Gates and Guinier were raising important questions here about the diverse historical legacies of race, class, and ethnicity that are not easily resolved through the kinds of redressive policies that have been implemented thus far. However, framing this debate in terms of a competition between 'black Indigenous middle-class kids' (whose legacy of slavery is recognized and legitimated) and 'recent arrivals' (who are not acknowledged as also confronting this legacy) raises questions not only about the extent to which the higher education community is committed to contemporary civil rights concerns, but also about the extent to  
which a contemporary civil rights movement might benefit from a more global historical framework of analysis (Gates, quoted in Rimer and Arenson 2004). Why not, for example, question the processes that create the conditions by virtue of which migration to the United States - for education or work - is seen as one of very few routes to social mobility in many West Indian and African countries where local ambitions always seem to require foreign realization? Asking these kinds of questions would disturb facile definitions of what circulates, who consumes, how communities are affected, and how political solidarities are forged and broken, and would draw our attention more fully to how global-local interrelationships create and reproduce power dynamics embedded within the production of various kinds of diasporic resources (education and jobs, as well as cultural style and political practice).