“Just black” or not “just black?” ethnic attrition in the Nigerian-American second generation

ABSTRACT

Despite the largely voluntary character of Nigerian immigration to the United States since 1970, it is not clear that their patterns of integration have emulated those of earlier immigrants who, over time, traded their specific national origins for “American” or “White” identities as they experienced upward mobility. This path may not be available to Nigerian immigrants. When they cease to be Nigerian, they may become black or African-American. In this paper, I use US Census data to trace patterns of identity in a Nigerian second-generation cohort as they advance from early school-age in 1990 to adulthood in 2014. The cohort shrinks inordinately across the period as its members cease to identify as Nigerian, and this pattern of ethnic attrition is most pronounced among the downwardly mobile – leaving us with a positively select Nigerian second generation and, perhaps, unduly optimistic assessments of Nigerian-American socioeconomic advancement.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial identity
• ethnic identity
• immigration
• assimilation
• racialization
• African immigrants

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for careful readings and thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper offered by Charlie Hirschman, Andrew Francis-Tan, Ana Sosa, Ruby Thompson, Cassandra Eddy, and anonymous reviewers at Ethnic and Racial Studies. Constructive criticisms offered by audiences at the Cornell Population Center (2016) and the annual meetings of the Population Association of America (2017) also added significantly to strength of the paper. Any shortcomings of this work are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Just black” is not meant to be degrading here; nor is “just American”. I use the word “just” to mean “regular” or “normal” or “plain old”. “Just black” and “just American” are only as degrading as “black” and “American” are by themselves.

2. Since I use a cumulative file with data from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, the cohort age ranges are adjusted as follows: 25–34 in 2010; 26–35 in 2011; 27–36 in 2012; 28–37 in 2013; and 29–38 in 2014.

3. The small number of white US-born children residing with Nigerian-born parents are excluded since most of their Nigerian-born parents are of people of British or other European descent who emigrated in the years leading up to and following Nigerian independence (1960). Their presence or absence from the analyses to follow has no significant bearing on the findings or conclusions of the study except that the small number of “White/Caucasian” responses no longer appear and the number of English, British, Dutch, and German responses to the ancestry question are reduced.

4. Regression analyses include only those respondents residing with one or more Nigerian-born parents since 100 per cent of those not living with Nigerian parents must themselves identify as Nigerian. 

5. As was mentioned earlier, the weighted analyses provide more accurate estimates of the effects in the logistic regression model, but since the each case is treated as twenty-four cases (on average), measures of statistical significance are artificially inflated.