I appreciate your honesty about your desire to create, in essence, what would be a separate black ethno-state. I’ll quote what you wrote:
“I have a goal of achieving defined ethnic groups in the US. Blacks need community with mutual aid, community leadership, defined ethnic foods etc. Assimilating has only caused the Black communities pain, anguish, violence, and poverty. The future is to treat our experience here more as a new immigrants and less as established Americans.”
I have numerous issues with this.
First, “black” is not an ethnicity any more than “white” is. These are large and ill-defined “racial” umbrella terms that most biologists believe do not even have any biological — as opposed to sociological — reality:
As I explained in my previous response to you, there is widespread variation in income, education and all kinds of other relevant aspects of life within the group known as “black,” and the same holds true for “white,” “Asian” or “Hispanic,” of course. When you speak of “blacks” needing “defined ethnic foods,” for instance, I haven’t the faintest idea what this means. It would be like saying that Asians need defined ethnic foods, whereupon I’d point out, of course, that the ethnic foods of Asians from Japan vs. Asians from Western China vs. Asians from Indonesia vs. Asians from the South of India are completely different. The same is true of “typical” multi-generational blacks from the U.S., Creole-ancestry blacks from New Orleans, blacks from Jamaica, blacks from the Dominican Republic, blacks from Brazil, blacks from Nigeria, blacks from Ethiopia, etc. There just isn’t one ethnic diet for “blacks.” And I’m talking about food because it’s easy to talk about, but also because it’s a microcosm of everything else. The idea that “blacks” within an ethno-state (or ethnic subdivision within the United States) have clear and similar preferences, whether about food or about anything else, is plainly incorrect. There may be some appearance of uniformity while we still have this blacks-vs.-whites dynamic going, but as soon as an “ethnic” blacks-only community gets created, all the inner fissures and tensions will manifest themselves.
If, on the other hand, you’re imagining a more nuanced subdivision of ethnic groups — separate ethno-communities or states for American blacks, for West African blacks, for Caribbean blacks, etc. — or a still more fine breakdown — separate ethno-communities for Nigerian blacks, for blacks from the Ivory Coast, for blacks from Cameroon, etc. — then I’d really wonder what this would mean in terms of any conception of national sovereignty. Without integration, there is no nation. A nation is, first and foremost, a cultural unity. As the cultural theorist Benedict Anderson argued, a nation is “imagined” into being through the sharing of common cultural ties. Break the nation apart into these small ethnic communities, and what you get is a bunch of warring principalities. You get something like the former Austro-Hungarian Empire or the former Yugoslavia, an unintegrated, multi-lingual, multicultural, multi-ethnic society that eventually fragments permanently.
That’s only my first major issue with your vision, though. The second is that I believe you’re empirically wrong. You say that “[a]ssimilating has only caused the Black communities pain, anguish, violence, and poverty.” The data tells a different story. I have repeatedly seen studies showing that the most integrated blacks are the most successful. For instance, I’d suggest you examine the first chart (and some of the other information) in this presentation of data concerning states with the highest black-white integration levels as compared to black income and education levels:
The correlation between integration and these other measures of achievement is clear. The same is true about school integration. Data shows that blacks in integrated schools:
- have higher average test scores
- are more likely to enroll in college
- are less likely to drop out
- are less likely to suffer from a racial achievement gap
- have higher self-reported satisfaction and intellectual self-confidence
- suffer from fewer racial biases and stereotypes
- are more likely to seek out integrated settings later in life; and
- have better leadership skills
In fact, school integration has been shown to be a more effective intervention than putting more money into an impoverished school: “One study of students in Montgomery County, Maryland, found that students living in public housing randomly assigned to lower-poverty neighborhoods and schools outperformed those assigned to higher-poverty neighborhoods and schools — even though the higher-poverty schools received extra funding per pupil.”
I would add one last point. Most new immigrant groups to America — Italians, Irish, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, Chinese, Jews — were poor and heavily discriminated against when they lived in ethnic neighborhoods, i.e., ethnic ghettos, in which they lived in often impoverished, unsanitary and otherwise deplorable conditions. It’s only once these groups worked their way into the middle class and beyond and moved out of their ethnic ghettos and into integrated neighborhoods and communities that the prejudices against them dissipated, until we got to the point where, today, most people from these groups are doing quite well in most respects. By way of contrast, unintegrated groups and neighborhoods are usually far more impoverished. Look at black American ghettos. Look at the Hassidic Jewish ghetto town of Kiryas Joel, the poorest town in America, where more than two-thirds of the residents live below the poverty line. Look at the state of the French and Belgian suburbs (“banlieues”), where unintegrated Arabs live in poverty. I can see this pattern very clearly living in New York City. The poorer people here largely live in ghettos or ethnic communities, and when they have an opportunity to move up and out into the more integrated areas of the city, they do. At that point, their children grow up with far more opportunities than they had. Integration, not segregation, is the recipe for success. And yet I fear we’re going in the exact opposite direction.
