Drawing Upon the Diaspora

Immigrant-Origin Blacks Gaining Presence at Elite Institutions

By Ronald Roach

Callie Watkins entered Harvard University looking forward to interacting with a diverse student population. The freshman was one of more than

120 Black students to enter Harvard in 2001, most of whom, she figured, would be U.S.-born. Instead what she found proved to be the exact opposite — most of the Black students were either immigrants, children of immigrants, or hailed directly from foreign countries. U.S.-born Blacks from non-immigrant families constituted a distinct minority, even within the Black population.

“I expected there would be many more Blacks from families that had a long history in America going back to slavery. There must have been about 30 or so in that category,” says Watkins, who has roots in the Cape Verde islands on her mother’s side and the United States on her father’s side. “I was in a middle category, and I floated between the different groups of Black students.”

So it didn’t come as a surprise to Watkins when Harvard professors Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Lani Guinier pointed out during a Black alumni gathering in 2003 that the children of African and Caribbean immigrants and children of biracial couples together comprised two-thirds of Harvard’s Black undergraduate population. Of the university’s 530 Black undergraduates during the 2003-2004 academic year, only about 180 could claim a completely Black American heritage. Those remarks, bringing to light a little-discussed issue in affirmative action, surfaced last year in the national news media.  

Writing in the Boston Globe in July 2004, Guinier contended that “many colleges rely on private networks that disproportionately benefit the children of African and West Indian immigrants who come from majority Black countries and who arrived in the United States after 1965. … Like their wealthier White counterparts, many first- and second-generation immigrants of color test well because they retain a national identity free of America’s racial caste system and enjoy material and cultural advantages, including professional or well-educated parents.”