The average wealth for black people is America is ten to a hundred times smaller than for white people. (source, page 5)
White people’s average wealth is not twice as big. Nor five times bigger. It is now one or two orders of magnitude bigger.
It is important to keep this in mind, whenever we compare behaviors of people from both groups.
Not important. Fundamental. Absolutely crucial.
It explains everything. In black communities: the constant pain. The hustling. The hardening. The dilettantism. The fracturing. The praise and respect for anyone making it big, no matter how the making it big happened.
And that one to two order of magnitude difference is pre-pandemic. It probably, almost a 100% sure didn’t get better. The gap is accelerating.
On the black end side of life, in that context, we can mostly hope for the best. It definitely shouldn’t be that way.
When a black citizen dies in the hand of random police unfairness, we hope that it will change policies. When a black celebrity dies of OD, I hope –as in, it would make a lot of sense- that we legalize all drugs so that overdoses are extremely rare.
But nothing happens. Black pain used to propel society into a better society. It hasn’t in the past 30 years.
How can we not legalize all drugs when some people can do them and be here –Charlie Sheen- and others –Shock G-, doing just the same, are not. I’ve never done cocaine but I want it to be legal so that I don’t lose another brother to fentanyl. It is exhausting and so disappointing to see a world of adults being completely unable to change things for the best. Acting blind. BLM not.
Police budgets after millions of people protesting the streets for weeks in 2020, and of course years of more than questionable body camera footage, have never lost their fat. Budgets basically didn’t change and stayed at phenomenal ranges.
This is why we mourn to no end when a successful black person dies early, no matter the cause of death. Nipsey, Chadwick, Virgil. And so many more. Those abruptly cut trajectories hurt so much because they would be the proof in the pudding. And just like that, they’re gone. Unnecessary Black death becomes black disappearance; it is what it is, it just happens, like the weather. At this point it is almost understood that if you are a successful black man today, you won’t live to experience grey blackness. Embedded ephemerality.
Sometimes I’m scared the stress and anxiety I have lived through my particular black life will get me before I make it completely. That damn chip on the shoulder black people in America and most of the world are born with.
This entire situation transforms black communities into dry, inflammable wood. Splintering, snapping. Acute, burning down in any way you can think of, at the first spark.