This story shows how stupid it is to think skin color is an important category. From the article:
Africans make up a small but growing part of the black population in metro-Phoenix, which limits opportunities for interaction. According to the 2008 American Community Survey, “foreign-born Africans” number around 18,500 in Maricopa County, or 10.8 percent of the area’s black population. The refugee population in Arizona is much smaller, although that figure more than doubled from 2006 to 2009, to 4,327, according to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement.
In a 2008 supplemental report entitled “The State of Black Arizona, Volume I,” ASU associate professor Lisa Aubrey and colleagues found that many African Americans hold new arrivals “responsible” for their ancestral enslavement and “correlate Africa . . . with poverty and feel ashamed.” Aubrey and her coauthors call today’s African Americans “old diasporans,” descendants of slaves and other earlier African arrivals. The scholars refer to modern continental Africans, including refugees who fled strife in their countries, as “new diasporans.”
Most American Blacks are descended from Africans who came here hundreds of years ago, longer ago than the ancestors of most of us arrived. It is ridiculous to suppose that they should have anything in common with newly arrived Africans. And if many of them hadn’t been conned into thinking that their African ancestry is more important than their status as Americans, nobody would try to make an issue of these differences.