🗨️ Black people are incorrectly assumed "poor" until proven otherwise
The thesis of this article is as follows:
Black pop culture reveals that most Black creators (outside music) come from middle-to-upper middle class backgrounds, while the Black poor are written about but rarely get the chance to speak for themselves.
A few quotes from the article:
“You got 1 percent of the population in America who owns 41 percent of the wealth… but within the black community, the top 1 percent of black folk have over 70 percent of the wealth. So that means you got a lot of precious Jamals and Letitias who are told to live vicariously through the lives of black celebrities so that it’s all about ‘representation’ rather than substantive transformation… ‘you gotta black president, all y’all must be free.’” - Cornel West interviewed by Joe Rogan, July 24, 2019
I was born into Black poverty, and I will not forget that George Floyd was born into the same. For Floyd, the particulars of poverty were this: to be raised in the Cuney Homes projects, to endure years of deprivation, and to die violently in a manner common to our caste. Were Floyd still alive, or somehow reborn, he would not be hired to work within any of the institutions which now produce popular culture in his honor because he never obtained a bachelor’s degree.
Based on publicly available biographies, compared to their non-Black peers, Black contributors had a higher rate of Ivy League attendance and were twice as likely to be college faculty.
- the point here being: in order to succeed as a contributor, Black contributors needed to have a more prestigious background than their non-Black peers.
Most of the time, the assumptions that can be made about the backgrounds of white creators can be safely applied to their Black counterparts. Any time an elite education appears in a Black creator’s biography, it is likely that it was preceded by exorbitant privilege. The writer Colson Whitehead–born Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead–was raised a wealthy Manhattanite. His family owned a home in the Hamptons, and he attended Trinity Preparatory School which sends nearly half of its students into the Ivy League in exchange for a tuition of $58,500 annually.
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Being Black and from poverty, I am what white Americans imagine they are learning about and “standing in solidarity” with when they imbibe popular culture’s Black offerings. But it never occurs to them that Whitehead and Gay come from a very different class to begin with, and are not necessarily standing in real solidarity with me.
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Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.
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