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By David Crary, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — They range from surgeons and
scholars to illiterate refugees from some of the world's worst hellholes
— a dizzyingly varied stream of African immigrants to the United
States. More than 1 million strong and growing, they are enlivening
America's cities and altering how the nation confronts its racial
identity.
Some nurture dreams of returning to Africa for
good one day. But many are casting their lot permanently in America,
trying to assimilate even as they and their children struggle to learn
where they fit in a country where black-white relations are a perpetual
work-in-progress.
"To white people, we are all black," said Wanjiru
Kamau, a Kenyan-born community activist in Washington, D.C. "But as
soon as you open your mouth to some African-Americans, they look at you
and wonder why you are even here.
"Except for the skin, which is just a facade,
there is very little in common between Africans and African-Americans.
We need to sit down and listen to each other's story."
The 2000 Census recorded 881,300 U.S. residents
who were born in Africa. By 2005, the number had reached 1.25 million,
according Brookings Institution researcher Jill Wilson.
Since 1990, the African population has more than
tripled in places as far-flung as Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis,
where Africans now constitute more than 15% of the black population. The
biggest magnets are New York City and greater Washington, including its
Maryland and Virginia suburbs; Wilson estimates that the African-born
population in each area has soared past 130,000.
As director of the African Immigrant and Refugee
Foundation, Kamau deals with some of the most hard-off newcomers —
dispossessed refugees from Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and
other war-ravaged countries. They have been arriving at a pace of
roughly 20,000 a year. Many of those from rural areas have never before
used modern appliances and, in some cases, can't read or write their
native languages, let alone English, she said.
"I cry a lot when I see the people being settled
here," Kamau said. "Some are very frustrated, because the culture is so
different from what they know."
The flip side of the refugee influx is a wave of
sophisticated professionals who also are making their way to the United
States. Census data from 2000 shows 43% of Africans in the U.S. have
college degrees, higher than the adult population as a whole. Compared
to African-Americans, the immigrants' average household income is higher
and their jobless rate lower.
They include hardworking couples such as Tigist
Mengesha and her husband, Girum — Ethiopians trying to build their own
version of the American dream in the mostly black suburb of Suitland,
Md.
Girum, 36, was granted asylum in the U.S. in 2002 because of political tensions in Ethiopia.
Tigist joined him two years later, bringing their sons Biniyam and Fitsum, now 7 and 6.
The family had lived comfortably in the Ethiopian
capital of Addis Ababa, with their own walled home and servants to look
after the children while Girum worked as a bank manager and Tigist as
an executive secretary.
In Washington, Girum had to resume his banking
career at the bottom, as a teller, but has worked his way up to
assistant manager and is pursuing a master's degree at a business
college.
Tigist is a family counselor at a Head Start
center, advising many Ethiopians as well as a few African-American
parents. "In some ways, life is harder here," she said. "But we have
hope — we are adjusting ourselves to the new situation."
She notes that they can't afford hired help and
scramble to raise their sons while working full-time. On the bright
side, however, they recently bought a townhouse.
Tigist said her relations with African-Americans
have mostly been amicable, though on occasion she has sensed
ill-feelings. "Some people, they treat you as if you don't know
anything," she said, "as if you're from the jungle."
Lack of knowledge can cut both ways. Tigist is
gradually learning details of America's racial history, even watching
the TV mini-series "Roots."
"I feel bad about that racism — but when I come
here now, I didn't feel it at all. I would never think someone would
discriminate against me," she said. "I don't have any bad feelings for
black Americans, but I am not one of them. ... I'm not a black American,
I'm not a white American. I'm an Ethiopian."
Democratic president candidate Barak Obama, son
of a black Kenyan father and white American mother, has wrestled with
similar issues. Some skeptics have doubted whether his background will
appeal to black voters, and he recalled in his memoirs that he was
rebuffed by national civil rights groups when he was younger.
Jacqueline Copeland-Carson, an African-American
scholar with Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the
University of Minnesota, is optimistic that African immigrants and
African-Americans will outgrow any strains, which she blames partly on
stereotypes.
"Some Africans view African-Americans as violent,
lazy, intellectually inferior — U.S. blacks are taught that the
Africans are less civilized, not as capable," she said.
"As people get to know each other in churches and
mosques and community associations, they're beginning to realize
they've been taught lies about each other. They're starting to
understand they share many things in common."
In the District of Columbia, as in some other
cities, there has been occasional friction between recently arrived
Africans and the entrenched, politically powerful black American
community.
Some African-Americans bristled at a proposal —
subsequently withdrawn — to officially nickname a bustling one-block
stretch of 9th Street as "Little Ethiopia." More broadly, civic leaders
say there is some resentment among working-class African-Americans who
view the newcomers as threats to their jobs in such fields as health
care, civil service and hotel work.
"Sometimes it's very overwhelming to the
African-American community," said Abdulaziz Kamus, an Ethiopian-born
activist who works on numerous immigrant issues. "They feel threatened
that we are coming here and demanding jobs. If I was an
African-American, I would feel the same thing."
In an overture to the newcomers, the city
government last year formed an Office of African Affairs. But even this
gesture ruffled some feathers — not all black American leaders felt it
was needed, and some Africans say they have been disappointed by a lack
of dynamism in the office's first few months of operation.
Bobby Austin, a vice president at the University
of the District of Columbia, has been one of a relative handful of
prominent African-Americans in the city to delve deeply into the
tensions and misunderstandings. He and Kamus have promoted townhall
dialogues between members of the two communities; some sessions are to
be shown on a local cable channel this summer.
American blacks, Austin said, do not see themselves as immigrants and often do not comprehend the Africans' desire to come here.
"We are going to have to learn a new narrative,"
Austin said. "We will have to learn to work with them, and they will
have to learn to work with us."
While African-Americans trace their presence in
America back to the slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries, the
modern surge of Africans dates to the post-independence era of the 1960s
and '70s. Persistent conflict and corrupt government in much of Africa
prompted more to follow in subsequent years, and the surge increased in
the 1990s due to the Diversity Visa Lottery, a federal program boosting
immigration from countries that traditionally sent few people.
The largest groups of Africans in the U.S. are
from Nigeria, Ethiopia and Ghana, but the influx is diverse. The refugee
program, for example, is accepting people from roughly two-dozen
African countries each year; more than 200,000 African refugees have
been taken in since 1980.
Some Americans, black and white, assume the
Africans must share a common culture and outlook with one another, when
in fact they may feel no deep bond with another ethnic group from their
own country, let alone with Africans from distant corners of the
continent. Immigrant leaders trying to encourage solidarity among
Africans have found that task challenging.
There has been a wide range of cultural clashes —
some serious, some bemusing — as the new Africans fan out across the
country. Some polygamous families have managed to settle in the U.S.,
despite laws forbidding that. Women's rights activists and health
officials have been on the lookout for cases of female circumcision —
illegal in the U.S. but a common practice in some African regions.
Wanjiru Kamau, the Kenyan activist, says many
newly arrived Africans find American culture bewildering. She tells them
not to look down, but into the eyes of a person they are speaking to;
she has fielded complaints that African nurses, accustomed to the
relative din of hospitals in their homelands, talk too loudly on the job
in America.
"That's how they talk where they came from," Kamau said. "Sometimes we fail to realize where we are."
Nurses and doctors are among the tens of
thousands of well-trained Africans who have settled in America —
contributing to concerns that a brain drain to Europe and the U.S. is
depriving Africa of badly needed talent. Some of the expatriates say
they are doing more good in the United States, where African immigrants
earn enough to send back an estimated $3 billion a year to relatives in
their homelands.
"The conditions at home often make it difficult
to go back," said Nigerian native Ike Udogu, a professor at Appalachian
State University who came to North Carolina 36 years ago.
"Here, there are great facilities," he said. "You simply want to do your work in a society where your life is not in danger."
Udogu has a thoroughly Americanized son who just
finished college in Indiana. Likewise with Ghana-born Kukuwa Nuamah, 49,
of Vienna, Va., a performer and instructor of African dance whose two
daughters have completed college in Virginia.
"You can't hear one African accent from our
children," Nuamah said. "They go back to Africa and get to know the
culture there. When they are here, they feel fully American. ... They
have both worlds."
In greater Washington, the Ethiopian and Nigerian
communities are large enough so that immigrants could isolate
themselves and minimize contact with American culture.
"For me, that's not healthy," said Abdulaziz
Kamus, who has tried to encourage African taxi drivers — and other
immigrants — to become politically engaged,
"You could be here 20 years, but if you don't start participating, you're not part of America," he said.
"What excites me every day is that I could go
protest without fear of deportation or being sent to prison. ... I could
lobby, jump up and down, start my own business, and nobody could
question me. The country I was not even born in is allowing me to
dream."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
SOURCE: USTODAY
