Ten years after arriving in the United States as a refugee, Daniel Majok Gai, one of the famed Lost Boys of Sudan, is back in Africa. Now 30, Gai is on a quest to build a sustainable education system in his homeland.
Armed with bachelor degrees in psychology and sociology from the University of Colorado at Denver and a year-long, representative in residence position for NGO, Project Education Sudan, Gai presents the sort of immigration success story that makes philanthropists ecstatic — and elicits worry in other corners that U.S. born African-Americans will be viewed as inferior to their immigrant kin.
By all accounts, those concerns are valid.
“The same conversation took place in the 70s when African-Americans were compared to Jamaicans,” says Charles Gallagher, PhD, professor of sociology and chair of the sociology and criminal justice program at La Salle University. “‘Why are Jamaicans doing so well? What’s wrong with these blacks from the United States?’ This kind of narrative emerges every time there’s a new immigrant group that comes to the United States that’s black.”
In 2007, Camille Zubrinsky Charles, PhD, professor of sociology and director of The Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, coauthored a study that showed black immigrants or their U.S. born children comprise a disproportionate number of black students at top universities. Although four years have elapsed, she says the data are still relevant, and she agrees with Gallagher’s observation that findings such as hers tend to be oversimplified.
“I get frustrated because what ends up happening is that the conversation very quickly devolves into American blacks have bad culture and immigrant blacks have good culture,” Charles says. “We’re comparing apples to oranges. When we look at the immigrant black population, we’re looking at a subset. These are the people with the wherewithal to leave everything they knew for something different, something better. They’re here for a particular reason and that reason is upward economic mobility.”
“When we look at the domestic black population, we get all of it. Yet [many] assume immigrants place greater value on education or on work ethic,” Charles adds. “We underestimate the motivation, the potential and the desire of black Americans, particularly those who disadvantaged. We’re too quick to believe that blacks from other places are better.”
