Our Ancestors Fucked Us Up!$#
We are poor because of you (well sort of)!
A new study called The Asset Value of Whiteness: Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap published in Bloomberg has just scratched the surface off of an old myth and the biggest question on our minds, Why are black poorer than the whites.
tl;dr Our ancestors fucked us! Well sort of, they didn't acquire enough wealth for their black descendants to inherit, unlike the whites’ ancestors.
The study has proven that most of the previously assumed reasons do not hold up, for example they found that attending college does not close the racial wealth gap between blacks and whites.
Take college attendance. Getting higher education helps African Americans earn more money and accumulate more wealth, of course. Even so, the median white adult who attended college has 7.2 times the wealth of the median black adult who attended college, according to the study
Even if you are raised in a family with both parents, or work full time job or spend less, the gap between the two races’ wealth will not be closed.
Though the study is based on African Americans living in America (I am a pure African btw), reading the article I could not agree more, I think its even worse in Africa, where we lived most of the Industrial Revolution stage under colonization.
The gap that the whites managed to leap may take time for us to recover. Take South Africa for instance, the second richest country in the continent, leading with the highest number of billionaires (tied with Egypt). The time most black South Africans were fighting for their rights, the other group was busy profiting through their vast establishments, that had been paid for by the country’s diamond reserves.
The blame that has been thrown around by most people that Africans in any part of the world are lazy does not do any justice!
By the time our countries gained independence a system was already set up, a system that made it hard for a recently free individual, who owned zero assets for collateral, who had been deprived of education and had no idea how to run the system, a system set up by the colonizers, to accumulate wealth.
The play field was balanced to one side all the black man and woman could afford to do was work for their previous masters in a new ‘free’ world. Even after getting that job, they had a big family depending on the few that managed to get one.
Even though we started to own a few companies, we started to get education, a few started earn a decent living, we still have a long way to catch up and nobody should judge us for not being the richest race, yet :-)
Nobody should judge us for the mistakes our ancestors made when they trusted white ancestors (and nobody should hold their descendants responsible too) when they took our lands.
Like the report said, this wealth disadvantage among the blacks gets passed on from generation to generation.
The result is that whites’ wealth advantage — and blacks’ disadvantage — gets passed down from generation to generation. Which means that forms of racial discrimination “that happened in the past, like redlining, continue to show up in bank accounts today,” says Amy Traub, (the associate director for policy research at Demos and co-author of the study, said in an interview).
I see this study, not as an excuse or reason to stay poor, but as an explanation and an address to the many myths about why there is a large wealth gap between black and whites.
There is no race more blessed than the other, opportunity and time is the most important thing…
The future of Africa belongs to a new generation, we will make mistakes, true, but we are determined to make it and we will see to it that a new wave move across the continent! Tinosvika! ✊
