When I told my high school religion teacher I wanted to be president, he encouraged me to pick a more realistic profession for a Black woman. Most white Americans did not vote for Obama in either the 2008 or 2012 election, and the backlash against him began immediately after he took office. But some voters see Black immigrants as an “elevated minority,” Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University, told me. In fact, “Black Americans are the most American of Americans,” Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist, told me. Though African Americans have been here longer than the majority of white Americans, they are not seen as such — because America has historically been understood as a country for white immigrants.

Source: Los Angeles Times December 18, 2020 11:02 UTC