Person:

Waters, Mary

We examine how recent immigration to the United States has affected African Americans. We first review the research on the growing diversity within the black population, driven largely by the presence of black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. As their children and grandchildren come of age, relations between immigrants and African Americans are complicated by the fact that a growing portion of the African American community has origins in both groups. We then review literature on both new destinations and established gateway cities to illustrate the patterns of cooperation, competition, and avoidance between immigrants of diverse races and African Americans in neighborhoods, the labor market, and politics. We explore the implications of the population’s increasing racial diversity owing to immigration for policies that aim to promote racial equality but that are framed in terms of diversity. We conclude with suggestions for new areas of research.

In an increasingly diverse America, the experience of race and racial discrimination is too often described as if it is the same for all racial and ethnic groups. Utilizing the perspective on ethnic and racial groups developed by Zolberg that stresses their contingent and dynamic nature, we explore ethnic and racial discrimination in depth. Drawing on data from the New York Second Generation Study we describe the experience of prejudice and discrimination among eight groups of young adults-native born whites, native born blacks, native born Puerto Ricans, and second generation Dominicans, South Americans, Chinese, West Indians and Russian Jews. While the experience of racial discrimination is common to many Americans, the nature and severity of that experience varies widely among the increasingly diverse people that are now often lumped together as "minorities" in the popular imagination. African Americans, and those who most often confused with African Americans have different kinds of experiences than other non white groups. They face more systematic and brighter racial boundaries than do Asians and light-skinned Latinos. This creates more formidable obstacles for those defined as black, as opposed to those who are just "nonwhite" to full incorporation into American society. We propose a typology of types of discrimination that begins to unpack this complex phenomena