Commentary to African American Vignette #8

African American Vignette #8

Written by a white woman:

Because I work in a medium sized organization as a diversity coordinator, many people express their opinions about racism to me. In 2002 a white man stopped me in the hallway and said, "Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, and Sidney Poitier all won awards at the Academy Awards last night. So what is their (African-Americans') problem? What do they want?"

I said to him, “I think the problem is that people of color in general don’t have equal access to resources. You assume that because a few black actors achieve success all blacks are better off.” The man countered, "African Americans just have to work hard enough, pull themselves up like the people who won the awards. I come from a working class background, and I pulled myself up, so what is their problem?"

Commentary to African American Vignette #8

Two main areas where black people are accorded celebrity status and large sums of money are entertainment and sports. Seeing progress at the top in these two fields does not accurately reflect the progress of the average black person. For example, in terms of wealth, the average Black family today has only one-eighth the net worth or assets of the average white family. (Dalton Conley, Sociologist; Race: The Power of Illusion. Episode Three: The House We Live In. Shown on PBS in 2003. http://www.newsreel.org/films/race.htm)

The question of why there is such a disparity in wealth between black and white people is a complex one. To reduce it to the notion “black people just need to work harder” i.e., blacks are lazy, is to fall into stereotypical thinking. Moreover, it completely leaves out the impact of institutionalized racism and its corollary, white privilege, which have made it much easier for whites to accumulate wealth. For example, given that one of the primary ways for most Americans to accumulate net worth is home ownership, the following fact is revealing: “Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion of home loans; more than 98 percent went to whites.” (“The Houses that Racism Built” Larry Adelman, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday June 29, 2000)