Black America is getting screwed: Shocking new study highlights the depths of economic disparities

[LittleBlue]

25. I think racial economic disparity isn't fixable with laws

We've tried for 60 years to fix it, created literally mountains of laws at federal and state level, and yet black wealth is actually the same or worse today than 60 years ago.

I've heard "well, wait until whites are the minority" as if that's going to change anything. Black South Africans today own about the same or less wealth than they did when Apartheid ended. Having an overwhelming black majority in parliament has done nothing to fix the black-white wealth disparity in South Africa.

Blacks can make income gains but whatever wealth they accumulate is offset by increasingly sophisticated debt instruments. In other words, black income gains benefit banks as horrendously awful credit card terms suck wealth out of the black community. Normally such an underprivileged group would receive investment as outside financiers seek to exploit low wages, and through these exploitative arrangements the disadvantaged community would learn skills necessary to start black businesses. That isn't happening because black areas are notoriously unstable and unsafe. The few blacks who do "make it" leave their communities for white communities at light speed.

Which forces me to conclude that if we continue this way, nothing will change. We can pass programs that make us feel good but fundamentally change nothing in the macro sense.

So there are three possible outcomes:

1) Nothing changes. This disparity continues forever (or basically for our lifetimes and several generations afterward)

2) The black community is radically restructured to end black and white separatism. In other words, black society as a separate culture is ended. No one really has the courage to even propose this. It might not even be constitutional. It might not work. And let's be honest, powerful people are satisfied with the current arrangement. Too much pride and money is at stake.

3) Intermarriage. The root cause of this problem is tribalism. Nothing will really change until those "others" are viewed as part of "us". Until whites see blacks as part of their tribe rather than separate, every law will have a loophole. A law can be made to keep equal hiring practices. But no law can force white financial institutions to make game-changing investments into the black community. That can only come from social change and self-interest. Self-interest in the sense that what happens to black people isn't a tragedy that happens to "them", it happens to poeple who look a lot like our spouses, children, in-laws and grandchildren. We would gain a personal stake in a fight that has, for too long, happened at so great a distance that we don't feel affected.


That's how I see it