We’re Self-Interested’: The Growing Identity Debate in Black America
Why a movement that claims to support the American descendants of slavery is being promoted by conservatives and attacked on the left.
By
Farah Stockman
- Nov. 8, 2019, 5:00 a.m. ET
In Hollywood, Harriet Tubman is played in a new movie by
a black British woman, much to the annoyance of some black Americans. On the United States census, an ultrawealthy Nigerian immigrant and a struggling African-American woman from the South are expected to check the same box. When many American universities tout their diversity numbers, black students who were born in the Bronx and the Bahamas are counted as the same.
A spirited debate is playing out in black communities across America over the degree to which identity ought to be defined by African heritage — or whether ancestral links to slavery are what should count most of all.
Tensions between black Americans who descended from slavery and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are not new, but a group of online agitators is trying to turn those disagreements into a political movement.
They want colleges, employers and the federal government to prioritize black Americans whose ancestors toiled in bondage, and they argue that affirmative action policies originally designed to help the descendants of slavery in America have largely been used to benefit other groups, including immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.
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The American descendants of slavery, they say, should have their own racial category on census forms and college applications, and not be lumped in with others with similar skin color but vastly different lived experiences.
The group, which calls itself ADOS, for the American Descendants of Slavery, is small in number, with active supporters estimated to be in the thousands. But the discussion they are provoking is coursing through conversations far and wide.
Those who embrace its philosophy point to disparities between black people who immigrated to the United States voluntarily, and others whose ancestors were brought in chains.
Roughly 10 percent of the 40 million black people living in the United States were born abroad,
according to the Pew Research Center, up from 3 percent in 1980. African immigrants
are more likely to have college degrees than blacks and whites who were born in the United States.
A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Education found that 41 percent of black freshmen at Ivy League colleges were immigrants or the children of immigrants, even though those groups represent 13 percent of the black population in the United States.
In 2017, black students at Cornell University protested for the admission of more “underrepresented black students,” who they defined as black Americans with several generations in the United States. “There is a lack of investment in black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America,” the
students wrote to the president of the university.
University administrators say that black students from other countries contribute to increased diversity on campus, even if their admittance does not mitigate the injustices of American slavery. Many black immigrant groups are also descended from slavery in other countries.
The film producer Tariq Nasheed is among the outspoken defenders of the idea that the American descendants of slavery should have their own ethnic identity.
“Every other group when they get here goes out of their way to say, ‘I’m Jamaican. I’m Nigerian. I’m from Somalia,’” he said. “But when we decide to say, ‘O.K. We are a distinct ethnic group,’ people look at that as negative.”
This year, responding to requests for “more detailed, disaggregated data for our diverse American experience,” the
Census Bureau announced that African-Americans will be able to list their origins on census forms for the first time, instead of simply checking “Black.”
The goal of ADOS’s two founders — Antonio Moore, a Los Angeles defense attorney, and Yvette Carnell, a former aide to Democrat lawmakers in Washington — is to harness frustrations among black Americans by seizing on the nation’s shifting demographics.
Embracing their role as insurgents, Mr. Moore and Ms. Carnell held their first national conference in October, and have made reparations for the brutal system of slavery upon which the United States was built a key tenet of their platform.
Their movement has also become a lightning rod for criticism on the left. Its skepticism of immigration sometimes strikes a tone similar to that of President Trump. And the group has fiercely attacked the Democratic Party, urging black voters to abstain from voting for the next Democratic presidential nominee unless he or she produces a specific economic plan for the nation’s ADOS population.
Such tactics have led some to accuse the group of sowing division among African-Americans and engaging in a form of voter suppression not unlike the voter purges and gerrymandering efforts pushed by some Republicans.
“Not voting will result in another term of Donald Trump,” said Brandon Gassaway, national press secretary of the Democratic National Committee.
Shireen Mitchell, the founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, has been embroiled in an online battle with ADOS activists for months. Ms. Mitchell contends that the group’s leaders are “using reparations as a weapon” to make Mr. Trump more palatable to black voters. Others have pointed out that Ms. Carnell once appeared on her YouTube channel in a “Make America Great Again” hat.
Over a thousand people attended the group’s first national conference, hosted by Simmons College of Kentucky. Guest speakers included Marianne Williamson, a white self-help author who has made reparations a key plank of her platform as a minor Democratic presidential candidate, as well as Cornel West, a black Harvard professor who said ADOS is giving a voice to working-class black people.
asked Talib Kweli Greene, a rapper and activist who has become a vocal opponent of the group. “Get out of here!”
Recently, Hollywood has become the source of much of the frustration around the dividing line between United States-born African-Americans and black immigrants. When the black British actress Cynthia Erivo was hired to play the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the
casting received immediate backlash. Similarly, the filmmaker Jordan Peele has been
criticized for hiring Lupita Nyong’o, who is Kenyan, and Daniel Kaluuya, who is British, to play African-American characters in his movies.
But Mr. Moore, 39, and Ms. Carnell, 44, say they are not scapegoating black immigrants or trying to lead black voters astray. They say they are merely demanding something tangible from Democrats in exchange for votes and trying to raise awareness around the economic struggles of many black Americans.
an Institute for Policy Studies report that predicted the median wealth of black families would drop to zero by 2053. Mr. Moore had been talking about some of the same studies on his own YouTube channel. The two joined forces in 2016 and coined the term ADOS, which spread as a hashtag on social media.
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sheeit, can somebody please give me a link to where i can buy that ADOS sweater homeboy is wearing?
? Do you really need the concept of family, blood ties, ethnicity and sexual reproduction explained to you? This is why I know most of yall on here have to be whites pretending bc not even c00ns sound this retarded.
gonna have the same dna as someone who just came from west africa
?