U.S. Africans In The Spotlight

As black immigrants in the United States of America feel connected to President-Elect Barack Obama's story. If President-Elect Barack Obama is in many ways unique, he's also part of a broader phenomenon. Immigrants from Africa, who claim the son of a Harvard-educated Kenyan father and a white American mother as one of their own, are starting to draw attention, both for their strong presence at elite colleges — where 13% of black students are first- or second-generation African immigrants — and for the rise of high-profile individuals. 'I definitely think that we're having an impact,' said Chioma Achebe, a Nigerian-American who is president of the Harvard African Students Association. 'The fact that a lot of us were brought up with these different strands of African culture woven into our experience, I think, makes us care a lot more about what's going on there,' she said, pointing to new initiatives at her school, including a fundraiser for clean water in African villages. 'And I think as time goes on we'll be even more of an influential group.'"

There are only about 880,000 African immigrants residing in the U.S., but they are a highly educated group. U.S. Census figures show that they are more likely to have a college degree (43.8% do) than Asian-Americans (42.5%) or the U.S. population as a whole (23.1%). "Our most educated immigrants come from Africa," said Camille Charles, a professor of sociology and African studies at the University of Pennsylvania whose research is the source of the statistic that 13% percent of black students at elite colleges are African immigrants.

Many see strong parallels with their own stories in the attitude of Obama's father, who came to the U.S. for college in Hawaii, left with a doctorate degree from Harvard, and badly wanted his American son to achieve academically. In one of the more telling passages in the younger Obama's memoir 'Dreams From My Father,' he recalls a visit from his father, also named Barack, when he was about 10. Young Barack was watching a long-awaited Christmas special on TV when his father told him to go to his room and study. It didn't matter that his son was a good student, or that he had apparently — the memoir isn't entirely clear on this point — finished his homework. If young Barack had done his homework, he could start on the next day's assignment, his father said. And if the boy had done the next day's assignment, he could move on to the work that would be due after winter vacation. As foreign as that reasoning may sound to many Americans, it draws chuckles of recognition from young people such as Abimbola Oladokun, a junior at the University of Chicago whose parents hail from Nigeria. 'When I'd get an A-, my dad was like, that's great, but you can do better,' said Ms. Oladokun, who also fondly remembers that her father used to squash requests that he considered excessive by reminding her that he walked to school, barefoot, in Nigeria. The message from her father wasn't harsh or negative, Ms. Oladokun said. He was telling her that she could do anything she wanted, regardless of the apparent obstacles: "The sky's the limit."

My response: The story about young Barack doing future homework assignments is hardly unique to immigrants. My family - as longtime Booker Rising readers know, my old-school Southern-born maternal grandparents raised me for certain reasons as I did not grow up with my mother or father - had the same attitudes as the African immigrant parents in this story, so I can identify with this story. So can most of the black folks who attended college with me. I remember bringing home 6 As and 1 B in high school, and my late Granddad was like, "Good grades, but you could've done better. What happened in this class?" My Granddad, who was the son of sharecroppers in rural Arkansas, would tell us about how they would walk miles to school, sometimes barefoot, too. Both of my grandparents urged me to take advantage of opportunities that they did not have due to Jim Crow in the South, and later the rampant discrimination when they moved to Chicago.

Nor are high expectations only a black immigrant story. Both sides of my family participated in the Great Migration. Three of my grandparents later attended college, and two of them (my maternal grandmother and my paternal grandfather) have Master's degrees. There is a solid military and educator history on my maternal side (my maternal great-great-grandfather was the first college graduate on both sides of the family), and a solid civil rights and political history on my paternal side (I'm the granddaughter of a local civil rights leader, and related to Chicago's first black independent alderman and the Illinois State Senator behind Illinois' seat-belt law). Maybe that's why I now have a Master's degree, and I even have relatives encouraging me to get a Ph.D. LOL. The only thing I can't identify with in this article are the strong personal ties to the African continent, but that's due to (1) the legacy of slavery and thus (2) my ancestors left Africa at least nine generations ago.