Immigrant of the Day: Orlando Patterson (Jamaica)

 
Professor Orlando Patterson (Harvard) is a Jamaica-born American sociologist known for his work regarding issues of race in the America, as well as the sociology of development, currently holding the John Cowles chair in Sociology at Harvard University. Patterson took his B.Sc in Economics from the University of London and his Ph.D. in Sociology at the London School of Economics.

Patterson often writes critically about race, civil rights, immigration, and the status of Blacks in the United States.  For example, see his piece in the N.Y.Times on “Race and Diversity in the Age of Obama” about the rapid assimilation of Latino immigrants and the relatively slow assimilation of Blacks, into mainstream America.  It concludes that

“The United States has worked harder and gone farther than any other advanced majority-white nation in confronting and righting the wrongs of its racist past. The crucial questions that the country now faces are these: How can white citizens, who publicly embrace black citizens as athletic heroes, matinee idols, pop-music kings, talk-show queens, senators, governors and now president, continue to shun them in their neighborhoods, schools and private lives? In their insistent celebration of racial identity, how complicit are black Americans in their own social isolation? And will Barack Obama, who delicately straddles both worlds of immigrant success and black identity, be able to broaden the inclusion of African-Americans? We watch and wait.”

KJ