4 After the Storm The black population is diverse economically today, but the black pop- ulation has always been diverse, not only in terms of income, education, and occupational prestige, but also ethnically. Just as blacks migrated in great numbers during the first few decades of the twentieth century from the South to the North and West, many people of African ancestry also migrated from places throughout the Caribbean to the United States. In more recent years, particularly since the mid-1960s when the restrictive quota system of the 1920s was lifted, the number of black immigrants from the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa has increased over time. Some scholars, and even some laypersons, view black immigrants as an invisible model minority group. Black immigrants and their children tend to have higher levels of education than native-born blacks, and black immigrants make up much of the overall black population at the nation’s elite colleges and universities. How black ethnic groups compare relative to native-born blacks and whites on indicators of asset ownership is understudied, especially in the South where, at least in some places, the number of black immigrants is quite large. The presence of Haitians in Miami is an example. Black immi- grants may have different expectations and different lived experiences than native-born blacks in the South and in the broader society on any number of sociological outcomes, but particularly with respect to home ownership, as a home represents much more than a dwelling place home ownership in the American imagination is the embodiment of the American Dream. Home ownership is one of the greatest indicators of an individual’s or a group’s ability to overcome discrimination—or, in other words, to assimi- late. Thus, in our analysis, we include comparisons of native- and foreign- born blacks. Data and Methods We analyzed data from the American Community Survey for 2008 through 2013. We selected heads of households over the age of twenty- five. All respondents identified their race as black or white. We calculated descriptive statistics for all respondents, and then we calculated descriptive statistics for the following groups separately: whites, blacks, respondents from the South, Southern whites, Southern blacks, foreign-born blacks, and native-born blacks. Next, we used logistic regression analysis to exam- ine variations in the likelihood of home ownership for blacks and whites over time, especially blacks and whites in the South. The dependent vari- able was home ownership, where 1 = owners and 0 = renters. We estimated three separate models. The first model included all respondents the second
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