I just read "The New Jim Crow"... I'm wondering why all other immigrant groups succeeded more than blacks, when facing similar prejudices?

by flossdaily

The Chinese, the Irish, etc... were they not equally uneducated, unskilled, and segregated from the mainstream?

mucho_bandito

I feel this is a loaded question. Latinos as a group have had similar struggles and face similar levels of incarceration and prejudice today.

The obvious answer is that a lot of other groups (Irish, Polish, Jewish any Europeans) are all white. They can integrate better and intermarry with few issues. After a generation or a name change it's hard to tell who's Irish and who's not.

As to the other groups I don't really know that they have all succeeded more than blacks. It depends on your time frame too. Are you referring to the wild west and the Chinese laying rail road or more recently? I don't think the Chinese laying railroad had a particularly good lot in life.

If we are talking more recently then a big difference between blacks and other racial groups entering the US is that most did it by choice. It might have been a choice between coming to the US or starving in some cases, but they weren't severed from their previous life for generations against their will. Blacks were. Blacks had no connection with their former life, so they had no financial support, no one to write to for advice, no anything. If we take a more recent example from Korean-American immigrants they have a network of financial support and a strong sense of community. This was a contributing factor in the 1992 LA riots. People saw Koreans and other Asians moving into the area and buying businesses from locals and it caused a lot of tension. Koreans were borrowing money from other immigrants to get the money that banks wouldn't loan them. I'm not aware of any such support networks in black communities, which could lead to greater financial struggles which in turn could even increase poverty in black communities as other immigrants move into the businesses that would otherwise be run by black people.

The issue is more complicated than that but a lot the success of Asian immigrants specifically has been attributed to the loan clubs that allow them within a generation of arriving to send their kids to college to become professionals.

Spoonfeedme

The biggest problem with your question is that it calls African-Americans (I am referring here specifically to the descendants of slaves here, not more recent immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean) are not immigrants in the traditional sense, so comparing them to other immigrants is a poor idea. The systematic roadblocks that were specifically applied to blacks has very few analogs in the other cultures. More to the point, the very fact that they were not immigrants meant that the standard model of immigration doesn't really work here. That model suggests that 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants in the US tend to become fully integrated into society. Even the Chinese who faced significant discrimination, or the Irish, were, by three generations in, were essentially becoming fully Americanized.

Compare this to blacks in the US. They are called 'AFrican-Americans' mostly because for much of their history, their status as Americans was not really acknowledged. What I mean by this is that, despite being as naturalized and native as any white American, black culture was treated as an other the same way as any other culture. While other cultures were assimilated into the dominant white culture, blacks were first denied that, then explicitly shamed for not doing it. This is straying into sociological analysis and political commentary now, and for that I apologize, but the point is that your question is why these groups succeeded and blacks did not. The answer is one was able to be assimilated, while the other was not.