Friday, March 29, 2024

President-Elect Donald Trump Met With Ray Lewis, He Met with Kanye West, and Now He Should Meet Me

*Donald Trump’s overtures to Black America have not been near the mark, because they are based on bad assumptions.

The assumption that all of Black America’s problems are fixed with tweaks, rather than a systemic overhaul. The false belief that you can fix Black America, without overhauling the system that has oppressed the race for nearly the entirety of our nation’s history. Trump has made several general propositions to Black America in his New Deal, none of which cut to the crux of why race was created in our country originally.

The belief that education, and safer communities will act as the New Deal did for White America is ludicrous. Let’s be clear that the New Deal enacted by Roosevelt driven by the Great Depression was one of the pillars that gave a foundation for the White middle class, and it was far from general in its policies.

Giving out job subsidies, helping white farmers, and supplying support for unions, it provided the economic soil for the White middle class to blossom. But again even with the New Deal, Black America was largely left out of receiving its benefits.

Meeting with Kanye West, or Ray Lewis wont open President Elect Donald Trump’s eyes to these facts, but I can. Exposure to the data will show him and his administration the depths of our problem, and make it much clearer what needs to be done to move toward fixing it.

For decades we have used the narrative of effort and ability to explain how wealth is distributed in America. In my recent discussion with Duke University Professor, and one of the foremost structural economist in the nation William A. Darity , he made it clear to me lineage is the key to wealth in modern America. The ways this wealth appears includes in vivo transfers, in life gifts between generations in the form of house down payments, college tuition, and other forms of gifts passed from one generation to the next. Also it is inheritance in the form of houses with equity, stocks, and cash assets being passed down after death. Yet, as stated by Darity due to an American legacy of racial oppression, and theft far too often Black Americans are left out from having these needed life events occur. This is the reason for the racial wealth gap. Many have answered this by stating many White Americans are left out as well. But what these people fail to grasp is how neither the data, nor history support their position applying so absolutely to nearly the whole White race. In my recent piece, “Black Wealth Hardly Exists, Even When You Include NBA, NFL And Rap Stars”, I detailed how this economic fact rears its head in application. To give context there are approximately 190 million Whites, living in just over 80 million homes. In contrast, there are 42 million Blacks living in about 14.5 million homes. According to Professor Wolff of NYU, after deducting the family car the middle black family is worth a mere $1,700. While in contrast the middle white family is worth about $100,000 when using a similar method of accounting. Meaning nearly 40 million white families are worth more than $100,000, with nearly 8 million of those homes being worth more than $1.4 million dollars. All while half of all black families survive on less than $1,700 in net worth. This chasm is not due to a difference in work ethic or drive, in fact, according to Darity and many other scholars this racial wealth gap is due to the historical reality of race, and its economic impact. As a result, despite all beliefs neither hard work, nor college will close the wealth gap created by hundreds of years of racial inequity.

Our great nation has a history, one that is scarred with oppressive acts done to black descendants of slaves. Many simply look to slavery rightfully so, but the era after known as “Jim Crow” was just as damaging. An era during which not only did Colored Only signs hang in storefronts across the nation. But also a massive assault on Black wealth occurred both by white citizens, and the U.S. government. While many citizens pillaged black ‘s personal property throughout the south, the government through laws like those instituted by the government through redlining further fortified blacks lack of wealth. Redlining was a process whereby areas where blacks bought homes were rated a D, and marked red making them ineligible for advantageous mortgage loans, and home insurance, in effect cratering the value of their property in comparison to nearby White Americans. This low rating was regardless of profession, education, or number of black families in aneighborhood. These laws, along with many others are part of what under-girded white advantage. We often forget this truth, and recreate narratives where black America’s current failures come as a result of the lack of black effort. As Professor Darity makes clear more must be done to recognize this is far from the truth. “It’s completely desirable to get additional education. But do not have the expectation that doing that will change the relative position of black folks in comparison to white folks. We have to do something much more dramatic, that’s much more transformative.” William A. Darity Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy at Duke University. It is this truth that President Elect Trump must be made to confront.

Despite Ray Lewis stating, “Forget Black or White, Black or White is irrelevant. The bottom line is job creation and economic development.” That isn’t the bottom line at all, “gilding the ghetto” as it’s accurately called didn’t work before, and it won’t work now. As recently stated by Darity in a interview with the Atlantic, “Trump seems to intend to pursue a program of intense business expansion in black urban communities. This, of course, harkens back to urban development projects pursued by the federal government in the 1970s, particularly under the Nixon administration. Those projects did not solve the problem of urban black poverty, and I’m doubtful that it will solve the problem now.”

The lack of African American wealth is a story tied into the fabric of the American economy, in order to address it requires an honesty we as a country have failed to be able to have at any point prior. It requires a coming to the acute awareness that our racial problems are both historical, and black and white. If we deny this fact we will never solve why wealth gaps exist that choke the life out of black communities across our great nation.

Originally on Huffington Post

Antonio Moore, an attorney based in Los Angeles, is one of the producers of the Emmy-nominated documentary Freeway: Crack in the System. He has contributed pieces to the Grio, Huffington Post, and Inequality.org on the topics of race, mass incarceration and economics. Follow him on YouTube Channel Tonetalks.

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