The Other African Americans

Black North America is ethnically and culturally diverse.It contains many groups who do not call themselves or have not always called themselves "Negro," "Black," "African-American," and so forth, such as Louisiana Creoles of color and many of the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi.There are also numerous North American ethnic groups of African descent whose ancestors came as free people from Jamaica, Nigeria, Haiti, Cuba, and so forth.In the United States, such groups encounter a system of classifying race and stereotypes about people of African descent that differ substantially from those in their native lands.This essay concerns the responses of these ethnic groups to contemporary North American conceptions of race, as well as their role in creating and reshaping these conceptions.This article challenges the current in the social sciences that dismisses "race" as an invalid analytic construct, it proposes an alternative to the unilinear "assimilation" model that is ct,i..morily presumed to chart the historical experience of immigrants to North America.It 1J proposed that there are at least two tracks of immigrant assimilation in the United States--one "white" and taken for granted, and the other "black."Of particular interest to educators are reflections on the role of schools in the diverse channels of assimilation, the allegedly different socioeconomic and academic performance of immigrant and native blacks, and the struggle over who should benefit from forms of hiring and school admissions intended to remedy racial discrimination.(Contains 81 references.)(Author/SLD)