What black Americans can learn from black immigrants as the casting for 'Harriet' sparks debate about opportunity
Coming soon to a cap and T-shirt near you, I'm sure, ADOS emerged along with a national resurgence of interest in reparations for slavery sparked by a June 2014 essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic -- and inflamed by appeals for black votes in the 2020 presidential race.
I have long maintained that reparations for us descendants of slavery would be a great idea if they only had a prayer of actually happening. Unfortunately, this effort is more than a century too late.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue answers to questions that could really help us to close the racial income gaps that the ADOS -- and I -- would like to close, such as, why do African and Caribbean immigrants succeed so well in this country academically and financially while too many native-born black Americans slip further behind?
African immigrants, for example, are more likely to have college degrees than blacks or whites who were born in the United States.
Contrary to stereotypes, black immigrants often arrive as a self-selected group of ambitious go-getters. Where many of us ADOS see institutional racism, they see opportunities.
In that sense, at least, they remind me of my own parents, who came up from the American South during the Great Migration. A railroad station was their Ellis Island. Looking past the Jim Crow segregation, they saw opportunity and took advantage of it.
Instead of viewing immigrant success with envy and wonder, we can learn a lot of useful lessons from their stories of success. The American Dream still works. Our challenge is to make it work for everybody.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2019 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
