I saw a photo on social media today which contained a group of men of color, a couple of whom I recognize as “media moguls”, looking into the camera with glasses raised in celebration. (An image search attributes the photo to the Roc Nation Grammy Brunch 2018. I have not shared the image, because I did not obtain permission from the photographer to do so.) The caption read, “Over $1Billion in this picture and not ONE black owned independent town, school, hospital, bank, insurance company, manufacturing company or militia. WE are OUR biggest problem!” When I replied we ought to talk about the many which were burned to the ground by white people before we start blaming ourselves I was asked if I blame white people today for what white people in the past did to oppress the Black community in America. My response is the situation is far more complex than that question implies.
Independent towns, school, hospitals, banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, and militia take decades, if not generations, to establish with some level of profitability. Have any of the people in the above photo established those things? I have no idea. I do know there are small, independent ones out there, because news of them occasionally crosses my social media feeds. But they do not have the economic sway or publicity of much of corporate America, which is predominantly white-owned.
And why do they not have that sway? Because their predecessors were violently dismantled by white people in the past, thus stopping the development of the generational wealth and community support necessary to nurture them until the present day. Because white people put institutional practices in place to prevent most of us from obtaining the funding to establish and maintain those things. Because not enough white people in the present are doing enough to dismantle those institutional practices, are not questioning the absence of Black-owned towns and companies etc., and are not putting pressure on the powers in charge of those systems. Furthermore, too many white people in the present are still willingly perpetuating the institutionalized racism that got us to this point today, and too many others are not pressuring their peers to drop their complacency about these things.
Could the media moguls in the aforementioned photo do more to support the Black community? Maybe. I don’t know what each of them is doing in their own way. But I do know they did not build, do not benefit from, do not run, and thus cannot dismantle the systems white people in the past put in place to keep the Black community from thriving. One handful of wealthy people of color cannot save an entire demographic from a system intended to keep the bulk of us from catching up, let alone keeping up with the wealth of white America at large. I also know not enough white people in the present are putting their all into dismantling those systems and paying back into the Black community the generational wealth that was lost due to those systems. Blaming ourselves is too simplistic and fails to consider both history and the present ramifications of said history. The Black community has issues, but our biggest issue comes from and must be solved by those outside of us: racism.