufacturing jobs to China and everything in your house, from your toilet seat to your calendars to your forks and spoons to you television to your clothes to the mini-American flag which you are now waving will read, 'Made in China'?"


As a politician, how would you campaign on these things? Even though this is the reality of Republican politics and economic platforms, how do they win elections by saying these things to their majority-white voters? The answer is you don't. They use a smokescreen instead. And the favorite smokescreen of choice is Black people.

Since the beginning of the Republican primary process, politicians like Gingrich and Santorum have used that old reliable smokescreen of telling their poor/working class white audiences, in so many words, "Black people. Black people are the reason why this country is suffering...Black people with their food stamps and socialized medicine and single-parent homes are draining the wealth and resources of this country...Black people! Black people! Black people and not middle-age rich white guys like me who are actively shaping the real class warfare by redirecting wealth up to the richest 1% of the country. It's those damn Black people. They are the ones who are sucking up the resource while every white person in America, white people like us, is productive and working hard and taking advantage of the free enterprise system. We're not the ones accepting handouts. We're not the ones getting wealthy off tax breaks, it's only the Blacks."

As an African American who currently owes a gazillion dollars in student loans as I struggle to obtain a Ph.D., I should be outraged. I should be shouting to the top of my lungs, but I am not. I understand this: race is a Republican smokescreen. To play dog whistle politics, to employ the type of rhetoric which blames one group for the entire country's misfortune, is to deploy tactics which ensure that the public willing consents to their own exploitation. Playing dog whistle politics and securing plenty of votes by them is to assure the wealthiest 1% that their fortunes are safe, and they don't have to contribute their fair share. Playing dog whistle politics assures the warhawks that they can start not one, but two wars, and their children will be safe and secure, and won't be risking their lives. Let the working class children pull the country's load, as long as we keep saying, "The Blacks! The Blacks! The Blacks," They won't mind.

I'm just sitting back, observing it all, and wondering why more poor/working class whites aren't mad as Hell that their politicians are playing them like chumps or using scare tactics. It seems that, as poor/working class whites who sometimes have even less than their African/Latino American counterparts, they'd one day wake up and smell the smoke-filled coffee. But, maybe not soon. The scare tactic....the tendency of Republican candidates to yell, "The Blacks are coming! The Blacks are coming!" has been working since the days of Barry Goldwater. And it looks like it may work one more time.