Exactly. None of these nikkas from the bottom and never had to really struggle just to hustle. Don't even know what that means but telling people who live/lived the shyt how easy it is. Somebody said they make 65 or 75gs a year and was able to save like they don't realize there're literally making 3 times as much as a poor person .
I started out in the projects. I left home at 16 and stayed in a garage apartment for $175/month on a part-time salary ($4.15/hr - 20 hours a week) from KFC in 1990 and still finished high school. I joined the military against my parent's wishes (we only reconciled during my 3rd year in). When my ship had it's first Med deployment, I bought my first car cash (1996 Nissan 200SX) off of earnings from selling name brand cigarettes, snuff and chewing tobacco and loaning out money to sailors (mostly white) who wasted their money on bullshyt, living from paycheck to paycheck. After I got out, I bought my first house on an $18K salary because I came up with the crazy idea to give up my lease and to live in my car for over a year boondocking (before they had a name for it) in a WalMart parking lot. I was washing my ass in the morning and night at the fitness center (they had showers), for a $50/month membership, to get up the scratch to make the down payment. To show you how stupid I was, I only thought disabled and veterans retirees could use the VA for a loan. That's how stupid I was. I didn't go out and get the McMansion. My first house, which I rent out now, is less than 1.2K square feet and needed about $15K of rehab that I did myself, room by room. You guys have YouTube to do about anything on a house when it comes to rehab/repair. I had to convince a GC that I wasn't bullshyting (most told me to get out of dodge) that I was willing to work for free to learn how to do XYZ or head down to the library crossing my fingers hoping I could find a howto book on XYZ.
I grew up in the poorest, most crime ridden county in the state of NC, which still gets shytted on until this day. I never made more than $38K before I quit working 9 to 5 in 2000.
I've tried to get cats I grew up with jobs working with the state that have felonies. Some of these jobs would have cats starting out the gate at $35K. Out of about 10 cats, only one could stop smoking weed for 30 fukking days to pass the drug screening test. One.
I guarantee if you plugged your bank account into a program like Mint or Personal Capital, you'll have a revelation and found out a significant portion of your income is spent on bullshyt. Hell, I know you throw out leftover food every week.
Do you smoke? Do you drink? That's anywhere from $300 to $500, depending on your habit, wasted every month.
These types act like history didn't happen. Like black folks weren't still being economically disenfranchised through the mid 20th century (lynchings, being locked out of economic opportunities, the failure of black banks due to the lack of capital etc).
None of us are saying don't work hard or try at business but you have to have a realistic view of the obstacles that you will face due to accrued disadvantages of being black in the United States. I don't want to hear about fukking immigrants who were probably elite back home coming with bullshyt "I came to this country with nothing but a straw hat" narratives. They weren't targeted for convict leasing, they weren't lynched and had their land stolen from them, they were not the target of the War on Drugs.
Expecting black folks to just hand someone 10K "to start a business" without that person having a track record of success or being legit is also not reasonable. We need access to good capital, to REAL capital.
I've said it repeatedly on here before that my maternal great-great-uncle was involved in the Wilmington Riot 0f 1898. They burned down his two general stores, his funeral parlor and his three-story house. He had to stay in a church steeple for almost two weeks eating raw eggs and sneaking down at night to get water from the baptismal pool to drink before he safely made it out of Wilmington traveling to Maxton, NC. He worked hard to get everything back and more in less than a decade. Before he died, his net worth was the equivalent for $250K in today's dollars.
My maternal grandfather graduated from high school at 16 in 1926. He got accepted to Stillman U in Tuscaloosa, AL. About 200 miles away from Stillman, one of the conductors kicked him off when he found out my grandfather was going to college. He made it half of the way on foot before an older black man gave him a ride the rest of the way. After his mother got sick, he dropped out in his junior year to take car of her never finishing college. He was a domestic for the rest of his life but he saved enough to buy two homes.
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