An Ethiopian-American in the Four Tops: Abdul Fakir

Did you know that one of the founding members of the Four Tops was of Ethiopian extraction? He definitely looks like it too, though his wikipedia page claims Bangladeshi ancestry, too. As someone of Ethiopian descent active in Motown's Four Tops, who are best known for songs such as "I Can't Help Myself" and "Bernadette," Fakir was likely one of the few Ethiopian-Americans in Detroit, since large-scale Ethiopian immigration to the US does not predate the fall of Haile Selassie's monarchy and decades of civil war, totalitarian rule, and other conflicts and disasters in the Horn of Africa. Oh well, what I would like to know is the ethnic origins of other famous Motown-era African-Americans...it definitely shows the impact of black immigration in African-America prior to the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965, which challenged racist restrictions in immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America (though, non-European immigrants from the Anglophone West Indies, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans entered the US for varying reasons prior to the cessation of racist, exclusionary immigration laws, which must be placed in a broader context of the Civil Rights Movement). Anyway, enjoy "I Can't Help Myself" which is one of their best songs. "I can't help myself, I love you and nobody else!"

African America vs. African Canada

Contrary to Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada perhaps leading one to think of the nation as a heaven for African-Americans, Canada and the US share a similar black-white inequality gap, despite the former's history of providing safe haven to runaway American slaves and the absence of Jim Crow policies. An amazing essay, "Black Canadians and black Americans: racial income inequality in comparative perspective" Paul Attewell , Philip Kasinitz & Kathleen Dunn provides some useful data based on income distribution. Although Blacks in both states share a broadly inferior income vs. whites, Canada's black-white gap is a little better, despite the study's authors finding that, once one removes controls, the gap is essentially the same. Interestingly, the aforementioned authors found that third or more generation Black Canadians, like African-American descendants of US slaves, shared a similarly lower educational profile and income than third or more generation whites. Like Afro-Caribbean and other Black immigrants in the US, however, first and second generation Afro-Canadians (overwhelmingly descendants of Anglophone Afro-Caribbean immigrants as well as Haitians and Africans) fare much better than third generation or more Blacks. They also disprove downward assimilation theory for second-generation blacks of Caribbean/African immigrant heritages in both the US and Canada.

Black African Immigrants in Metropolitan Washington

African-Born Blacks, 2005	Washington, D.C. Metro Area	United States
Total number	114,101	870,744
Country of origin (%)
Ethiopia	19	12
Nigeria	12	18
Sierra Leone	12	3
Ghana	10	9
Cameroon	9	3
Liberia	4	7
Somalia	3	7
Guinea	3	1
Sudan	2	3
Eritrea	2	2
Educational attainment, ages 25+
Less than high school (%)	8	12
Bachelor’s degree or higher (%)	42	38
Limited English proficient (%)	38	38
Below poverty (%)	11	21
Median household income (2005)	$52,998	$36,691
Percent unemployed	7	9
Occupation, ages 16+ (%)
Management, professional	35	31
Service	25	27
Sales and office	23	22
Construction, extraction, maintenance	5	3
Production, transportation	11	16
Other	1	2

Source: Author's analysis of the 2005 American Community Survey. The Washington metropolitan area includes the District of Columbia, five counties in Maryland, 15 jurisdictions in Virginia, and one county in West Virginia. The population includes all those born in Africa to non-U.S. citizens who identified as black alone or black in combination with another race.