Split Apart: How Unchecked Capitalism and Integration Divided the ADOS Community
The civil rights era opened doors to advancement within the black community that were previously closed entirely. But this integration, while representing indispensable progress, also had the unintended consequence of growing class divisions that strained once tight-knit social bonds within African-American society.
This fracturing only accelerated over subsequent decades, as predatory capitalism and greed fostered the exploitation of the marginalized while enriching a few. Truly reconciling these rifts will require grappling honestly with the complex legacy of both integration and unchecked capitalism.
Segregation’s Enforced Solidarity
Under the violently enforced segregation of the Jim Crow era, class differences within the black community were rendered secondary by the all-consuming daily oppression of racism. No matter one’s educational or economic attainments, the entire ADOS population was consigned to second-class status without recourse. This created a remarkable sense of solidarity in the face of shared adversity.
Since even the highest accomplishments like becoming a doctor or lawyer still left blacks unable to testify in court or vote, the professional class channeled their capabilities not into futile individual advancement, but into communal uplift. Black entrepreneurs who managed to achieve financial stability lived alongside lower-income families in the same neighborhoods out of necessity, running businesses in the community.
Their children attended the same woefully underfunded, dilapidated, segregated schools as children from poor households, rather than isolating themselves in enclaves of opportunity. The only social clubs, associations, and churches available excluded no one based on income or skin tone.
This oppressive closeness enforced by law and custom nurtured a sense of kinship and mutual obligation across class lines despite economic inequality. The fortunate few with higher education, stable careers, and disposable income felt spiritually bound to lend their efforts not to personal gain under a system stacked fully against them but to the uplift of the race as a whole. All recognized that their fates were intertwined with those suffering most under white supremacy’s boot.
But as the legal edifice of segregation first cracked and then fully crumbled over the 1950s and 1960s, new avenues for socioeconomic advancement suddenly opened up to a slice of the African-American community. At the same time, little changed for those mired at the bottom, especially in hollowed-out urban centers. This inevitable widening of the economic ladder ultimately strained the once tightly-knit social bonds as African-Americans confronted new inner divisions shaped by class and opportunity.
The Opening of a Gateway — For Some
The civil rights reforms of the 1960s legally unchained black America from the yoke of institutionalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, and more. This enabled the gradual emergence over subsequent decades of a black professional middle class with economic stability and security on a scale not seen since the fall of Reconstruction.
With the gates pried open by relentless protest and visionary leadership, some gained access to the predominantly white corporate world and elite educational institutions from which they were previously barred wholesale. Many justly leveraged these long-denied chances to build successful mainstream careers in law, business, academia, and more, which allowed them to accumulate wealth and comfort previously unimaginable.
Yet for those at the very bottom rungs of America’s economic ladder, especially in hollowed-out urban centers, daily life remained largely unchanged even after the landmark civil rights reforms. With factories and low-skill jobs rapidly disappearing in urban areas nationwide, an underclass became effectively mired in intergenerational poverty, institutional neglect, and the trafficking of drugs and guns.
As inequality, therefore, widened substantially within the African-American community itself in terms of income, education, and security, so too did social distance grow between the classes now emerging. Economic disparities reinforced by opportunity gaps now overlap with a yawning and accelerating cultural gap, as two worlds pull apart from a once cohesive whole.
Whereas in earlier decades, the fortunate few black professionals with any status lived among and directly served lower-income neighborhoods out of necessity, now their mobility has enabled physical and psychological distance. As new opportunities opened up, middle-class families began migrating en masse from cities to suburbs, rarely looking back except on occasional Sunday visits.
Their children now increasingly went to integrated or even predominately white schools rather than the systemically underinvested and crumbling inner-city ones that most blacks still had no choice but to attend. Cross-class bonds grew more tenuous and frayed over time, no longer reinforced by the geographic and social proximity that Jim Crow had previously enforced upon all African-Americans.
Judgment Replaces Mutual Support
This inevitable widening of class divides meant that a sense of mutual obligation and support within the black community was increasingly replaced by negative class-based stereotyping and judgment, as many reflexively blamed the poor themselves for their plight rather than recognizing ongoing structural hindrances. Why couldn’t they just apply themselves in school like we did? Why can’t they just get a job instead of selling drugs? Why can’t they keep their family structures intact?
A bootstrap mentality took hold: if some could make it up the ladder, anyone could, despite the vastly different starting conditions and opportunities still impeding many left behind. Lingering intergenerational trauma fueled much of this bifurcation, as the formerly oppressed often struggled most to develop empathy for others who were still marginalized when they gained status. But healing would take decades of open self-reflection, moral courage, and purposeful relationship-building across dividing lines.
The Poisoned Fruits of Predatory Capitalism
While the ADOS community still faced monumental external obstacles of racism and discrimination across most facets of American life even after the civil rights era, the greatest cancer subtly poisoning communal bonds from the inside came through the emergence of unchecked predatory capitalism and greed.
As some black financial institutions and enterprises properly integrated into the economic mainstream, opening their services to wider demographics, others rapaciously sought to exploit vulnerable niches of the black community rather than empower them. They gravitated not to areas of need but to opportunities for extraction. As society would later come to understand, merely trading white corporate oppression for black capitalist exploitation uplifted very few while demoralizing many.
A stark example was the wave of predatory subprime mortgage lending that disproportionately targeted and infiltrated black urban neighborhoods in the 1990s and 2000s. As journalists and activists later uncovered, too often black-owned banks and brokers themselves cynically participated in peddling risky, deceptive home loans to their own communities for short-term profits with long-term damage.
The subprime bubble and collapse left half of black homeowners nationwide stripped of nearly all their home equity by 2011, compared to just a quarter of affected white families. Black America lost decades of wealth-building almost overnight. Yet few, if any, predatory lending corporations or personnel faced serious consequences or accountability for these egregious abuses.
This selective opportunism was replicated across spheres. As the black underclass found itself underserved by mainstream institutions, some seeking to fill the void prized profits over empowerment. Check cashing fees and payday loans targeted those shut out of banks, siphoning wealth from those who could least afford it. Small store owners and landlords hiked prices higher than large chains by capitalizing on captive markets.
Too often, businesses developed predatory pricing and lending schemes to exploit low-income minority areas rather than invest in their financial stability. Exorbitant rents in neglected neighborhoods further drain families’ limited budgets. Those unable to access traditional financial tools had little choice but to accept whatever terms allowed basic participation in commerce and the economy, no matter how harsh.
Internalized Oppression’s Impact
Within the African-American community itself, some entrepreneurs adopted an attitude that rationalized this exploitation as just business while dismissing vulnerability as a merely personal failure. They justified preying upon their own people’s lack of options with the refrain, “At least it’s black-owned.” This prioritized individual profit over community empowerment and uplift, however much it allowed material accumulation for a select few.
Other examples abound of how internalized racism and oppression can manifest in ruthless intra-communal capitalism divorced from ethics. For-profit colleges aggressively and sometimes fraudulently recruit ADOS students with inflated promises of advancement, while overcharging for low-quality education rarely leads to the advertised career success.
Some black-owned grocery stores and bodegas in neighborhoods without alternatives openly maintain higher everyday shelf prices than corporate supermarkets, cynically exploiting a lack of competition. Black radio personalities endorse get-rich-quick schemes that often prey on the elderly and vulnerable. The handshake of racial solidarity provides a convenient cover for seedy motives.
In these ways, under the guise of community support, heartless crony capitalism continues to thrive, enabled by the silence of those who climbed a few rungs up the ladder and then pulled it away behind them. Those who manage to achieve middle-class stability and security in the black community have a responsibility to call out such practices rather than becoming passively complicit in them through a nominal shared identity.
Too often, the greater communal good of supporting each other’s authentic rise is sacrificed to ruthless individual enrichment. Those taken ruthlessly advantage of first are invariably the most marginalized—the working poor, recent immigrants, the disabled, and the geographically isolated. But ultimately, the entire demographic suffers from ethical sacrifices. Reaping unethically sown winds yields a bitter harvest down the line.
Reconciling Internal and External Divides
Truly standing fully against inequality and marginalization under these complex circumstances requires consciously rejecting not only overt external racism but also internal greed that exploits vulnerabilities rather than healing them. Among oppressed groups, the deep trauma of racism and marginalization often manifests in a ruthless undervaluing of one’s own people, contrasted with elevating whiteness and wealth above all else.
Healing these internal community fissures involves fully acknowledging past harms done, making amends, changing destructive behaviors, and reconciling honestly around a shared hope-filled vision. As Martin Luther King himself cautioned, “It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of white society.” For America, that means reparations. For the ADOS community, it means reconciling.
None of this is to minimize the external obstacles still to be toppled through relentless political effort, protest, and economic empowerment free of exploitation. The ADOS demographic still battles overwhelming structural discrimination across many facets of American life, an enduring legacy of white supremacy. That war continues against formidable resistance and must remain a central priority.
But communal ties have also frayed from unchecked capitalistic greed, selfishness, and ego, opportunism disguised as racial uplift, class divisions exacerbated by income inequality, and the human tendencies toward judgment, resentment, and contempt that flow downstream from suffering. Healing both together is the only path forward.
With compassion as our compass, a historically divided black community can become whole once more. But it begins with acknowledging the internal wounds that occurred alongside external injustices, and proactively addressing each through open truth-telling and accountability. The freedom struggle endures, now against both inequality and our own worst impulses. Hand in hand, we continue onward.
And yet, despairing today would dishonor our ancestors’ sacrifices. What is shattered can be mended. What is divided can be united. Where there is ignorance of our shared bonds, wisdom can yet bloom. But first, the old must pass to make room for the new.
The Path to Reconciliation and Healing
For those who perpetuated or ignored past exploitation, defending actions as just business rather than trafficking in human dignity only prevents progress. True communal reconciliation begins with moral courage and honest truth-telling, not passive tolerance of injustice to preserve superficial tranquility. Let us speak and hear each other.
Next, class-based divisions must be bridged through concrete investment, not just lofty rhetoric. We must proactively undo the segregation and inequality that allow an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality to arise. Integration of neighborhoods, boardrooms, and classrooms—however incremental—can re-instill familiarity and empathy between all levels of society top-down and bottom-up. But no one side can integrate alone.
At the same time, businesses must sincerely act upon ideals of community uplift and empowerment, even at the cost of some profits. Serving the underserved should mean enabling customers, not exploiting desperation. Sincere community development ennobles a business, rather than simply enlarging the owners’ bank accounts. Trust is rebuilt through compassion, not transactions.
Culturally, we must resuscitate the tireless communitarian spirit of mutual support and collective economic cooperation that historically enabled black America to lift itself amid hostile conditions when all odds were arrayed against it. None of us are exempt from missteps in the past, but tomorrow we can choose grace.
Politically, the African-American community must rebuild the cross-class, intergenerational coalitions that once toppled oppressive systems and can again bring power through collective action. When fractured into socioeconomic silos, we lose not only cohesion but also agency, self-sufficiency, and the ethics of our ancestors. Rekindling solidarity of spirit to overcome divides rooted in justice and human dignity is the only way forward.
And each of us can begin mending historical rifts through everyday acts of community across barriers. Conscientious individuals must set an example through openness, constructive dialog, extending hands wherever they can reach, and listening without judgment. By seeing humanity in each other first, political change will organically follow.
None of us today created this exhausting road we walk, but all can help pave it forward. The task belongs to us all.
The path is long, but the destination is worth every step. Let bonds be reforged through truth, however searing. Let walls be dismantled through fellowship, however imperfect at first. And let each extend a hand across whatever chasms separate our family, knowing we all seek the same shore.
The thriving, just community we deserve to inhabit has always been waiting within us if only we could cultivate it together. Where there is ignorance of our shared bonds, wisdom can yet bloom. The spirit that sustained our ancestors’ journey can light the path forward — if kindled anew.
