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In
Concourse Village in the Bronx, Sylvester Donkor, left, and Ataa Serwaa,
immigrants from Ghana, waiting for a cab to church. Credit Damon Winter/The New
York Times
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Threatened with arrest in 2009, Lamin
F. Bojang fled Gambia after publicly contradicting its president’s claims that
he could cure AIDS. Now 31, Mr. Bojang lives in Concourse Village in the Bronx
with his wife and 2-year-old son and works as a receptionist at Kingsbrook
Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn, while working toward a bachelor’s degree in
political science at City College.
With educational and professional
opportunities in Gambia scarce for his generation, “the rest will have to find
ways of leaving,” he said, “and African migrants here, just as previous
migrants, are likely not going to return to their countries of origin.”
Niat Amare, 28, graduated from law
school in Ethiopia where she grew up, she recalled, “watching the media portray
the U.S. as the land of opportunities.” She arrived here in 2010, lives in
Harlem and said she felt welcome in New York. “Anyone would find one’s
countryman here, which eases the strange feeling we all have the first time we
leave home,” said Ms. Amare, a legal advocate for the African Services
Committee, a nonprofit organization that assists new immigrants.
While the migration of black Africans
is not new, the number of sub-Saharan immigrants has grown swiftly, an influx
that is shifting the demographic landscape across the country, including in New
York City.
Between 2000 and 2010, the number of
legal black African immigrants in the United States about doubled, to around
one million. During that single decade, according to the most reliable
estimates, more black Africans arrived in this country on their own than were
imported directly to North America during the more than three centuries of the
slave trade.
And while New York State is home to the
largest proportion and many have gravitated to ethnic enclaves like Little
Senegal in West Harlem or the Concourse Village section of the West Bronx, to
live among fellow Ghanaians, black immigrants from Africa have tended to
disperse more widely across the country — to California, Florida, Georgia,
Illinois, Maryland, Texas and Virginia — than Caribbean-born blacks.
About a third of black New Yorkers were
born abroad, mostly in the Caribbean. Africans constitute about 4 percent of
the city’s foreign-born population, but as much as 10 percent in the Bronx. At
last count, according to an analysis of census estimates by the Department of
City Planning, from 2000 to 2011 the African-born population increased 39
percent to 128,000, although other estimates suggest that many more are living
here without legal residency.
“They’ve been doubling every 10 years
since 1980,” said Kim Nichols, an executive director of the African Services
Committee, which is based in Harlem. “There’s a more established family and
community network here to come to.”
Some come as refugees, some with work
visas or special skills, many to stay and others to hone their talents and
eventually apply them back home.
The yearly flow can be affected by wars
and epidemics.
“They’re a self-selected population,”
Ms. Nichols said. “They have to be the most ambitious and have the means to get
here — at least one plane ticket — and a fearlessness about coming to a new
place.”
She recalled a boy who was 13 and
fluent only in Soninke when he arrived alone from Mali after his family had
finally scraped together enough money to pay for his airfare. The young man,
now 18, just got his green card.
“His parents saved everything for years
to buy a plane ticket,” Ms. Nichols said. “They have this dream. They’re dirt
poor and the only way their kids are going to get ahead is to get them here by
hook or crook.”
An analysis of the Census Bureau’s
latest American Community Survey, which ended in 2012, found that 30 percent of
African-born blacks in the city had a college degree, compared with 22 percent
of native-born blacks, 18 percent of Caribbean-born blacks and 19 percent of
the nonblack foreign born.
Immigrants like Mr. Bojang and Ms.
Amare say they still identify more as African than as black or
African-American.
“Many black immigrants do not identify
with the historical experiences of discrimination encountered by blacks in the
United States,” said Kevin D. Brown, a law professor at Indiana University’s
Maurer School of Law.
Two generations removed from
colonialism and legal segregation, said Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of
the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
“the younger African immigrants tend to be less consciously ‘black’ and are
somewhat reticent to link their fates with the history and contemporary protest
traditions of African-Americans.”
“Selma doesn’t exactly cut it for
them,” he said.
Kobina Aidoo, director of “The
Neo-African-Americans,” a documentary, said, “I’ve heard people refer to
themselves as everything from ‘African African-American’ to ‘Halfrican
American’ to ‘White African-American’ to ‘Real African-American’ to ‘American
African” to ‘Just black.’ ”
Dr. Muhammad, recalling the shooting by the police
of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea in the Bronx in
1999, and of Michael Brown, an
unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Mo., last month, said color still
trumped place of origin.
“Diversity among African-descended
communities remains a black box and a mystery to most Americans,” he said.
“Where public safety is concerned, black is all that matters.”
Mr. Bojang, who hopes to study law here
after graduating from City College, said it might seem paradoxical that young
Africans, who centuries ago arrived in chains, now dream of coming to America —
but largely because the educational and economic opportunities are so much
better than back home.
“So, if you look at the factors in
place and contrast that with the conditions of the continuous struggle of the
African-Americans for economic and social justice, it will be an error in
judgment to say that the U.S. is becoming the Mecca for Africans.
“After all,” he said, “we are all
Africans.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com
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