Let’s start with some data:
| ace; | Black Americans | Jamaicans (in US) | Nigerians (in US) |
| Median household income | $51,286 | $62,044 | $52,000 |
| Poverty rate | 17.5% | 11.2% |
Source for information on Jamaicans
Source for information on Nigerians
Source for information on black Americans
Since the category “black Americans” is inclusive of Jamaicans and Nigerians in the United States and their incomes are higher and poverty rates lower than for black Americans generally, that means the lower incomes and higher poverty rate for black Americans exclusive of Jamaicans and Nigerians are even more disparate.
Most black Americans are what the late sociologist Charles Moskas called “Afro-Americans”—blacks the descendants of American slaves. While there are genetic differences among Afro-Americans, Jamaicans, and Nigerians to be sure, there are cultural differences among them as well. Anyone who numbers Afro-Americans, Jamaicans, and Nigerians among their friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, should be able to tell you that.
I don’t attribute the differences in income, poverty, crime, incarceration rates, etc. among these three groups to genetics. I attribute them to cultural factors. I further think that we need to focus our attention on Afro-Americans rather than on Jamaicans or Nigerians. Unfortunately, the solutions we have utilized to help black Americans have actually benefited Jamaicans and Nigerians at the expense of Afro-Americans (I think that white folk dig the accents).
“Anyone who numbers Afro-Americans, Jamaicans, and Nigerians among their friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, should be able to tell you that.”
You bet. Although my personal experience is underweighted with Jamaicans and overweighted with Nigerians and Sudanese.
I couldn’t endorse your last paragraph more.
Per 2022 numbers 700,000 Nigerians live in the US with about arriving after 2000. About 1.2 million Jamaicans and 70,000 Sudanese. A bit over 50% of white American earn over the median US income and a bit less than 1/3 of Black Americans. If you look at media incomes for black vs whites it’s as of 2022 about 65%-70% of median white income as opposed to about 50% in 1950, before the civil rights changes.
So there arent enough Nigerians and Jamaicans to account for that 1/3 now over median income. What we have really seen is that a substantial percentage of the black population has benefitted from eh changes that have happened while there has also developed a kind of permanent underclass. The reasons for that are not entirely clear though many have an opinion.
Steve
https://images.app.goo.gl/qF4r8onP26Kd84qVA
(Map of A. A. Distribution in the U.S.)
It just looks to me that the majority still live in the area where their ancestors were living in slavery, became tenant farmers, the industry mechanized, and they became generational welfare recipients.
Even among those from the great migration north, in rust belt cities, the times left them behind, and they stayed.
But you are looking at statistics, I would note that there are many millions of white Americans who also have been left behind, and many, many successful Whites emigrated after slavery ended, just like the Black Americans you have noted.
But you are still dividing the Black population by ethnicity, and not doing so for Whites, which gives you a skewed perspective.
Sorry, but genetics is the basic cause. What we do see is a “boiling off” of high IQ blacks from both American ghettoes and foreign countries. The Obamas are a good example, as is Harris’s father. But the residue in the ghettos is genetically stupid, genetically violent, and genetically impulsive. They are a subspecies of Homo sapiens.
If you refuse to recognize the pervasive effects of genetics on human behavior, you cannot understand our culture, economics, or politics.
So now I understand that my genetic baldness is the cause of my poor human behavior!! Watch out!!
That there is a genetic basis for the problems of blacks in inner cities is refuted by actual results. If the causes were genetic there would be fewer distinctions among urban vs. rural blacks, Jamaican immigrants and their children, Nigerian immigrants and their children. It’s cultural. Period.
The topic was black Americans vs Nigerians and Jamaicans et al. If the topic of white Americans existing in a near permanent underclass comes up then glad to discuss that. I have some cousins in that demographic plenty of family in the WalMart/fast food worker groups.
Steve
Dave Schuler: I attribute them to cultural factors.
Immigration tends to sort people by ambition, ability, and educational attainment. For instance, a lot of medical professionals have immigrated from Nigeria.
bob sykes: But the residue in the ghettos is genetically stupid, genetically violent, and genetically impulsive. They are a subspecies of Homo sapiens.
Blacks are not a biological subspecies. There are no extant subspecies of humans, which is best understood as a genetic continuum.
To add to what Zachriel wrote, people that migrate to the U.S. aren’t necessarily representative of the places they come from. Indian-Americans are better educated and have better resources on average than those who didn’t migrate.
There has been a lot of immigration near me from Togo and Congo through lottery visas to work at a meat packing plant an hour away. They include doctors, lawyers, and teachers, as well as relatives of Kings or chiefs.
I don’t think they necessarily make much money. Cargill bought the plant, cut everybody’s wages and the workers slowly left. They had to look elsewhere. So I don’t know if income would say much about them, and just looking at Jamaicans, it looks like many live in Connecticut, which might explain things.
That is a common experience in the meat-packing industry. In Iowa and Minnesota meat-packing used to be jobs that paid a good wage. When they cut the wages low enough the native-born workers that had staffed the plants were gradually replaced by foreign-born, frequently Somalis. The wages being cut was the motivating factor.
That’s why I think there should be an asterisk after the phrase “jobs Americans won’t do”. There’s a reason they won’t do them. That has been the case with agricultural workers in the Southeast and Pacific Northwest. As recently as the 70s in the Southeast and the 80s in the Northwest those jobs were held by blacks in the Southeast and whites in the Northwest. The owners hired migrant workers, frequently illegal migrant workers, to prevent organization. It happened almost overnight.