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I'm not sure how elites having exposure to rich Nigerians during their college years is going to help them govern African-Americans later on.
Slave-descended Americans are vanishingly rare at Harvard.
"If we were to count the number of [Generational African American] students at Harvard who were descended from enslaved people, came from low-income backgrounds, first-generation, four grandparents descended from enslaved people, I feel like that number would be so low — like, maybe one person."
And of course, actual African-Americans are just one group that is basically non-existent at elite universities.
What percentage of Harvard is white, working-class, non-legacy, non-athlete? I'm sure there are examples. But it's extremely rare. Along with slave-descended blacks, this group is incredibly underrepresented at Harvard.
Is Barack Obama not African American? I’m not saying you need to go pull anything you can out of Baltimore or the southside of Chicago. I had a wealthy black neighbor who ran a mutual fund his kid went to Stanford. Tilting the scales a bit to get the upper middle class or current elites seems fine.
I know it’s a meme that they just pull upper class internationals to meet their quota. They should bring in internationals at elite schools but I’m not sure how far this goes from meme to literally 13% of Harvards 14% black population is an African prince. They shouldn’t do that. But those types should exists at elite schools too. Something like 5% American black mostly upper class with 1% the best you find lower class and 2% international would seem fine for making a place like Harvard a broad community.
The whole Nigerian thing doesn’t make sense to me. It’s population is only 5x the size of Americans African population, not biracial, and I doubt there schools are as good as ours so I have trouble seeing how so many of them could be qualified above the domestic population.
No, Barack Obama is not a central example of an African American.
As you probably know, Barack Obama is biracial, with a black father and a white mother. His father was not descended from slaves, nor was he present in Barack's life. Barack Obama was raised in white culture. As are many of the black people at Harvard.
Harvard practices a racial essentialism that would make a KKK member proud. The 1/8th black adopted son of two white hedge fund managers is black in their eyes. Eminem, on the other hand, would be considered white.
That said, I'm perhaps a little out of my depth here. I read a couple articles about Harvard's black students. The quote about nearly ZERO students at Harvard having 4 slave-descended grandparents really struck me as crazy, considering that almost all African-Americans would be in that category. The black student at Harvard is not a central example of an African-American, even an extremely successful one.
But I would welcome actual data about what percentage of Harvard's "black" students have at least one grandparent descended from slaves.
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