Affirmative action, also known as equal opportunity, is a federal
agenda designed to counteract historic discrimination faced by ethnic
minorities, women and other underrepresented groups. It is an outcome of
the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement and initially focused on improving
opportunities for African Americans in employment and education.
African Americans refer to the people whose ancestors were
involuntarily brought from West Africa to the United States by means of the
historic Atlantic slave trade. They have made a lot of efforts to obtain the
equal human rights in the United States. And they are different from the
African immigrants, who immigrate legally to the United States from almost
all regions in Africa. And many reports have showed that first- and
second-generation black immigrants were more educated and economically
successful than African Americans.
In this paper, the author examined the extent to which the black
immigrant success story was directly relevant to African immigrants from
different countries of origin in the United States.
First, the author introduced some successful stories and findings of
African immigrants. Then he collected data from the three census years (1980,
1990, and 2000) and weighted the data differently. Next, the authors analyzed
the variation in socio-economic achievement and in language and citizenship
acquisition, and racial and ethnic diversity. Finally, the theoretical
implications of the findings on affirmative action were discussed.
And the findings revealed that African immigrants were represented in
the entire continuum of the American class structure, and therefore, any
representation of a uniform experience was not empirically defensible.
Besides, a more robust data is needed to achieve a more comprehensive
articulation of the implications of the socioeconomic and ethnic diversity on
educational achievement among black immigrants. And both historical and
contextual variables that can address the different social and political
contexts that informed emigration from Africa, and the context of reception in
host communities are required.
Article by Abdi M. Kusow, from Iowa
State University, Ames, USA.
Full access: http://mrw.so/3G9CI4
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| Image by Alicia Watkins, from Flickr-cc. |
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