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@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF Guys, I am American and I think there’s a bunch of stuff missing from this discussion. Andrew, you started to address one issue. Where you live directly affects your chances of receiving good public education. Public schools are funded by local property taxes.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF Wealthier neighborhoods spend more on schools. Wealthier neighborhoods have also historically discriminated against black people. When/how? First of all, let’s talk about white flight. We can use Brooklyn as an example though almost every city faced this. In the 60’s and 70’s...
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF More black people started moving into New York - both immigrants from the Caribbean and families from southern or rural parts of the country. In the post-civil-rights era there was a LOT of tension in newly integrated areas, where young white and black men faced off.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF In Brooklyn in particular, one skirmish that took place at (I think) a dance hall ended up with bullets flying and a young black boy was accidentally killed. This led to a massive riot, which started the white flight there. White families wanted out.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF Real estate companies hit upon a great idea, one of the oldest in the history of people: buy low, sell high. Real estate agents began to circulate fake fliers in Brooklyn neighborhoods that they pretended were written by black power groups - this is documented.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF Real estate agents would go door to door asking white families if they wanted to sell. Sometimes, families that said no would find a brick fly through their window later that week. Real estate companies were attempting (and succeeding) to scare white families into selling cheap.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF They would turn around and offer these same apartments to Caribbean families moving in from Jamaica, Puerto Rico, etc, at astronomical rents. Meanwhile, the white families who were leaving would seek bank loans in the suburbs, and would be awarded the credit pretty easily.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF One major reason credit was so cheap was because there was an active federal program going on trying to disburse “essential populations” from highly dense cities. It was one of those Cold War things.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF The feds were scared of the threat of a nuclear bomb, and created financial incentives (in the form of bank loans for houses, with minimal interest rates and down payments) for essential populations to move out of cities. Guess who weren’t deemed essential? Black people.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF So now you have a bunch of real estate companies who own buildings in New York that the purchased on the cheap, meaning property values in that area have gone down and there’s less tax money for the education system.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF And you have a bunch of white people moving to the suburbs, getting awesome deals on houses, and those deals literally ARE NOT AVAILABLE for black people. They remain largely excluded from the suburbs for the next 2 decades. And those wealthy suburbs have good schools.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF Feyi, was it you who put up a graph explaining how the affect of good pre schools exponentially impacts the outcomes of that society, and that college and post-school job trainings offer diminishing returns? Apply that to the picture I’m painting about American schools.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF The discrimination is real. The barriers that prevented black people from getting the same economic advantages as white people are real. From my knowledge, Nigerians in the 60’s and 70’s migrated to UK more than they US because there was a stronger colonial tie, & it was closer.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF So there’s a very real history of discrimination here that Nigerian immigrants for the most part missed. I think the real influx of Nigerians coming to the US started in the 80’s and 90’s, at which point it had become somewhat easier for black people to get home loans.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF Andrew to your question about whether immigrant black kids are doing better than African Americans... I think that black immigrant kids are more likely to live in better zip codes. The Nigerian diaspora in America is the most educated of all the expat populations living there.
@afalli @Ambrosia_Ijebu @DoubleEph @Tobs_OF They’re more educated than the Indians, the Chinese, everyone. I would hazard a guess that this means the Nigerians who make it to the US (which is hard to get to, it’s a whole ocean away) are putting a super high emphasis on their children’s education.
