It's not like the racial wealth gap in America is closing anytime soon even.
We even have studies done by accredited professionals that state that poor white people have a better chance of moving upward in class then middle to upper class black people. In fact middle to upper class black people actually have a greater chance of falling in mobility than moving upward in in this country.
It's this "I got mine but you if you don't have anything...fukk you do better in life" mentality that's fukking us over. Especially considering this country was designed for us to fail to begin with.
Actually the "wealth gap" is one of those things I'm referring to when I said...
...or their focusing on [one of] the many right things that need attention, but putting disproportionate energy into it relevant to it's importance.
To be succinct my overall position is:
- The popular wealth analysis is fundamentally flawed in it's application (I.E. You can't take persons making incomes of 80k v.s. 15k a year and act like they have anywhere near the same financial life because of a similar "non-depreciating asset" profile) people across drastically distinct income levels can easily have similar "wealth" profiles.(All other positions raised by folks essentially stems from or are in defense of this flawed analysis) ...I've been saying this about 2-3 years now before the current state of affairs.
Why do I say this?
The existence of disparity in "non-depreciating assets"
(Wealth) between African Americans and other races isn't the point of contention here. The contention is that the existence of disparity in "non-depreciating assets" ....or specifically; people with "non-depreciating assets" of similar levels, can have wildly different economic options.
EXAMPLE:
For the sake of "argument" lets take 3 hypothetical people with $0 "non-depreciating assets"(wealth) and do a basic Life style comparison.
Person 1 of 3:
- Income - 180k yearly ("non asset")
- Downtown luxury apartment Rental - ("non asset")
- Luxury Car - $30k paid & $30k owed ("depreciating asset")
- 401k - $160k ("non-depreciating asset")
- Student loans - $100k (debt)
- Credit Cards - $30k (debt)
- etc etc
Total "non-depreciating assets" value = $0
Person 2 of 3:
- Income - 80k yearly ("non asset")
- Home - $50k paid & $50k owed ("non-depreciating asset")
- Used Car - paid off ("depreciating asset")
- 401k - $60k ("non-depreciating asset")
- Student loans - $40k (debt)
- Credit Cards - $20k (debt)
- etc etc
Total "non-depreciating assets" value = $0
Person 3 of 3:
- Income - 15k yearly ("non asset")
- Section 8 Apartment rental - ("non asset")
- Public transportation
- Checking account - $200 ("non asset")
- etc etc
Total "non-depreciating assets" value = $0
The (expenses available to / lifestyle afforded by) the 3 persons/families above are wildly distinct.
And most importantly the overwhelming majority of African Americans are not reflected by [Person 3 of 3] above(a non-depreciating asset profile doesn't give the data to make that assertion one way or the other).
(To be clear, a person could have great income and crippling debt also ...one data point isn't going to net but so much)
I.E. asserting that African Americans have a $
[insert value here] "non-depreciating asset" profile means very little in determining the economic options/quality of life for a given person or group of people. Hell Africa itself is a prime example of that. There are various African countries with vast amounts of "non-depreciating assets" in the ground in terms of raw resources, that doesn't mean the country and it's inhabitants are automatically/anymore likely to be Singapore status.
My central objection is that the validity of the reference data and the validity of conclusions/interpretations based on that data are two related ...but distinct topics. Folks often confuse the two and I've said this a couple times now on coli.
Just because folks have quality ingredients
(data) doesn't mean they succeeded in properly cooking the dish
(conclusions). They also can't lean on the quality of those ingredients to justify a failed dish. The dish isn't a failure because of the quality of their ingredients, the dish is a failure because they failed to properly cook those ingredients.
Conclusion:
The "wealth deception" is a huge topic deserving of it's own thread, I mean there is still the issues of...
- Asset(property) value and tax hikes - see Georgia sea island people who loose their homes when the taxes on the property skyrocket because of local development raises the value of the land without a corresponding increase in income to pay those new taxes.
- Disparities & Gaps(wealth, income, etc) as a motive for development - The nonesense action of people acting like development goals are assessed, proposed, & justified based on the existence of Disparities / Gaps.
- Political history of focus on wealth as opposed to income - People were hyping the "so called GDP(spending power)" of African Americans till around 2014 when conservative Larry Elder started using the spending power factoid to dismiss AA problems. Soon After people started moving away from GDP; first to PPP then to "wealth".
- Market manipulation of wealth - See African nations like Zimbabwe where the west colludes to embargo any purchases of goods thereby artificially lowering it's value despite those same goods from other exporters having value on the open market. On a smaller domestic level I would also look to the experience of black farmers in the U.S.
- The white valuation of African American assets (If we had the same amount of "stuff" we still wouldn't have the same "non-depreciating asset" value) because the mere fact that African Americans own the asset diminishes it's value to those doing the assessing/buying. I've touched on this aspect before....
Me getting to all of the above would take some time I'm not quite ready to give. And this is all before the odd position of saying income doesn't matter only wealth, then proposing an increase in income via reparations, when if income would alter the wealth profile you could just as easily push AAs to spend a greater share of our disposable income on collective wealth acquisition. Which is even more odd because if the position is that there is no mechanism for AAs to spend our disposable income on collective wealth acquisition then what does folks think is going to happen when AAs get more income via reparations?
(And folks can't tell me the majority of African Americans are in poverty with no disposable income to pool for collective wealth acquisition cause that's a lie used to spur folks into [insert action here])
Most of the wealth talk logic is just silly to me and has always been for the past 3-5 years
List of U.S. communities with African-American majority populations - Wikipedia
