I actually have some experience here being a bi-racial half Mexican and having lived in an affluent white bible belt community and an impoverished predominantly black ghetto. On the one hand it would seem blacks are disproportionately impoverished as a direct consequences of the enslavement of their ancestors and the fallout from that. At the same time they’re also, at least from my own personal experience, disproportionately racist, even violently so.

Really, all of the weed, booze, crack, and in a lot of cases discrimination toward white people was like something out of a racist white man’s imagination of how black people live, but it all makes sense when you realize it’s a product of class, except the disproportionate racism which is at least partially attributable to race coupled with class. It’s hard being poor so there tends to be more drugs and violent crime, and a general perception of white people as being somehow responsible for it all.

It’s a complicated issue, because on the one hand modern white people aren’t to blame and generally aren’t racist from what I’ve seen, not in the traditional sense anyway. On the otherhand if you look at the fallout from slavery it would seem the disproportionate figures are, on a statistical level, directly attributable to slavery. Individual black people may overcome poverty but a majority won’t because people don’t usually change class en masse.

What do we do then? Socialism or communism? Sounds good in theory but difficult to practically implement compared to capitalism. There will always be poor people in society and you can’t save everyone, especially if you’re lacking in means. As far as I can see the most humane and viable solution is to design viable businesses that survive and thrive but make poverty more livable as an output. Meritocracy shouldn’t mean the less fortunate suffer terribly. The first and most important issue is housing, followed by education. You need free housing to allow the poor to save their money and you need premier education to churn the waters and shift those at the bottom to the top.

Housing is a toughy because real estate is expensive and you don’t want to put people in hell holes that make them miserable. You need a way to profit from housing the poor without costing the poor or relying on the government too much. It also can’t be exploitative like monopoly housing. I’m thinking sponsored housing, the houses are all covered in ads from the companies that are footing the bill. The education can’t be sponsored though because that’s a horrible mistake waiting to happen. The information is already freely available online anyway in most cases, it just needs to be packaged in a more palatable way geared toward starting businesses or making products and including the most valuable maths and sciences.

Helping the poor certainly would be quite the lucrative venture and it would go a long way toward disrupting established racial dynamics but there are a lot of factors to consider and it would require a team of businesses professionals and specialists to put something viable together.