a1811: VOA: Black Community Multi-Ethnic w/ Immigrants : significant Haiti focus

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

National, Ethnic Identity Creates Tension Between US Blacks
Andrew J. Baroch
Washington
27 Apr 2002 15:25 UTC


Black immigration from Africa and the Caribbean to the
United States is turning America's black population into a
multi-ethnic, immigrant community. The change has led to
increased tensions between native-born African Americans
and foreign-born blacks who settle in the United States.

In the 1950's and '60's, many African Americans considered
themselves a united community, bound by a common skin color
and a strong desire to end segregation, confront racism,
and guarantee their civil rights.

Marvin Dunn, who is African American, is the chairman of
the psychology department at Florida International
University. He said the portrayal of African-Americans as a
unified community appears to be changing.

"As the era of segregation [of whites and blacks] ended by
the mid-1960's, here at least in south Florida, we found
that other kinds of divisions were evolving between people
that seemed to have nothing at all to do with skin color.
Rather, the new divide had to do with ethnicity and
national identity more so than race," Mr. Dunn said.

The divisions are most prevalent in some of America's
larger cities: Miami, New York, Boston, and Chicago, where
black immigrants have been settling since the 1980's.
William Frey is a demographer at the University of
Michigan.

"There's been a relatively dramatic increase in
foreign-born populations in New York and some increase in
some of the other east-coast cities. Some of the bigger
countries you can identify [immigrants are natives of] are
Caribbean places like Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican
Republic, Trinidad, and then some African places like Ghana
and Nigeria," Mr. Frey said.

He said that black immigrants make up only about eight
percent of the America's approximately 33 million blacks.
But in Miami, immigrants represent 48 percent of the black
population, and one-third of blacks in New York City and
Boston.

Florida International's Marvin Dunn said that African
American communities in those cities are changing
radically, with the black population essentially divided
between American-born blacks and foreign-born blacks. He
said that Miami-area tensions between these two groups have
been building since the 1980's.

"We [researchers] found that for the most part, that black
Americans were not welcoming when Haitians arrived in the
early 1980s, complaining about Haitians taking their jobs,
or claiming they were bringing AIDS into the community,
etc. On the other hand, there's a certain
'look-down-the-nose' attitude that one gets from certain
Caribbean blacks towards African Americans that I think is
offensive [to American blacks] and understandably so - that
is the view that African Americans are violent, don't want
to work, are lazy. Some of the things you hear from white
racists you hear from blacks who are not African
Americans," Mr. Dunn said. Gary Pierre-Pierre is the editor
of The Haitian Times newspaper in New York City. His
parents left Haiti when he was eight years old. He has
vivid memories of his arrival.


Gary Pierre-Pierre
"I told my mom, 'Wow, there are a lot of Haitians in New
York. I didn't know there were so many Haitians.' They were
all black Americans. To me, I didn't know any difference,"
Mr. Pierre-Pierre said. But the boy's parents had strongly
negative feelings.

"Your parents said, 'Don't play with these black kids.
They'll be a bad influence on you,'" he explained.

Mr. Pierre-Pierre said his parents and other first
generation Haitians somehow thought they were better than
the black Americans who lived in the same poor
neighborhoods.

"You [as a Haitian immigrant] were living among the
underclass. You were part of the underclass - although you
may think of yourself as some middleclass, petty bourgeois
with a lot of education. Well, that's back in Haiti. In New
York and New Jersey, you were a poor immigrant as far as
the status quo was concerned," Mr. Pierre-Pierre said.

And where do things stand today between Haitians and black
Americans in New York and New Jersey? "At school, there
still are a lot of problems. I just read that in Asbury
Park, New Jersey, there were problems with black American
and Haitian kids fighting," Mr. Pierre-Pierre said.

Marvin Dunn of Florida International University reports
similar clashes in south Florida high schools. "So it's not
a healthy situation. But I tell you, as these things go in
south Florida, so may they go in the country. The entire
nation is being impacted by immigrant groups coming in,
particularly immigrant groups of color, into communities -
and ethnic clashes, even within the same race groups, are
becoming more common across the country," he said.

According to Professor Dunn, the tension between immigrants
and native blacks can be "hurtful, emotionally and
psychologically." But he said those tensions are a classic
part of the immigrant story - arriving groups face
hostility until they become assimilated into American
society. And according to Haitian Times Editor Gary
Pierre-Pierre, it takes time, but he's confident it will
work itself out.


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