Links to news that matters to you.
- Several stories this week focus on the tensions within the Black community, especially those tensions that focus on recent immigrants or their descendants. The Oregonian reports on divisions and stereotypes among college students. “Instead of focusing on similarities, insecurities and tensions surface based on long-standing stereotypes about one another, students say.”
- Part of the problem is that immigrants from Africa or the West Indies appear to have “better chances to assimilate”. In fact, according to the Carib World News from New York, a new study from professors at Harvard and CUNY suggests that the children of West Indian immigrants earn considerably more than native- born African-Americans or Hispanics, and are less likely to be in segregated workplaces. Indeed, “of the immigrant second-generation groups surveyed, - Dominican, West Indian, South American, Chinese and Russian-Jewish immigrants - West Indians were most likely to vote and be engaged with New York’s civic life.”
- But what of Barack Obama, the child of an African father who has clearly left debates about his Blackness behind? Veteran economist Frank Mwine on Politicsincolor says that an Obama victory could help end tribalism in both America and Africa.
- The largest newspaper from Obama’s father’s homeland, Kenya, agrees. Nairobi’s the Nation speaks to Kenyans in America and elsewhere to get a sense of what they would expect from an Obama presidency.
- But there are some sharply dissenting voices. In that paper’s Zimbabwean counterpart, its embattled President’s chief spokesman writes a column that attacks both the American ambassador to Zimbabwe, and, by extension, Obama, as representing “White interests”. He adds: “many self-respecting African-African Americans resent being identified with these Black pastes on America’s stripes and stars”. Continue reading
