Nigerian Americans Earn More Than White Americans — Explain That With Systemic Racism

Here is a fact that will not be discussed on any cable news panel this year, will not be assigned in any university course on racial justice, and will not appear in any political speech from either party. According to the United States Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Nigerian Americans have a median household income of approximately $68,658 — higher than the national median of $64,994 and higher than the median household income for white Americans. According to the same data, 61 percent of Nigerian Americans over the age of 25 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 33 percent of the general U.S. population and 36 percent of white Americans. Nigerian Americans hold advanced degrees — master’s, doctoral, and professional — at rates that exceed every other ethnic group in America, including Asian Americans.

Nigerian Americans are Black. They are dark-skinned. They have African names. They wear their Blackness in the same skin that, we are told, is the primary determinant of life outcomes in America. They are subject to the same police, the same hiring managers, the same landlords, the same loan officers, the same school systems, and the same structural racism that is identified as the dominant explanation for Black American underperformance. And yet they outperform not only native-born Black Americans but white Americans as well, by virtually every measurable metric of socioeconomic success.

This fact does not disprove the existence of racism. Racism exists. Discrimination exists. But this fact does something that the current discourse cannot tolerate: it introduces a variable. It suggests that something other than the system — something carried within a community, within a family, within a culture — plays a decisive role in determining outcomes. And that suggestion is so dangerous to the prevailing orthodoxy that the data itself must be ignored, explained away, or buried under qualifications so thick that the original number disappears.

The Numbers That Nobody Cites

Nigerian Americans are not an anomaly. They are the most prominent example of a pattern so consistent that ignoring it requires active effort. The data extends across nearly every Black immigrant group in America.

Ghanaian Americans have a median household income of approximately $69,000, with a bachelor’s degree attainment rate of 40 percent. Trinidadian and Tobagonian Americans have a median household income of roughly $62,000, with homeownership rates that exceed the Black American average by nearly 20 percentage points. Barbadian Americans have historically maintained income and education levels comparable to or exceeding the national white average. Jamaican Americans — the largest Caribbean-origin group in the United States — have a median household income of approximately $58,000, higher than the native-born Black median of $46,400, and maintain college enrollment rates significantly above the Black American average.

Ethiopian Americans represent a particularly instructive case. The Ethiopian immigrant community in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area is one of the largest outside of Africa, and despite arriving from one of the poorest countries on Earth, with limited English, limited financial resources, and none of the social networks available to established American communities, Ethiopian immigrants have built a visible economic presence — owning businesses, staffing hospitals, building churches, and educating their children at rates that consistently exceed the native-born Black average.

The Pew Research Center’s comprehensive 2015 report on the Black immigrant population documented that African immigrants to the United States are the most educated immigrant group in America — more educated than Asian immigrants, more educated than European immigrants, more educated than any other group. Approximately 43 percent of African immigrants hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 33 percent of the total U.S. population.

The Variable That Cannot Be Named

There is a word in the social sciences that, when applied to Black Americans, produces an immediate and violent reaction. The word is culture. To suggest that cultural variables contribute to differences in outcomes between groups is, in the current intellectual climate, to commit an act of aggression. It is to “blame the victim.” It is to “ignore structural factors.” It is to provide “cover for racism.” The accusations arrive before the argument is even completed, because the argument itself is forbidden.

But the data on Black immigrant success does not permit the luxury of avoiding the question. If the system — the same police departments, the same school districts, the same mortgage lenders, the same labor markets — produces dramatically different outcomes for people who share the same skin color but come from different cultural backgrounds, then culture is a variable. Not the only variable. Not a magic variable that explains everything and excuses every failure of institutional responsibility. But a variable. A real one. A measurable one. And the refusal to examine it is not compassion. It is cowardice wearing compassion’s mask.

What are the cultural variables that distinguish Black immigrant communities from native-born Black American communities? The research identifies several, and none of them are mysterious or insulting. They are, in fact, precisely the characteristics that Black Americans themselves valued and practiced at far higher rates before the cultural shifts of the late twentieth century.

Family structure. Nigerian American households have a two-parent family rate of approximately 67 percent, compared to approximately 37 percent for native-born Black American households. Among Ghanaian Americans, the two-parent rate is approximately 63 percent. Among Jamaican Americans, it is approximately 52 percent. The literature on child development, educational outcomes, and economic mobility is unambiguous: two-parent households produce better outcomes on virtually every measurable dimension, controlling for income, race, and geography.

Educational orientation. Nigerian immigrant families maintain what sociologists call an achievement ideology — a deeply embedded cultural expectation that education is the primary mechanism of advancement, that academic failure is a family dishonor, and that children are expected to pursue professional careers in medicine, engineering, law, or business. This is not a stereotype. It is a documented cultural pattern that Nigerian immigrants themselves describe, celebrate, and enforce within their families. The joke within the Nigerian American community — that the only acceptable career paths are “doctor, lawyer, or disgrace” — is both a punchline and a description of a cultural reality that produces 61 percent bachelor’s degree attainment.

The absence of a victimhood narrative. This is the variable that produces the most intense resistance when named, and it is also the one that Black immigrant communities themselves identify most consistently. Nigerian, Ghanaian, Jamaican, and Ethiopian immigrants arrive in America without the intergenerational narrative of oppression that shapes native-born Black American identity. They arrive expecting to succeed. They arrive with cultural memories of Black people running nations, building economies, staffing universities, and governing themselves. They do not carry the psychological weight of being told, from birth, that the system is designed to destroy them and that their individual efforts are futile against structural forces. They carry, instead, the expectation that effort will be rewarded — an expectation that, as the data demonstrates, turns out to be largely correct.

Addressing the Model Minority Critique

The most sophisticated objection to this analysis is the model minority critique — the argument that holding up immigrant success stories serves to delegitimize the claims of native-born communities, to provide rhetorical ammunition for the denial of structural racism, and to create a hierarchy among Black people that serves white supremacist interests. This objection deserves honest engagement, not dismissal.

The model minority critique has legitimate force when it is used to argue that because Nigerian Americans succeed, structural racism does not exist and native-born Black Americans have only themselves to blame. That is not my argument. Structural racism exists. Documented disparities in policing, sentencing, lending, hiring, and housing exist. The history of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration has produced material disadvantages that persist across generations. All of this is true, and none of it is contradicted by the success of Black immigrants.

What is contradicted is the claim that structural racism is the sufficient explanation — the claim that it is so powerful, so pervasive, and so deterministic that individual and cultural variables are irrelevant. If that claim were true, then Nigerian Americans, who face the same structural racism as native-born Black Americans, should produce similar outcomes. They do not. If the system were the whole story, there would be no story to tell about Black immigrants. But there is.

The model minority critique is also correct to note that immigrant populations are self-selected. The Nigerian who obtains a visa, crosses an ocean, and builds a life in a foreign country is not a random sample of the Nigerian population. She is, by definition, someone with unusual drive, education, and resources. This selection effect is real and must be acknowledged. But it does not explain the full picture, because the children and grandchildren of these immigrants — who are not self-selected, who are born in American hospitals and raised in American neighborhoods — continue to outperform native-born Black Americans, though their advantage narrows somewhat in each generation. The narrowing itself is instructive: it suggests that the longer a Black family is embedded in American culture, the more their outcomes converge with the native-born Black average. The culture of origin provides a buffer. The American environment erodes it.

Mary Waters, a Harvard sociologist, documented this generational pattern in her landmark study of West Indian immigrants in New York. First-generation immigrants maintained high achievement levels. Second-generation children, raised in the United States, showed declining performance that correlated with the degree to which they adopted native-born Black American cultural norms rather than retaining their parents’ immigrant culture. By the third generation, the outcomes were nearly indistinguishable from the native-born Black average. The system had not changed. The structural racism had not intensified. What changed was the culture — the expectations, the narratives, the community norms that surrounded the children as they grew.

The Uncomfortable Implication

I am aware of what I am saying and to whom I am saying it. I am a Black man telling a largely Black audience that culture matters — that the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what is possible for us shape our outcomes in ways that are measurable, documented, and consequential. I am saying this not because I believe racism is irrelevant, but because I believe that treating culture as unspeakable while treating racism as the sole explanation leaves Black Americans with no agency, no tools, and no path forward that does not depend entirely on the moral reformation of white people.

Consider the practical implications of each framework. If the system is the whole explanation, then the only solution is to change the system — a project that, however necessary, has been underway for sixty years and has not produced the outcomes its advocates promised. If culture is also a variable, then communities have the power to change outcomes now, without waiting for institutional reform, without depending on political goodwill, without ceding control of their futures to forces outside their authority.

Nigerian American families did not wait for America to become less racist before educating their children. Jamaican American entrepreneurs did not wait for structural barriers to be dismantled before opening businesses. Ethiopian immigrants did not wait for the system to be reformed before building communities. They operated within the system as it exists — with all its flaws, all its biases, all its documented injustices — and they produced outcomes that the system allegedly makes impossible.

This is not a comfortable truth. It carries the risk of being weaponized by people who want to deny structural racism entirely. But the alternative — pretending that culture does not exist, that agency does not matter, that Black people are purely the products of what is done to them rather than also the authors of what they do — is worse. It is worse because it is false. And it is worse because it robs Black Americans of the most powerful resource any community possesses: the belief that what they do matters more than what is done to them.

What Lagos Knows That Chicago Forgot

I want to close with a question rather than an answer, because the question is more honest than any answer I could provide.

If a Black man from Lagos, Nigeria — a man who grew up in a developing country with unreliable electricity, inadequate infrastructure, pervasive corruption, and none of the institutional advantages of the wealthiest nation in human history — can arrive in America, navigate the same racist system that we are told makes Black success nearly impossible, and build a life that exceeds the American average in income, education, and family stability, what does that tell us?

It does not tell us that racism is a myth. It is not a myth. It does not tell us that history is irrelevant. History echoes in every institution and every interaction. It does not tell us that native-born Black Americans are inferior, or lazy, or less capable. They are none of those things.

What it tells us is that the narrative is incomplete. That the story we have been telling ourselves — the story that the system is so powerful and so malevolent that Black success is an anomaly requiring explanation while Black failure is a natural consequence requiring no examination — is a story that does not survive contact with the data. The data says that Black people from dozens of countries, speaking dozens of languages, carrying dozens of cultural traditions, arrive in America and build lives that the dominant narrative says should be impossible.

“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” — James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son” (1955)

I criticize the narrative not because I reject it entirely, but because I love the people it claims to serve, and I can see that it is not serving them. A narrative that says the system is everything and culture is nothing leaves Black Americans waiting for a redemption that may never come from institutions that have never prioritized their interests. A narrative that acknowledges both the system and the culture gives Black Americans something far more valuable than a grievance: it gives them a lever. A tool. A set of variables they can change without permission, without legislation, without waiting for anyone’s approval.

The man from Lagos did not wait for approval. The woman from Kingston did not wait for approval. The family from Accra did not wait for approval. They arrived, they assessed the terrain, they identified the pathways that were available, and they walked them with a determination born not of naivety about racism but of a refusal to let racism write the final chapter of their story.

If Black people from Lagos can thrive in the same system that allegedly prevents Black people from Chicago from thriving, then the system is not the whole explanation. And if it is not the whole explanation, then the whole explanation includes variables that Black Americans can control. That is not an insult. That is the most empowering truth available. The question is whether we will embrace it or bury it, as we have buried so many inconvenient truths before, under the comfortable weight of a narrative that asks nothing of us except our permanent outrage and our permanent defeat.