In the US, it is not only at elite universities where there is a clear over-representation of black immigrant children, it is also at public gifted schools and any kinds of intellectually gifted programs that are highly selective on intelligence. For example, when the New York Times did a story to show the experiences of blacks at Stuyvesant High School in New York, they had to use the personal account of a West Indian black child there (Ann-Marie Miller); if they had many native blacks, that would have certainly been their preferred subject. Furthermore, the only other student who was interviewed for that article, Opraha Miles, a former president of the black student society at Stuyvesant, also just happened to be Jamaican; no black American student was mentioned in the story. A close look at a number of other such institutions shows even more clear evidence of a tendency for black immigrants to be over-represented as selectivity requirements for an academic institution (or complexity of a subject) goes higher.
In the world of intellectually gifted schools, perhaps the most selective in the United States is a special program called the Davidson Academy started by Jan and Bob Davison in 2006 in Reno, Nevada. The tiny school boasts of selecting only the most profoundly gifted children (the highest of the five levels of giftedness) whose IQ is so high that “only one in every ten thousand children in America” can qualify to the school in any one cohort; it is more selective than Stanford or Harvard can ever be. The school makes no efforts or pretensions to affirmative action and as such, they have had very little “diversity.” However, a search through the promotional materials of the school for a black student – all schools and colleges will always show some black faces in their promotional materials if they have any – reveals that they have had at least one black student, and it was, unsurprisingly, a Nigerian Igbo name (the parent is interviewed in the ad posted on Youtube).
At the tertiary level, a special program to promote African American academic pursuit of Science and Engineering called the Meyerhoff Scholars program was started by philanthropists Robert and Jane Meyerhoff at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). The program has attracted funding from a lot of companies by gaining a reputation for achieving something totally unexpected in American society: black students who take a deeply passionate interest in engineering and science majors and even proceed to advanced studies at elite universities. According to a book co-written by the Meyerhoff program’s leader, UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski III, they believe they have succeeded against all odds by having “strong academic advising and personal counseling, emphasis on group study and peer support, appropriate tutoring and mentoring, [and] involvement with faculty in research and access to role models in science.”
The program has been so successful that educators in other states and universities have been seeking to replicate its success by imitating its key principles and management practices. However, a closer look at the program reveals that their key to success is much simpler than it appears: they simply fill up their program with Caribbean and African blacks! For example, listening to the names of the graduating class of 2008 posted on youtube, this author could identify about half of the blacks in this class who were clearly of African (immigrant) descent.
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