One of the most condescending comparisons is to suggest that African Americans have not made progress like immigrants in America. This comparison implies that Black Americans simply haven’t worked hard enough—ignoring the reality of structural racism. However, it is important to understand the differences in circumstances between African Americans and immigrants.
When asked about the struggles faced by African Americans, Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “White America must see that the other ethnic groups have not been slaves on American soil. That is one thing that other ethnic groups haven’t had to face.” He further explained that America made the color of the African American’s skin a stigma, which limited their opportunities. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed the slaves, but it provided them with no resources to start a new life. King emphasized, “It was freedom to hunger. It was freedom to the winds and rains of heaven. It was freedom without food to eat or land to cultivate, and therefore, it was freedom and famine at the same time.”
In discussing the notion of lifting oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, King remarked, “I believe we ought to do all we can to seek to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps.” He highlighted the impact of slavery and segregation by emphasizing that generations of oppression and the deliberate degradation of Black people have left them without resources and opportunities.
To address the relevance of slavery and institutional racial discrimination today, King proposed a question, “Would the racial wealth gap exist in America today if black Americans came to this country voluntarily and were able to pursue the opportunities in America with no legal or social restrictions on their race?” He emphasized the importance of acknowledging the malevolent forces at work since emancipation if the answer is no.
King also noted the disparity in resources provided to white peasants from Europe compared to Black Americans. He stated, “Millions of acres of land were given to white peasants from Europe, but nothing was given to Black people who had worked for 244 years for free.” King highlighted the significance of reparations for ex-Confederates and former slaveowners, the Homestead Act, and the G.I. Bill in enabling white Americans to build wealth and achieve financial stability.
Black Americans accomplished more in their first generation out of slavery faced with every conceivable opposing force than any immigrant group. When considering American history and the nature of American racism, the immigrant success story is not all that remarkable.
The stories of the immigrants and Black Americans are in no way comparable. Immigrants voluntarily left poor or dangerous circumstances to come to a country that had been made the most prosperous and stable country in the world. African Americans were forcibly taken away from their homeland, where they were already prosperous, to a foreign and hostile land where they were made to build a country from scratch. Moreover, there were structural barriers put in place by the government and practiced by every facet of society to bar African Americans from the prosperity that they created.
For one, many of these immigrants came to an America that was already built. Two, they did not contend with laws that kept them from enjoying full access to the benefits of America. Three, virtually all of them came here freely of their own accord and were able to keep their culture.
Let us start with the first: Immigrants came to an America that was already built. This is certainly true of those who emigrated from the Third World or developing countries of “black, brown, or yellow people”: those who came here by air instead of sea. There was no Middle Passage on the flight over. The country they were coming to was highly developed and equipped with all the amenities they currently have. Whatever contributions Indians, Asians, or Africans made to America were made in the comfort of a country that already suffered through slave-based agriculture, a revolution, and several internal wars, including a Civil War and a Civil Rights struggle.
Not only were immigrants not hamstrung with anything like redlining, segregation, or racial terrorism, but they were encouraged to prosper by the very white America that enacted laws to stifle Black Americans. The chance of an African American with a Master’s degree becoming a millionaire is the same as an Asian with only a high school diploma. There are a number of factors the study mentions for why Asians fare better. One of them is the Immigrant Investor Program.
The Immigrant Investor Program, also known as the EB5-Program, was created by Congress in 1992 to stimulate the U.S. economy and job growth. Under this program, investors (and their spouses and unmarried children under 21) were eligible to apply for a Green Card (permanent residence) if they made the necessary investment in a commercial enterprise in the United States and plan to create or preserve ten permanent full-time jobs for qualified U.S. workers. Congress wanted to stimulate the U.S. economy through job creation and capital investment by foreign investors. In 2011, there was an increased interest in China. This was because Asian economies began to flourish, and the U.S. was interested in Chinese and Japanese money.
The same is true of Black immigrants. Whether from Africa or from the Caribbean: “Some West Indians say American blacks don’t want to work very hard and are too quick to use racism as an excuse for their failure to advance. At the same time, many black Americans resent West Indians, arguing they are too eager to take their jobs or too willing to work with white people at the expense of black Americans.”
When Black Americans would go on strike or refuse to work in the service industry because the pay was so little and was not comparable to whites who worked the same jobs, the country turned to the Caribbean to get workers who would accept these conditions without complaining. They came from poor countries anyway, so poverty in the U.S. was a step up.
If white America has not discriminated against West Indians (and, to this extent, Africans), it is because they are ethnically different from Black Americans, which is another way of saying that they come to this country without the legacy of combating white supremacy and being shut out of America’s economic wealth.
West Indians and African Blacks do not inherit the racial issues that have and continue to define America.
Also, like with Asian countries, white America seeks to use Black immigrants to bolster its economy. In a 2020 report, the U.S. State Department unveiled its plan to increase diplomatic relations with the Caribbean. The United States does $47.6 billion in trade with the Caribbean, of which $12.3 billion is surplus. This report identifies strategies for building commercial ties between the two regions.
One of the chief areas the U.S. will focus on is business. According to the section “Small Business Development,” the goal is to increase “private sector job growth and create new markets for U.S. businesses.” The plan is to build and standardize small- and medium-sized enterprises and “seek opportunities to empower women and youth entrepreneurs.”
Of course, as diplomatic relations between the two increase, so will tourism and immigration. Perhaps it is too early to predict the implications of this plan on both inter-diaspora relations and gender dynamics (the report explicitly leaves out the males), but there is nothing in this report that suggests things will improve should this be a success, so here we are with the reason immigrants of color are not suitable barometers for racial justice: white America’s discrimination is not only racial, but it is also ethnic. Black Americans are not simply targeted because they are Black but because they are Black Americans.
Immigrants of color are not spared of racism. A Black immigrant at face value is indistinguishable from a Black American. Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, and Botham Jean are examples of how foreign Blackness is no protection from racial violence. Still, Black immigrants view themselves in terms of ethnicity first and race second, usually as a consequence of the racism they’ve encountered in America: “Many of the Jamaican men would say to me, ‘I never knew what it was to be black until I came to the United States,’” says University of Virginia sociologist Milton Vickerman.
Black immigrants to the United States served the interests of white America in two ways: 1) They were a cheap labor force who did not make the demands for higher wages and thus bolstered the economy by working mostly menial jobs without complaining about fighting for workers’ rights, and 2) They provided a Black face for white racism. They were used to undermine the Black rights movement by affirming white stereotypes of Black Americans and objecting to the grievances of Black Americans.
Such attitudes demonstrate how some Immigrants are both ignorant and indifferent to the history of racism in America and how it has impacted America.
Immigrants were not confronted with a campaign of racial proscription, nor did they inherit the fight against its barriers. Once they arrived in America, their primary challenge was poverty. They built enclaves that were not policed, surveilled or sabotaged. There were no laws like the slave codes that restricted Blacks from gathering or racial profiling. Furthermore, unlike Tulsa in 1921, self-sustaining Black immigrant communities were not attacked and destroyed. Black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, or Europe did not have to deal with racial terror or fight to overturn laws that undermined their progress. They have benefitted from the work of African Americans who did fight to overturn such laws. In short, immigrants did not face any existential threat to their group in America, and they most certainly were not under siege for generations.
Immigrants of color were able to selectively practice their culture. African Americans experienced deracination: this is when someone is violently uprooted from their natural geographical, social, or cultural environment and placed in a hostile and oppressive social and cultural environment where they are forbidden from achieving the kind of success that immigrants were encouraged to achieve.
The immigrant comparison incorrectly assumes that Black people did not work to overcome the odds, when in fact, they did and have achieved some pretty magnificent results! As alluded to in previous chapters, there were thriving Black towns throughout the country in the early 1900s that were more successful than the neighboring white communities and their immigrant counterparts. Harlem is probably the most renown because of the Harlem Renaissance: an epoch of intellectual, artistic, and economic vibrancy. However, I cannot emphasize enough there were communities like Harlem all over America.
Throughout the United States, within fifty years of being out of slavery, Black Americans developed their own insular society with its own economy. The Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was dubbed ‘Black Wall Street’ because it was a bastion of Black enterprise. Created during the early twentieth century, Black Americans created this self-sufficient, prosperous business district. The term Black Wall Street was used until whites destroyed the town in 1921.
Black Americans made Greenwood home to high economic activity. Newly emancipated Blacks worked as servants but pooled their money together and, by 1905, quietly bought a strip of land and buildings, which grew into a cluster of businesses. These included a grocery store, a barbershop, a hospital, a newspaper, and schools such as a business college. They even had planes and a sea-liner.
Another notable example is Auburn, Atlanta, also referred to as ‘Sweet Auburn.’ The Sweet Auburn District became Atlanta’s premier area, with its main street being Auburn Avenue. Auburn Avenue was located in northeast Atlanta and was called the “richest Negro street in the world.” Auburn Ave., as it was called, was the location of a Black-owned insurance company called Atlanta Life Insurance Company and the first Black-owned commercial radio station in the United States.
Auburn was one of the largest concentrations of Black businesses in the country. What was different from Tulsa is that Sweet Auburn was the result of the race riot: there was the 1906 Atlanta Riot, where Blacks and their business were attacked. This highlighted the vulnerability of Blacks in an integrated society. Before the riot, most Black businesses were located downtown in which Blacks and whites owned their business but competed with each other for jobs. Blacks were more successful and in 1906, there was an allegation of sexual assault by a white woman: an allegation for which there was no evidence and never proven. As a result, the Black community in Auburn was destroyed. Was the response of the African Americans? Did they shrivel up and die? Did they protest or ask for “hand-outs” from the government? Did they go on the news and complain about racist white people? No to all these questions! Instead, they pooled their resources together and rebuilt, but this time away from the whites—thereby creating a racial cocoon where Blacks could pursue and protect their own interests.
In both cases of Tulsa and Atlanta, the race riots were started by whites on the false pretext that a white woman was supposedly violated. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the riot followed the arrest of a Black man named Rowland, who allegedly attacked a White woman. The Black community of Tulsa got wind of plans to lynch him. Armed Black Americans gathered at the Tulsa County Courthouse to prevent this crime. Shots were fired at the crowd. Blacks retreated to their neighborhood, where they held off the white mob.
It is important to note that all of the race riots during Jim Crow were started and carried out by whites destroying Black people’s property. In contrast, all of the race riots after desegregation were carried out by Blacks who were destroying neighborhoods they lived in but did not own. This is significant. Blacks have never rioted to destroy their own property. They never attacked their neighborhoods when they had ownership of their communities. As we see with Tulsa, Blacks were armed and were prepared to defend the property in their town. They armed themselves and defended their neighborhoods from mobs of angry and jealous whites who were trying to destroy what they, Black Americans, had built. Today, when Blacks riot, they are not attacking their property. They are attacking stores owned by outsiders. They are attacked by foreign interests in their neighborhoods.
It is truly remarkable that Black Americans built communities like these within fifty years of slavery when they were penniless, had no experience with proprietorship, were besieged by violent whites, Klansmen, and police, and racially restricted laws that had the sole purpose of blocking progress for Blacks being able to build wealth. This was less than one generation out of slavery.
The fact that Black people beat the odds, even if temporarily, to create prosperous, self-sustaining communities in spite of their conditions is more impressive than anything immigrants have done because of the conditions in America that favored their success. Unlike immigrants, Black Americans’ success during the early twentieth century was achieved without white America’s help or government assistance. Was Black America held up as a shining examples of what this country could do for someone if they worked hard? Did Congress or the U.S. State Department launch a campaign to stimulate entrepreneurship among these former slaves and their descendants? Did white America put money into making Booker T. Washington’s goals a reality? Did white industrial America give jobs to Blacks who migrated North to work in the factories? The answer to every one of these questions is no. Instead, all of these efforts were met with legislated discrimination in the form of school and housing segregation, such as redlining, blockbusting, job and loan discrimination, the Ku Klux Klan, racial profiling, police brutality, and intergenerational poverty. Immigrants did not have to contend with any of these.
African and Caribbean immigrants grew up in countries where everyone looked like them, where there was no discrimination, the lack of opportunity was the only barrier, and they emigrated voluntarily to the United States where, for the most part, they were not subjected to an ethnic or racial embargo. The immigrant comparison ignores the unique struggle of African Americans, how that struggle has made immigrant successes possible, and the role of ethnicity in structural racism.
The African American fight against systemic racism is a struggle to get what is theirs—not a plea for “hand-outs”! It is not a demand by foreigners who voluntarily showed up in this country and expect success to be handed to them; it is a native people’s fight to not exist below the poverty line or be victimized by discriminatory practices that have debilitating and lethal effects.
The wealth and opportunity that the United States offers were made possible by the involuntary and voluntary sacrifices of Black Americans. There were more Black American inventors than there were Black immigrant inventors who directly enhanced the quality of life in this country. Most of these Black inventors were denied patents because of the racism in the patent process. From thriving neighborhoods to inventions, the Black American community has witnessed its contributions diminished or stolen and then had legal barriers from extracting their full benefit.
Black immigrants chose America, but America chose Black Americans. Black immigrants have often talked about growing up listening to stories in their home country about how the streets were paved with gold. Apparently, they were never taught about who paved those streets!
Cheryl Harris writes in her book Whiteness as Property about how the legal construction of whiteness set out to 1) define and affirm who is white, 2) what benefits accrue to that status, and 3) what entitlements are attached to that status. The story of European immigrants to America who were discriminated against proves this point. The Irish and Italians not being considered white shows how exclusion from having full benefits, rights, and privileges in America was given a racial designation. Anti-Semitism is an enduring part of America, but it does not trump anti-Black racism. As we will soon see, in cases involving groups of European immigrants, every one of them capitalized on the racial hierarchy in order to abide comfortably within white society.
Black Americans are placeholders for the bottom in America. Within this racially stratified society, whites who emigrated to America have traded on their European heritage and looks. America has always been a place where marginalized people in Europe could come to escape marginalization. Whether they were peasants, serfs, Catholics in a Protestant kingdom, Protestants in a Catholic kingdom, or Jews in Christian Europe, in America, they were all white. This meant that they would not occupy the lowest rung.
Italian immigrants were discriminated against because they were Catholic. Anti-Catholicism was one of the reasons the Irish were viewed with suspicion, as well. There was a belief that by giving Catholics the vote, they would carry out the directives of the Pope. This is absurd and is even more ridiculous today than during the nineteenth century, but it was a major concern that was played up in elections.
The exoticization of Italian immigrants can be seen in how they were portrayed as non-white and, at one point, even mixed-race. This happened more so with them than the Irish, largely because the Italian’s darker complexion was attributed to the Carthaginian general Hannibal and the Moors. Nonetheless, Italians were not mixed race, and they most certainly were not Black. They were white, and, like the Irish and Jews, their whiteness enabled them to triumph over the intra-racial discrimination of white America. Also, like the Irish, they proved their loyalty through anti-Black bigotry.
There is a recurring theme in much of the immigrant hostility towards American Blacks, even the Black immigrants. Black Americans are deemed a threat—an opponent to their economic and social interests. For European immigrants in the Northern states, this was exacerbated by the Great Migration, in which Black people emigrated to the fully industrialized North in search of prosperity. They became instant competitors for the limited number of jobs. Ultimately, the whiteness of these new arrivals from Europe made them preferable.
The Italian-American community became associated with organized crime in the early 1900s, which has made this community self-conscious over the generations. However, the benefits of whiteness in a hierarchy springs eternal. Corruption and crime have been viable paths for marginalized whites to not only survive economically in their new country but to build a fortune. White criminals have been arrested, tried, and convicted (as is to be expected of anyone who commits crimes), but what is interesting is that the fortunes they were able to amass have been less precarious than the legitimate wealth built by African Americans.
Legal institutions like banking were practical means for whites to launder “dirty money.” It would logically follow that if banking, real estate, and other conventional legitimate avenues for investing discriminated against Black Americans, this crucial aspect of making organized crime successful was closed off to Black Americans. Many non-Black immigrants transformed their earnings during prohibition into legal profit, whereas Black crime figures like Casper Holstein, Madame Sinclair, and Bumpy Johnson were unable to take this route.
Some African Americans have used the white immigrant model as an example of what they can do through criminality, but this is just as delusional. The immigrant success story that involves criminals like the Kennedys or the Italian-American mafia are poor examples of what Black people can accomplish through organized crime; this is just another example of the model-immigrant myth. This myth wants you to believe that if immigrants can come here penniless and build something for themselves, then why can’t Blacks? The answer to why crime hasn’t paid as well for Black Americans is the same reason that serves as another example of structural racism. Building long-term sustainable wealth from illegal proceeds has required the same legitimate racist institutions that have discriminated against law-abiding Blacks.
It is well known that the RICO Act was passed to fight the Italian-American Mafia. This law, which stands for Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, was passed in 1970, and it allows for enhanced prison sentences if the crime was committed as part of an enterprise. Over the years, the paranoia over the Italian mob lessened, and of course, Black criminals re-emerged as the primary focus. Again, the Italian mob was able to bribe government officials, including police, while Black criminal activity remained, for the most part, unable to trade on the corruption of the legitimate world. The RICO Act was used to try Black men who acted individually as part of an enterprise, which allowed for lengthier sentences.
In a study by Jordan Blair Woods titled “Systemic Racial Bias and RICO’s Application to Criminal Street and Prison Gangs,” Woods conducted an empirical study of the RICO Act and how it was being used to target criminal street and prison gangs. Although European mobsters still exist (Italian, Russian, and Eastern European), Woods revealed that roughly 86% of the cases prosecuted under the RICO statute were street gangs affiliated with minorities. Today, the RICO Act is almost exclusively applied to gangs associated with minorities, even if the individual who committed a crime is not associated with a gang.
What is most revealing about the racist application of how the government treats organized crime based on race and ethnicity is the fact that no member of the Ku Klux Klan has ever been tried under the RICO statute. The Klan has carried out documented terrorist attacks that have included bombings, lynchings, kidnappings, rape, and the list goes on. Originally, the RICO Act was designed to prevent Catholics from getting into influential positions in government. The Klan has infiltrated the government; they have become business leaders, politicians, judges, prosecutors, and members of law enforcement.
Since the Italians and Irish have long overcome ethnic hostility, the laws that were put in place to persecute them were aggressively applied to Black Americans. These laws have a deleterious effect on the Black community. They compound its vulnerability by exacerbating the poverty and criminogenic conditions and factors that emanate from structural racism.
Jewish Success
While Jews were discriminated against by the larger Anglo-American society, their discrimination was never equal to that of African Americans. One example that illustrates this is the Seven Sisters Schools, in which a prominent feminist during the 1930s opposed Jewish professors being promoted and wanted to ban the entry of Black students. This is indicative of the soft discrimination that Jews faced in America compared to Black Americans. While Jews were allowed to become professors at white institutions (prestigious ones), Black Americans were not even allowed admission. The contrast points to how far the two groups had to go to get to the “top” and the degree of hostility both faced comparatively.
Class in America was never ethnicized like it was racialized. This is important for anyone trying to argue that the discrimination that Black Americans face is due to class. Jewish author Karen Brodkin writes in her book How Did Jews Become White Folks?:
Like most chicken and egg problems, it’s hard to know which came first. Did Jews and other Euroethnics become white because they became middle class? That is, did money whiten? Or did being incorporated in an expanded version of whiteness open up the economic doors to a middle-class status?
It was a synergy of both. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the category of “white” was opening up to include all Caucasian immigrants regardless of religion or ethnicity, while the softer practice of intra-racial discrimination did allow marginalized white immigrants to become middle-class with education and well-paying jobs. As pointed out throughout the book, this was never the case with Black Americans. The statistics show that the accouterments of class are calibrated to reflect racial stratification. E. Franklin Frazier, in The Black Bourgeoisie, excoriates the Black middle class as a shallow exhibition wherein they lack any real ownership in America.
Racial solidarity proved a potent neutralizer of intra-racial discrimination within white America for the Jews, just as it did for the Irish and Italians. Like the Irish and Italians, Jews were discriminated against by the larger Anglo-White America, but, like the Irish and Italians, the Jews were not deemed “non-white” after 1945, and they were able to trade on their whiteness in order to overcome ethnic and religious discrimination.
There was undoubtedly anti-Semitism in America, just as there was anti-Catholicism. However, Jews were never the antithesis of how American identity was constructed in this country.
For Brokin, her experience as the child of Jewish immigrants to the United States has taught her that to be successfully assimilated into America, one must become “white.” White skin and the Caucasian phenotype are currency, and anti-Black bigotry has been capital.