How America's Vast Racial Wealth Gap Grew

[iluvatar5150]

Any discussion on economic racial inequity needs to include an explanation of why Asians do so well, given they weren't even allowed to be citizens until the 1940's for Chinese and not until 1952 for Japanese. There history also includes many social and legal barriers in the United States. What's the secret to their success? My guess is it is their hard work, as well as their strong family and cultural values.

Asians didn’t suffer the same multi-generational oppression and forced poverty in the US that blacks have.

They tend to be concentrated in higher-wage areas:
If Asians Make More Than Whites Then What Should We Do About The US Racial Pay Gap?

And they aren’t all wealthy. “Asians” are not a monolith. Their are many nationalities under that banner and many still tend to be quite poor - in fact, there is more income inequality among Asian Americans than among any other ethnic group, including whites. Their average numbers are skewed upwards by those who already had the skills and/or wealth required to move here.

How ‘Crazy Rich’ Asians Have Led to the Largest Income Gap in the U.S.

 

[iluvatar5150]

Are you saying that there hasn't been racial discrimination against Asians since 1970? I don't think you will find many Asians who would agree with that.

I know plenty of Asians. I’m sure most would say they’ve experienced some amount of discrimination (I’m aware of a few cases among them - one as recently as this past month; I’m sure there are more). I don’t think any would claim they’ve experienced it to the degree that so many black people have.

 

[Ana the Ist]

Your reply implied that lynchings were the totality of how black homes and businesses were destroyed.

Not at all. During the same time period about 1500 whites were lynched...and that doesn't count all the lynchings before. If you look at incidents like the Lincoln County War you can see that lynching and vigilantism has certainly taken its toll on the wealth of whites as well.

No, what I'm saying....not implying....is that when it comes to the racial wealth gap, lynchings and other instances of whites killing blacks don't account for it. It's entirely negligible. If killing a black person hurts the overall wealth of the black community....then the black community has done hundreds of times more damage to itself in that regard than the white community has.

 

[All Englands Skies]

This is the argument that was also made in the 1960s, there have been rich black people throughout the 20th century, that did not mean there was no racism or segregation.

There is a myth that slaves were all just unskilled labour, when in reality a lot of slaves did technical work, repair work and had the practical skills that kept plantations and farms operating.

After the US civil war and the slaves being "freed", former slaves could taken a huge slice of the Souths economy, they were the ones with the real skills, with hard work and working together, they could have become a wealthy class.

To the former "masters", they had to find a way to take a wrecking ball to safeguard their economic power, to bring order that protected their unjust wealth and power, so they, who grew fat and greedy off the sufferings of slaves, didn't lose their unearned power and wealth, after all, they had lost those who actually had the practical skills to make farms/plantations/businesses grow, they weren't going to be able to work it by themselves and if the "freed" slaves got together they had the skills to prosper.

the freed slaves has their dreams crushed by the immoral and conniving, lazy, self-serving slave-masters.

 

[Ana the Ist]

There is a myth that slaves were all just unskilled labour, when in reality a lot of slaves did technical work, repair work and had the practical skills that kept plantations and farms operating.

After the US civil war and the slaves being "freed", former slaves could taken a huge slice of the Souths economy, they were the ones with the real skills, with hard work and working together, they could have become a wealthy class.

To the former "masters", they had to find a way to take a wrecking ball to safeguard their economic power, to bring order that protected their unjust wealth and power, so they, who grew fat and greedy off the sufferings of slaves, didn't lose their unearned power and wealth, after all, they had lost those who actually had the practical skills to make farms/plantations/businesses grow, they weren't going to be able to work it by themselves and if the "freed" slaves got together they had the skills to prosper.

the freed slaves has their dreams crushed by the immoral and conniving, lazy, self-serving slave-masters.

Not really. Post civil war was a hard time on everyone....and newly freed blacks especially. Without land, resources, or large scale help from white....southern or northern...a great many starved and died or simply fell to diseases like smallpox.

The idea that southern former slave owners all conspired to keep them poor is silly. First off, northern whites discriminated against them just as much....they didn't want to hire blacks much more than their southern counterparts. Secondly, those former slave owners were working out a new system of labor to try and keep cotton profitable. This resulted in sharecropping and bank loans and other lines of credit. There was a large population of poor whites who had been previously shut out of work by slavery....it was just a matter of figuring out how to get them working and stay profitable at the same time.

 

[SummerMadness]

There is a myth that slaves were all just unskilled labour, when in reality a lot of slaves did technical work, repair work and had the practical skills that kept plantations and farms operating.

After the US civil war and the slaves being "freed", former slaves could taken a huge slice of the Souths economy, they were the ones with the real skills, with hard work and working together, they could have become a wealthy class.

To the former "masters", they had to find a way to take a wrecking ball to safeguard their economic power, to bring order that protected their unjust wealth and power, so they, who grew fat and greedy off the sufferings of slaves, didn't lose their unearned power and wealth, after all, they had lost those who actually had the practical skills to make farms/plantations/businesses grow, they weren't going to be able to work it by themselves and if the "freed" slaves got together they had the skills to prosper.

the freed slaves has their dreams crushed by the immoral and conniving, lazy, self-serving slave-masters.

Shortly after the slaves states were reinstated to the Union, the Black codes became the new form of oppression. The prevailing view was that freed men were too lazy, unstructured and hypersexual to live on their own, so the law was needed to rein them in. You also have to remember that polygenesis was still a widely held view (that humans arose from four different races with blacks as the most inferior), so keeping some form of control on black was desired in the South. They also used the law to keep Blacks in slavery via convict labor because the 13th amendment of the US constitution allows for slavery of the incarcerated, so that's why loitering laws and other such laws that targeted the assembly of black people arose.

It was by no means equal suffering because the century of terrorism that followed also had a profound on Black Americans. The interesting thing is that a senator proposed a post-war plan to redistribute the land of slave masters to freed people with the remainder of the land sold to the highest bidder. This idea was rejected because there was because giving Black people land would make them think they could get something for free without working and that was "wrong." Funny enough, you still hear echoes of that same argument today: Black people are lazy and want a handout. And despite racial discrimination, that is not the problem, the problem is them.

The post-war era was only positive for Blacks during Reconstruction, but their progress was quickly shredded when Union soldiers withdrew from the South and the terrorism emblematic of the Jim Crow era became the norm.