The late 2010's saw the emergence of a new movement called ADOS, or American Descendants of Slaves in the United States. African-Americans have lower average income and educational attainment than the American population at large, as well a higher crime rates. However, immigrants from the Caribbean and especially from Africa have higher levels of educational attainment and income and lower crime rates compared to other Black Americans, with African immigrants being one of the most educated demographics in the United States.

Since end of Jim Crow and the passage of the Civil Rights Act the mid-20th century, the United States has had a system of affirmative action for Black Americans, including in elite education. Recently, some African-Americans have expressed concern that many beneficiaries of these were not descendants of slaves. As early as 2007, the Guardian reported that Black Americans of immigrant, chiefly Caribbean and African ancestry, were overrepresented at elite universities compared to other Black Americans. Also in the mid-2000s, two Harvard professors including African American Studies Professor Henry Louis Gates Junior claimed that 1/2-2/3 of Black Harvard students were of immigrant background and/or mixed race. Many African-American Harvard students identify themselves as GAA, or Generational African-American, to distinguish themselves from people of more recent immigrant ancestry. Gates is quoted as saying “I don’t have the statistics and the University doesn’t release them, but a large percent of the Black students in the College are descendants of recent Africans as opposed to being descended from African-Americans who were enslaved in North America."

African immigrants have higher fertility than the GAA/ADOS population and African immigrants have continued to move to the United States. Therefore, black immigrants account for an ever-growing share of the Black American population. America's only black president to date, Barack Obama, was born to a Kenyan father and a White mother, and America's only black Vice President to date, Kamala Harris, was born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother.

Recently, Harvard's policies of racial preferences and affirmative action have received scrutiny, with the US Supreme Court recently ruling that Harvard's admissions system "does not comply with the principles of the equal protection clause embodied in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Furthermore, there has been a recent push for reparations for slavery in the United States, which would necessitate disaggregation of descendants of people enslaved in the United States from other Black Americans.