I. A Historical Analysis. part 2 Essay - 3,164 words

... get an admissions boost without having faced the historical suffering of U.S. blacks. Jason Lee, the Harvard group's president, pointed the fact that there has always been a tension between the representation of the both black Americans and immigrants. He said that immigrants disrespect black Americans; parents don't allow their kids to play with them warring that bad habits rubbing off on them. He emphasized that a lot of immigrants think though they share the same skin color with African Americans they come from different backgrounds with different cultures.


From the historic point of view discriminations based on race and on gender are the same. They were the result of slavery (in direct and indirect meaning). From the other hand Adjei-Brenyah, the president of the African Students Association at Columbia, proves that drawing an admissions distinction based on suffering under slavery is false; because there are a lot of immigrants who suffer under slavery. He argued that "If you're going to make a slavery case, people from the Caribbean were also displaced and enslaved. How do you begin to differentiate?" Most of all, living in Africa is 100 times worse than America ever was. Is it right if people shouldnt be admitted because they havent gone through suffering? 3. Nowadays, the affirmative action is being debating as a part of the process of democracy.


Opponents said that nowadays African Americans are in an unfavorable situation. Why they should immigrant receive racial privileges as soon as they get off the plane? They say that immigrant minority has more advantages today than African Americans. Others argue diversity is its own reward and as long as the opportunities of access to quality higher education are available to all, it should not matter that they are recent immigrants or descendants of slaves. Yet opponents typically attack at quotas strongest emotional pointthat they are somehow compensation for the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crowrather than their weakest pointthe Bizarro World aspect of giving privileges to newcomers. Proponents of affirmative action argue that because of prior discrimination in education immigrants will be in worse situation than Native blacks when they seek decent jobs, look for promotions or apply to good schools. They believe that colleges and employees ought to give some sort of preferred treatment to immigrant minorities, either by seeking minority applicants or by setting up a quarter of jobs or school spaces reserved for them. In this aspect all the forms of discrimination are the same.


But, frankly speaking, there are another side of the medal. Some people and students point the fact that affirmative action at Harvard doesnt do anything significant for poor blacks, from here or abroad. Even Harvards American black students tend to come from well-to-do families. Other studies also demonstrate similar findings. In a study regarding divisions between African immigrants and black Americans, Howard Ph.D. candidate Msia Kibona Clark, conducted several interviews among black (native-born and immigrant) college students and residents of the Washington, D.C. area. One interviewee, who was originally from Washington D.C.


but attended Princeton, remarked that most of the black students at Princeton were upper middle class African and Caribbean immigrants whose parents could offset the cost of their educational expenses, and says, in conclusion, that theres a deep class divide amongst African and African American students at predominately white universities" (Pailey, "Students Study"). The author, Suzanne Wu, noted that in comparison to their American-born black counterparts, black immigrant students were more likely to have attended private school. The authors also found that "Black immigrant fathers were far more likely to have graduated from college" than the fathers of American blacks. Indeed, many had received their college degree in the United States (Wu, "Immigrants Comprise"). Another difference that commentators writing on the study noted, though that was not explicitly stated in the study, involves work ethic. As a direct result of pressure to succeed, many black immigrants, much like immigrants from other nations, outperform their American peers.


According to U.S. census data from 2000, black immigrants from Africa averaged the highest educational attainment of any population group in the country, with 43.8% of African immigrants having attained a degree at an institution of higher learning in comparison to 42.5% of Asian-Americans, 28.9% of immigrants from Europe and Canada, and 23.1 of the entire U.S. population (Page, "Black Immigrants Collect"). In addition, black immigrants make up 40% of the black student population enrolled in Ivy League education institutions, while they only comprise 13 percent of the black population in the United States as a whole (Wu, "Immigrants Comprise"). The biggest problem in analyzing studies like the one presently at hand is attempting to do so through the lens of commentators, many of whom have an agenda of their own. With each additional piece of information regarding the study, the previous claims of the vast differences between black American and black immigrant college students became les ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: immigrant, black american, affirmative action, black students, american

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