If black America were a country, it’d be the 15th wealthiest nation in the world.
These are exactly the words uttered by talk show host Larry Elder when he declared that racism is not a major problem in America and that black Americans are thriving economically.
The Tampa Bay Times fielded an editorial which contained, “[Larry] Elder referred us to an annual report by Target Market News called ‘The Buying Power of Black America’, which publishes the only estimate one could find of the total earned income of African-Americans. In 2011, the report Larry Elder provided, Target Market News put the income spent by African-Americans at $836bn [£524bn].”
But as author Theodore R Johnson of the Atlantic pointed out, the stats do not support Elder’s presumed monolithic black America.
“Nearly all the sources of black America’s attributes are grounded in America’s history, economy, geography and government structures,” he says.
As NYU economics Prof. Gian Luca Clementi tells the Tampa Bay Times, “factors like government expenditure and private investment mean that buying power and [the total income produced in a country] aren’t comparable.”
Even so, statistics published in the Atlantic paint a picture of two countries:
“The first is of a strong nation with considerable manpower and purchasing power. The second is of a troubled, fragile state suffering from socioeconomic disparities and structural subjugation in ways that degrade life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
According to the US Census and the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, the median wealth per black American adult is $4,955 (£3,100), below the median wealth per adult in Mexico, China and Brazil. And in the United States, the average poverty rate is 15.1% overall, versus 27.4% in the black community.
Johnson writes:
Black household wealth is just over the median wealth of an adult in Palestine.
W.E.B Du Bois, who was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) through most of his life – a staunch integrationist – outlined a similar concept that African Americans had been systematically denied economic progress in America.
In 1934, he advanced the argument that since integration would not happen in the nation any time soon, the leading classes of African Americans had to take steps to develop their own communities for their people and build economic and political resources independent of white help and support. Du Bois gave a speech, “A Negro Nation Within a Nation,” on June 26, 1934 as he resigned from the NAACP, to underscore the need for the leading Black elite to change the cause of an increasingly costly integration movement.
In it, he noted that African Americans faced the fact quite calmly that most white Americans did not like them, and planned neither for their survival nor for their definite future if it involved free, self-assertive modern manhood. He did not call all white Americans racist but stressed how much the saving few Americans were nonetheless worried about the Negro problem; while a still larger group were ill-disposed and condoned prevailing white public opinion. Du Bois lamented that the great mass of Americans were merely representatives of average humanity, who muddled “along with their own affairs and scarcely can be expected to take seriously the affairs of strangers [African Americans] whom they fear and despise.”
In concluding, Du Bois devised what he felt was the only way out for African Americans, if we were to attain liberty, the pursuit of happiness and self-realization at all in America.
“For a nation with this start in culture and efficiency to sit down and await the salvation of a white God is idiotic. With the use of their political power, their power as consumers, and their brainpower, added to that chance of personal appeal which proximity and neighborhood always give to human to human beings, Negroes can develop in the United States an economic nation within a nation, able to work through inner cooperation to found its own institutions, to educate its genius, and at the same time, without mob violence or extremes of race hatred, to keep in helpful touch and cooperate with the mass of the nation. This has happened more often than most people realize, in the case of groups not so obviously separated from the mass of people as are American Negroes. It must happen in our case or there is no hope for the Negro in America.”
Alas, was he right in the face of comments like Larry Elder’s, some 80 years hence?
Can the leading Negro classes, as Du Bois called them, assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, or would they allow their own people to be doomed for all time? Would this leading Negro class consider the present state of affairs as not a case of ethics, but a plain case of necessity, to employ the methods necessary, by which liberty and the pursuit of happiness can be ensured, and first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity in America? Or will they fail to wake up once again for their people?
Larry Elder talks about earned income of Black America, but what about accumulated debt? I think if he were to calculate Black America’s debt to White America, he would be surprised at the number that he would find. Wealth is another category where there is a huge disparity between White and Black Americans. Black Americans have for some time been denied opportunities to accumulate wealth, the most detrimental area for the majority has been in the housing sector where Black Americans are denied the right to purchase houses historically in areas now that have more than quadrupled their original value. Larry Elder’s talk about black income is just another example of empty words that don’t at all get at the meat of a subject.
It all boils down to simple mathematics!
White conservatives and their black hatred cannot be countered with white liberals who do not support violence and injustice against blacks. Liberal inaction is very costly to blacks who believe that whites are on their side. At the end of the day, the “good” whites doing nothing + the “bad white” doing everything is the same as 0 + (-1) = – 1. There is a negative impact of white society on black people since the bad outweighs the inaction of the good. Black people need to realize this and take action 1 or 2 or more, in order to negate or outweigh the negativity coming from the racist whites.
Good luck getting black people to wake up. I’m black and I’ve tried to get black people to do simple things and they don’t want to do anything if they’re not getting paid. As long as they continue to accept the money from the highest bidder, they’ll forever be disadvantaged. Whites will always be the highest bidder. Capitalism is their game. Black people need to have a different game plan if they are going to wake up from this new era of civil injustice.