Don't you just hate those lame "we came here poor" and "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" speeches and excuses posited by White America? I know I do because it is devoid of context on so many levels that it almost appears like a snicker, a bite of sarcasm or a pouring of salt on an open wound. Be that it may that many whites came over during the Ellis Island era poor with nothing but the shirts on their backs, I don't recall White America needing a Civil Rights movement just to persuade the goverment to acknowledge and protect their basic human rights. When did White America needed this type of activist because I guess I missed that one?
America the Great, the land that seduced so many whites to leave their home countries in Europe for good as penniless well wishers to stake their claim to the equality and opportunity so widely touted, was itself nursed off of the inequality and lack of opportunity of those dark hued people from Africa who built it and used their blood, sweat and tears to transformed itself from a backwater frontier colony of political exiles, indentured servants, religious refugees and deported criminals into one of the world's economic powerhouses that attracted the likes of these poor and destitute white Europeans.
I find funny that when the descendants of these enslaved laborers and the inheritors of their oppressed outcasted condition attempt to speak on the facts of this reality, they are labeled as "whining complainers who feel the world owes them something" by either the actual, racial or social descendants of those who benefited so enormously and unequally from this social science project called the United States of America. The irony, the audacity, the nerve of you m_____s!
Regardless if whites came over before or after slavery, the fact is as a collective they reaped and continue to reap the benefits of the economic engine conceived and developed through unpaid agricultural labor, a prosperous slave mongering shipping industry and chattel slave insurance policies.
Those poor white immigrants... Really? Please they chose to emigrate for hope of a better future than they could hope for in their homelands. They had intent - impoverished or not! Of course they had to work hard to carve their piece of the American pie; the United States was never and is not an utopia. It has been since it's beginning a capitalist society. We all know nothing is free in a capitalist society. Their white skin and European origins afforded the immigrants no failproof guarantee to success but it did afford them more readily available opportunities and relatively easy access, via hard work, to realizing the American dream and success. So the 'hard work' and 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' is a valid narrative but it is only valid for White folks.
By contrast, the 'hard work' narrative for Black people is a disingenuous one because for a people who had already worked hard since 1619, the fruits or outcome of Black 'hard work' was and still is severely limited. Given the duration and intensity of hard work done, where even the kids worked hard, you would think African Americans would be the wealthiest and most prosperous population in America if the hard work argument was factual true. Black folks have worked hard in the United States before the United States even became the United States - forget since Ellis Island.
For Black folks, hard work is not the formula for success. It is a formula for more hard work with the same results - underpaid, socially disenfranchised and politically powerless. The reality is many venues or positions of employment and equitable upward mobility in the American social environment have been denied or closed to us throughout our presence in this country. Our narrative is not one of hard work but one of hardly working. Most things hardly work for the children of slaves - the job market, the government and its politics, the justice system, the educational system, taxes, police department, health care, etc.
Chew on this fact - slave cotton production in the south generated more than $3 million annually by 1830 (that is an estimated equivalent of $117 million annually on cotton alone). Now add the production of tobacco, rice, indigo and corn -not to mention slave breeding which one "breeder" commented that breeding slaves proved to be a more prosperous venture than his previous slave based agricultural pursuits. In 1830, the United States as a sovereign country was only 54 years old - younger than the average human lifespan.
So the "we were poor but made it through a strong work ethic, unyielding determination and an iron will", the motif so etched in the White America psyche and only partially valid during the post-Ellis Island white experience in America, belies several things when its leveled at Black America as a means to disarm the very accurate statements of the brutal, grim and less than rosy reality of the 4 centuries of Black existence in colonial and sovereign United States:
1. It unveils, as well as, promotes White America's belief in the inherent inferiority of Black folks;
2. It seeks to place blame on Black America for its less than satisfactory status and attribute Black America's problems to some innate lack of a moral compass or to some kind of character flaw among Black people;
3. It absolves White America of any level of accountability for both its historical and modern day actions of tyranny, oppression, injustice and hypocrisy.
4.It ultimately spares the White collective ego while bolstering the notions of White moral superiority and White Supremacy overall.
For Black people this means: ACCESS DENIED AND DEFERRED! Same shxt, different day. So what's new besides the coffee?
Food for thought!
(FinalCall.com) - The foundation of American White supremacy sits tenuously on a rickety base of lies and deceptions about how Whites gained their wealth and status. A century and a half after slavery the median wealth of White families is $100,000; for Black families, it's $5,000. The belief that Whites achieved this 20-1 wealth advantage by HARD WORK is an absurd and a historical fantasy. Nonetheless, the airwaves are filled with the self-righteous pronouncements of Caucasian commentators anxious to “advise” Blacks to “work hard” and to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” if they want to succeed in America. Not only do they seek to invent a fraudulent fairy tale that whitewashes a very bloody legacy, but they also aim to reaffirm the notion that “non-Whites” are naturally inferior and lazy and are thus responsible for having comparatively nothing. The truth is a whole lot nastier than that.
