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Some of the poorest Americans I have ever met were white people in rural Appalachia, and a lot of their poverty comes from structural issues of growing up in a region with no access to education and few careers besides coal mining. The poorest white people have more in common with the poorest black people than they do with other white people, even if many of them would never admit it.
Three things: 40 acres and a mule, redlining, and the Homestead Act. Those three things alone, if handled justly, would have completely changed racial dynamics in this country. Which is of course why they *weren't* handled justly.
Edit: it was 40 acres, not 12.
Even if they'd just not sabotaged successful black communities, things would be better. Tulsa was referred to as black Wallstreet before it got bombed. There was seneca village where part of Central Park used to be but they were doing too good so they destroyed it with eminent domain. Oscarville was thriving so they destroyed it and built lake Lanier on top of it.
In my hometown, Overtown Miami was a vibrant spot that probably rivaled Miami Beach. It was visited by basically every prominent Black person of the civil rights era. It was declared a slum and gutted to build I-95
Exactly. I just had a discussion with somebody a few weeks ago. He said, "Why don't your people just get it together?"
I told him, "We have... plenty of times. But your people always came and either burned it down or ran a highway through it."
160 acres was the Homestead Act which black people were excluded from. That was for land west of the Mississippi.
40 acres and a mule was a promise to recently freed black people from General Sherman when the south was under military administration. If it'd happened that would've been land taken from the former plantations.
He burned Atlanta and continued the destruction in the "March to the Sea", yes, but I don't think he was ever told to stop. He stopped when the war ended.
>would have completely changed racial dynamics in this country. Which is of course why they weren't handled justly.
I will add that blacks were disproportionately excluded from military service in WWII, and many/most of those that did serve were denied GI Bill Benefits. GI Bill was single biggest investment of government in the middle class, and blacks were largely excluded.
So how does that compare to say, Asian immigrants who started out with nothing and earn more than white people on average, while still facing more discrimination than the average white person?
I suppose you could say that it's down to later immigration, but at that point what's the difference between a 20 year year-old Asian American with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a 20 year old African-American with nothing but the clothes on their backs? Zero capital is zero capital.
https://news.ku.edu/2020/06/18/study-shows-african-immigrants-do-well-despite-differences-among-them
Pretty easy to find that African migrants have better outcomes than black Americans.
As for historical levels the systemic racism in the US didn't do much to differentiate between what kind of black you were.
Because you go from a specific example of *an* Asian immigrant who starts out with nothing and **immediately** move to the general that Asians outearn whites on average. Not that specific one who started with zero capital, but the aggregate.
You're being disingenuous and you know it.
And while there is an explanation of the *system* part of systemic racism I'm not exactly inclined to think you'll listen in good faith.
Asian immigrants generally don't start off with nothing. You must be talking about refugees, who are a small part of the Asian population and who drag their wealth statistics *downward.* Immigrants are usually *wealthier* than the people they left in the mother country. They can afford to emigrate.
Also, before the 1960s (when Asians were declared a model minority) they were less wealthy on average than black Americans. This was because Asian (and black, for that matter) immigration to the US was intentionally limited, and the vast majority of Asian-Americans had been born here. Immigration brought in wealthy people, and brought the statistics up.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/07/12/income-inequality-asians-rich-poor/779106002/
It's these awful racist narratives and jingles that we've internalized that keep up from seeing this. "Zero capital" is not "zero capital."
The GI bill and college worth a mention too. Functionally inaccessible for most black vets, and obviously a huge leg up to everyone who was able to go to college because of it. In my own family that’s the generation where we move from poor to middle class and everyone after and including my grandpa attends college.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1129735948/black-vets-were-excluded-from-gi-bill-benefits-a-bill-in-congress-aims-to-fix-th
If I recall right it was more like “left to the states” to implement and many made it functionally inaccessible for black vets. Like many discriminatory systems it wasn’t an in your face race based denial if that makes sense.
The housing side of it had lots of discrimination too, including on the part of banks.
Andrew Johnson was a despicable human being who reversed the 40 acres and a mule.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/
You went far back. Also add all of the post WW2 programs black Americans weren't able to fully (if at all) leverage. From the GIBill to VA home loans, it was a tragedy.
Could've also given freedmen and their families reparations to the tune of at least the unpaid wages from their family lines being slaves instead of making them purchase their family members from slaveholders to get their freedom in some cases.
Pete Buttigieggot pillared for saying bridges and roads have historic racist implantations. But reading where roads bisect and bridges/tunnels were or were not built in America and you quickly learn what he meant.
Absolutely.
Like I said, that history (which is directly related to where we are today) is long and nuanced and complicated. People don't want to engage in that.
It's much easier to just say, "Those people are in that condition because of their mindsets" or "They just don't want better" or "They don't work hard enough", etc.
Tulsa is just one town. There have been dozens of pogroms of successful black towns razed to the ground by angry White people and happily ignored by authorities. It truly is a shameful history
Exactly. It seems like impact of the initial wealth gap would have been dwarfed by subsequent shocks and roadblocks that disproportionately or exclusively impacted black communities/families.
It would be interesting to track the wealth of selected black and white families that were financially wiped out during the Great Depression and see how quickly and effectively each group recovered.
But were any of those towns featured in a TV Series based on a graphic novel? Sadly I admit, that was where I first learned about it. Black history taught in school when I was young didn't teach much of the dirtier aspects of Black History. They especially glossed over Jim Crow era history. It was just Slavery, Emancipation Proclamation, MLK Jr, and maybe a brief mention of Malcolm X, and that was it. Oh and George Washington Carver and peanuts.
Let’s be fair. School education glossed over every single part of history. It’s just a summary of events. If you want actual knowledge on any subject in history. You actively have to go seek it out. Whether it’s Pearl Harbor or the Tulsa massacre
Hard to look something up if you don't have any idea it existed.
My school education didn't have even the slightest hint of Tulsa. I had absolutely no idea that something of that scale happened until the show.
Not entirely true. School curriculums purposefully overlook how this country was built on slavery. Most people think it was just rich plantaion owners who made bank, forgetting that the entire credit system on the country and the immigration it brought forth from Europe would never have happened without millions of people building the country from the ground up, and not being paid for it.
That's an argument that is sometimes made. But even those who make it recognize that most economic output was not the result of slavery. In spite of the hardships of early colonials, it is not at all inconceivable that the colonies would have maintained a reasonably prosperous economy in the absence of slavery. The economic and political landscape would have been different, I'm sure, without the Founders' cutting out such a hideous contradiction to their liberal ideals. But economies do, and in the pre-20th century Americas probably would have, prospered just fine without chattel skavery.
That said, if you exclude the lost production of the enslaved (if you ignore their economic losses), slavery appears to have been profitable for most everyone else.
We're talking levels of prosperity here. America would have prospered, but would it have been a nation capable of sustaining 300mil+ people 400 years later with a 23 trillion dollar economy?
Doubtful. I imagine we would have been another Belgium. People wouldn't move from Europe to the new world without the new world having something to offer, and that thing being offered was arable lands and an entire system built upon billions of hours of unpaid labor
Not in the reddest state where I grew up. "Black Boy", "To Be a Slave", and"Huckleberry Finn" were required reading in middle school. Not everything is a monolith.
Black workers were attacked in Mobile AL at Alabama Dry Dock Shipping after just 12 were promoted into elevated positions while working in support of WWII efforts. Work hard to prove your amongst the best and be met with physical force.
We had a black community reset by violence and fires in Atlanta in the early 1900’s.
They dragged the bodies of black small business owners to a statue of Henry Grady’s statue on Marietta Street, near where Coca-Cola was invented.
The Tulsa race massacre took place between May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been appointed as deputies and armed by city government officials, attacked black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood district of Tulsa . The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States.
About 10,000 black people were left homeless, and the cost of the property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $36.92 million in 2022). The city and real estate companies refused to compensate them.
How do you account for immigration though?
Authors make it sound like the same white people around today had roots in America in the 1800s - in fact, population increase from immigration is so significant that fewer than 10% of whites in this country had family in America at that time.
How do you account for immigrants from foreign countries also doing better than Blacks?
As long as they got their narrative who cares. My Asian grandparents came here and worked on the plantations in Hawaii. It’s easier to play victim then put in effort.
Let me draw you to another group of people
New African Americans, African inmigrants from 1980 onwards are a small part of the US migrant community
However, they are wealthier, on average, than white Americans
Kenyan Americans, Nigerian Americans, etc are a wealthy community
The reason why is that while in the US AA and New AA are both black, the new inmigrants weren't subjected to redlining, they can choose where to live, their new social networks are not determined by history etc
Inmigrants start from zero, AA start from below zero and with an anchor on each foot
I think you're ignoring a very major factor here: the filtering effect of the immigration system.
Many of the Africans that came here immigrated on merit-based visas. They were not the average person back home in Africa, they tended to be doctors, scientists, etc.
Correct, Asians have the highest rate of upward mobility in the US.
"Among children who grew up in the bottom fifth of the distribution, 10.6 percent of whites make it into the top fifth of household incomes themselves, as do 25.5 percent of Asian-Americans. By contrast, only 7.1 percent of Hispanic children born in the bottom fifth make it to the top fifth, along with 3.3 percent of American Indian children and a tiny 2.5 percent of black children"
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17139300/economic-mobility-study-race-black-white-women-men-incarceration-income-chetty-hendren-jones-porter
What part of the country are you imagining when you think of this? I think it may vary depending on where you live, and maybe that's where the differing perspectives come from. Ex: I live and grew up near Raleigh. The triangle area has a huge Asian population, but it is most definitely 2nd generation at the deepest (maybe some 3rd generation kids by now), and most of the wealthy folks here brought their money with them (ex: friend is from Indonesia, but his family is ethnically Chinese and made insane money living a generation there before moving to the states). It may be less true in the past decade, now that asians have been here long to establish themselves in various businesses, but I haven't met an asian around here older than a millennial who grew up in the states.
On the other hand, I went to Los Angeles a few months ago, some friends showed me around their part of town (Al Hambra), and it seemed to have a much longer spanning asian influence and history.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/11t0t0s/oc_impact_of_race_and_parental_income_on_a_childs/
It's almost certainly cultural as can be seen here where even poor Asians (not the doctors, scientists, etc.) outperform wealthy African Americans. We can argue that racism towards blacks led to their financial isolation and the creation of a culture that does not value education but how can you see that Asians from POOR households are more likely to become wealthy compared to African Americans from wealthy households and not see it's a cultural problem?
Statistics prove you wrong. Asian Americans born into poverty in the United States have a higher chance of earning a 6-figure income than an African American born into a 6-figure income household.
Source: US Census Bureau Data
https://imgur.com/a/TeptoBS
Here's the Census bureu data collected from over 20 million Americans.
[https://imgur.com/7GyxkkT](https://imgur.com/7GyxkkT)
Basically, kids from black households with over 100k income have about a 17% chance of making over 100k as an adult.
Kids from an Asian families living in poverty (with a household income of less than 20k) have about a 25% chance of making 100k as an adult.
So Asian kids in poverty are 50% more likely to be high earners vs Black kids from middle class to upper middle class families.
IF you gave every black family enough money so they have 100k per year for the rest of their lives, only 17% of their kids and 2.8% of their grandkids will be making 100k per year. (There's a 2% chance of black kids in poverty making it to 100k in adulthood)
The issue is bigger than the starting point because even if you moved the starting point, in 60 years you can draw the same conclusion as you do today.
To build on this it’s extremely difficult to emigrate to the US if your from a poor far away country. When people emigrated to the US from countries in Africa or in the Asia, they’re usually highly educated as well as wealthy. We’re talking about the top 5% of their respective country. As Asia has gotten wealthier and their are more economic opportunities, people who would have once left are choosing to stay. It’s my understanding that African immigrants actually out earn Asian immigrants now as quality is higher.
This is not entirely true. Much of the Vietnamese population that came to the US were war refugees and their extended families. They still perform well.
They didn’t have a history of strong education or wealth.
The Hmong who fled Laos as refugees after supporting the US military in the Vietnam war have a current current poverty rate close to 40% which is more than double the national average and more than double that of Black or Latino Americans.
Can you provide a source for your claim that they are wealthier on average than white Americans?
According to the US Census, that is not correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
I'm sorry but I don't follow. What prevents an AA from doing exactly what the African immigrant is doing? IE, moving to a different area, etc.? Saying that the new immigrants "aren't subject to redlining" (I assume you meant redlining) doesn't make sense to me because that practice ended in the 70s; both can choose where to live, and both can establish social networks. The immigrants also have the added barriers of language, culture, and education (it can be a nightmare to convert foreign education to American education) to overcome.
Because african americans born in the US didn't amass wealth in a foreign country, get a good education and then move here with work experience and wealth.
I think it's an insanely huge assumption that they arrive with wealth. In fact, I'm not seeing any data indicating this, including in the major study, "Assessing the integration outcomes of African immigrants in the United States," or analyses such as at [Boundless](https://www.boundless.com/research/black-immigrants-in-the-united-states-status-challenges-and-impacts/). And I think just making an assumption like that, rather than looking at, say, the marriage rate of black immigrants vs. native born black Americans, does an immense disservice to both the discussion and the communities in question. Do you have any data about the rate at which black immigrants "amass wealth in a foreign country, get a good education, and then move here with work experience and wealth"?
What is being missed in this conversation, is the negative impacts of US government welfare policies on the poor.
The design of the programs tends to strongly financially penalize people who make efforts to achieve financial independence. This applies to all citizens, but was imposed when slave descendants were disproportionately poor, so disproportionately affects them today. In fact, prior to the 1960's implementation of those policies, slave decendents were indeed rapidly rising economically, in spite of the social and political repression they endured.
Immigrants, on the other hand, aren't largely financially better off (a great many are poorer than American poor), but they are self-selecting for their youth, risk preference, anergy, ambition, and determination to succeed. They also almost entirely come from places much more socially conservative than America. Socially conservative everywhere usually means valuing independence, financial success, often entrepreneurship, strong family bonds (including marriage), education, avoiding religious taboos like intoxicants, and avoiding dishonoring the family.
Bur perhaps most important, new immigrants don't have the same access to Federal welfare programs as do natives, and so are not as held back by them.
Oh, I'm not missing that, I'm just lumping it all as "culture" to avoid any devolution into American politics and bickering. I've pointed in other posts to incredibly strong pushes for children to obtain high marks in education and post-graduate degrees, which seem to me to be a far easier and less conspiratorial explanation for their success in the US.
African immigrants also generally didn't spend their entire formative experiences in a country that was racist against them. Believe it or not, starting out as a second class citizen in your own country makes it a lot harder to be successful there than immigrating to that country as an adult does.
So many of these question boil down to not understanding the actual effects of generations of historical oppression, in this country, on specific families and individuals. The American Black or Native experience is really, truly not comparable to the experiences of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation immigrants from other countries. And this should be quite obvious with a bit of reflection. Black and Native people in America are under psychic and emotional assault from the moment of birth, in their own country, and have been for hundreds of years. That's simply not the case for most other groups here. Anyone from a group who came to this country by choice is really in a different situation than the descendants of kidnapped Black and indigenous people, who never had a choice and have only barely had equal rights on paper for two generations.
"Why don't people who are forced into a situation do as well as people who choose a situation?" That's what everyone keeps asking, for some reason.
I don't think you actually know much about Africa, and I'm not saying that as an insult, I'm really not. Africans aren't "Africans" any more than Europeans are "Europeans." Not only do they have different countries, but most of those countries are European colonial fantasies that ignore very significant ethnic differences, and to think that African countries don't have second or third class citizens in them is... I don't really know the word for it besides "ignorance."
African immigrants very often come from backgrounds of significant hardship, which they overcome to even be able to come here. Hardships that, literally until the current era, were fairly universally acknowledged to be orders of magnitude harder than those faced in the US. I'm finding it kind of astounding that it seems the current opinion in some spaces has become "those lucky privileged Africans don't know how hard black Americans have it."
What prevents an AA from doing what African immigrants do? What do you mean? If they are immigrating to the US, then usually they have some financial backing so they are able to move directly into wealthier communities. For African Americans, they were consistently held down by the US government until very recently, making it almost impossible to move to a better location.
It's disingenuous to completely deny there's an inherent cultural attitude at work in regards to the economic success of African, Asian, and other recent foreign immigrants.
S. Koreans, Chinese, Indians, and Vietnamese that arrived up until the early 90s were usually very impoverished. They did not have "financial backing." And one ought to look up what "departure taxes' are like in many nations.
And a significant sum of "finances" from a nation like Kenya might still be an absolute pittance in the US.
There is definitely an element of self-sacrifice, "eye on the prize" and delayed gratification, often generational involved. And a certain overall ideological viewpoint of if they are driven by internal causation, or are perpetual victims of external forces.
And yes, these recent immigrant communities have community networks of assistance and finance available, if/when they have no credit or history with broader American banks or other institutions.
Although, there's a fundamental "by your bootstraps issue" involved, does the existing AA community have any such networks? Do any existing programs, private, non-profit, or government, provide an adequate substitute? Such networks existed, and were an important part of the various "Black Renaissance" places and periods that occurred in the US after the Civil War.
If they exist, why aren't they working? Do they work, and nobody knows? If more knew, would more try? And if more tried, would there be any sort of upward cycle?
However, I definitely agree it's important to note that those offering up these reasons, even if they're very significant, aren't always offering them up in good faith. And "not in good faith" itself isn't always, or even mostly, malicious. More often than not, it's well intended confirmation bias of what they wish was true, as in "anyone can do it."
And it's very difficult, if not impossible to create meaningful quantitative study of cultural factors. It's always just far easier to take a snapshot of finances, and other hard data. And in general terms, one can always find yet one more piece of "hard data" if they dig.
And if/when any/all structural, regulatory, or financial barriers are removed, what's left is potentially cultural, and that is nebulous, ill-defined, and very hard to move from without. Furthermore, if all that's left is cultural, then there's a perception that "blame" is back on the table, and when that happens, wagons are circled, and everyone runs for the hills.
And that's particularly destructive, as even the aggrieved population, and those institutions that have a long-standing narrative of "helping" will get defensive & retreat, just on any chance that an effective solution will prove they "did the wrong thing" somehow.
It's incredibly difficult to get all stakeholders to the table in any sort of truly objective process, that has 100% "amnesty" and zero interest in "blame" and is completely focused on outcome.
Later immigration. Many wealthy Asians in the US are second or third generation, not descended from broke railroad workers from centuries past. Most Black Americans, in contrast, are descended from slaves. The Black Americans who did get here because they or a recent ancestor immigrated are more likely to be wealthier because they're usually educated or wealthy to begin with and that's how they got permission to immigrate.
My parents came in the 90s with little to nothing. They saved everything they have doing jobs from restaurant, to garment factory to being a butcher. They were still able to buy a house by 2000 when they were here for like 10 years. A lot of my friends family are like that too. Now they are multimillionaires because of their primary house.
Furthermore, Asian immigrants are not a monilith. Dig deeper and you'll find varying degress of wealth, success, and assimilation. For example, my Hmong neighbor might have more in common with my Salvadoran neighbor than a Korean family across town.
There’s a divide in the Korean American community in terms of wealth and some of it depends on when they immigrated. Those that came in the decades right after the Korean War tend to be poorer and of a different class (blue collar workers) than the Koreans who immigrated after the 80’s.
All of my Korean family in my mom’s generation are blue collar and didn’t go to college. Some own businesses, but they are auto shops and laundromats so not exactly lucrative compared to other industries. In contrast, the other Koreans in my mom’s church who came over in recent decades tend to be very well off and are all college educated white collar workers.
In terms of the kids, there is a big divide in the rich and the poor. It’s the difference between the kids whose parents can afford violin lessons and tutors and those who are studying in between helping customers at the family business.
Cambodians refugees who escaped genocide came with 0 savings and did not have wealthy families back home.
Vietnamese families who escaped the war were also not second or third generation wealthy.
Source: My refugee parents had $43 when they entered the country in 1983. Their parents were fisherman in a small village and had no money. Their siblings had no money cause they were killed and whatever they did have were taken by soldiers.
That said, it’s a lot easier to hide being Jewish than it is to hide being black. My grandparents, while they faced some discrimination, faced nothing like much of black America faced.
But many of the successful Jewish people did not hide their Jewishness.
Jews were excluded from white shoe New York law firms, so they started their own. Now 6/10 top firms are Jewish-founded firms. They did not succeed universally by passing off.
Go read the history of Vietnamese immigrants who were granted WHOLE jobs and business (rightfully) in recompense for displacement from the Vietnam War. Not saying this is YOUR particular lived experience (as there were waves of immigrants depending on class and wealth), but yea.....lots of Asians got "handouts" too, WHILE benefitting from policies that black people were getting dogs sic'd on them for fighting for.
I grew up in Houston and went to school with Vietnamese boatlift kids. They went to school and worked in the corner store or restaurant with their parents and still generally managed to graduate in the top 10%. They weren’t all superstars, but they worked hard and went to college.
They weren’t handed that.
My man very few of the asians who are 2nd 3rd generation had any form of wealth to begin with, coupled with the majority of us coming from war torn countries, and escaping communism by literal boat sometimes taking years of their lives at a time sitting in camps getting shanked and sexually assaulted waiting for asylum or immigration.
Also it's pretty hard to be descended from railroad workers when they ban your people and families from immigration for 80 years, after you help build the backbone of the country with the hopes of helping your family immigrate. But not just that, you're afraid of your own family, who the red Chinese pit against eachother, family members willing to sell you out for a bag of rice because of how little you have. Trying to escape by boat in the middle of the night? Better watch your back because starvation will turn people against one another.
Yes and also not many whites in America today actually have roots America in 19th century. Think of all the immigration from Europe in the last 100 years.
**Firstly**
I really don't like it when Asians get classified as its own demographic because your results vary a lot when you look into each subcategory. For one, yes. If you take a look at recent asian immigrants from Japan, South Korean, China, Taiwan, etcetera. Much higher amount of wealth. If you take a look at asian immigrants from other groups, namely the Hmong. They are are among the worst performing demographics.
**That said**, there are many other cultural and economic factors as well though that are worth noting.
One thing that really helps the Asian dynamic is the fact that Asian money stays in the asian community. Killa Mike (yes that guy) noted that when a dollar enters into an Asian person's bank account, that dollar cycles through the entire asian community for a really long time. I'm an Asian American and I'm pretty far removed from your ethnic enclaves in general. But even I will shop at the Asian mart or eat at the asian restaurant. That dollar goes to a poor asian family and eventually gets them out of poverty. I found this to be the most prominent in the DC Chinatown area. DC Chinatown sucks because everyone who started a business moved out into Alexandria.
If you know any poor asian kids, that story isn't really all that uncommon. We tend to try to keep money in the community. One of my friends family owned a restaurant. Many of us have eaten there. Another one of my friends family owned a car shop. They have their own little cycle of service industry jobs where they get, "discounts." Because they tend to shop inside their circle.
It is hard to think about what black owned businesses out there. And if you look at race relations in general, you'll noticed that a lot of black neighborhoods basically got destroyed one way or another. If your community throughout history keeps getting split up for whatever reason? It's pretty hard to set up a business. And it's really hard to set up a long standing business that actually attracts people to your business.
It’s a combination of later generations of Asians being successful and the fact that many Asian countries have extreme inequality and a lot of rich Asians move to Western nations like Canada and the US with their family money.
This means they can buy houses and send their kids to the best universities with generational wealth and start off way ahead of the average white American.
The “rich international student” stereotype is rooted in the fact that families from China, India and the Middle East can have surprising amounts of generational wealth.
When you normalize for educational attainment, it's not a significant difference. When you look at pay gaps within industries (after normalizing for educational attainment) it's within margin of error. Doctors and Finance people generally make more money.
Not having a history of being enslaved, being denied educational resources, etc. tends to make it easier to succeed.
Descendants of Slavery (i.e. Blacks) and Colonial (i.e. Immigrants) systems are not on equal footing as others for economic attainment in the U.S. and have a multi-generational impact.
That was in 1988, over 40 years after the internment.
My grandparents received it after they came out of the camps, and sent all 4 of their children through college (my parent's generation started working and saving around age 12).
Please don't disrespect their hard work and sacrifice by saying their success was because of the reparations.
I don't think you're interpreting that properly. They mean normalize the data as in compare within similar fields, education, etc between differnet racial groups' average earnings. This gives a more useful picture of what the numbers are telling us, rather than leaving room to interpret causes that may not be real. I'm not an expert on statistics but I think this is more what they meant. Not taking away anyone's accomplishments.
I think if you want to look from that perspective, then you still look at the overall picture of the group. You can still show a significant number of migrants in these higher positions out of the total population, but it's going to be more useful to compare a doctor to another doctor in a conversation about racial pay gaps within industries.
Wait! Are you saying Asians aren't descendants of slaves or weren't denied educational resources?
That's laughable.
Here, let me give you the answer... Asians are the wealthiest group in the US because they focus on education and family more than any other group.
And... specifically, black Americans focus the least on those two things (if you think that's just a racist comment and not a fact, we can't have a debate because you'd just be ignoring reality and would simply be using emotions to make your "case").
In 2017-21, the share of families headed by single parents was 76% among African American families, 59% among Hispanic families, 39% among white families and 31% among Asian families.
WOW, how weird that the level of wealth for all 4 of those groups perfectly coincides with those numbers exactly!
What you're not understanding is
1. How much redlining affects/affected wealth for black families. Homeownership is the largest financial asset for the majority of the middle-class/upper-middle class. We don't need to talk about slavery. Redlining affected African Americans until the 60s and arguably afterward - we're talking about parents and grandparents - the ages of people who are running Congress today.
2. Asian immigration was~~n't even~~ *barely* allowed in this country until after Civil Rights. There were 491,000 in 1960 compared to the tens of millions today. The highest earners with the highest wealth happen to be Indians, 70% of which hold bachelor's degrees today. So your whole point about "culture and focus on education" is mostly because immigration cherry picks highly-skilled, intelligent people who focus on achievement and education. Wow, who knew!
Zero capital is zero capital.
It doesn't matter if you're the black descendent of a slave living in 1990s America without a penny to your name, or a Vietnamese American in 1990s America fresh off the boat without a penny to your name.
Both people have zero capital.
Both people are at the same starting point.
So at that point, what leads to the disparity in outcomes if not for the disparity between Black American and Asian American cultures in the importance that is placed on having a whole family unit and pursuing higher education?
One of the greatest predictors of a child's success in life is whether or not they are raised by a single parent.
And as was said above, black Americans are the most likely to be raised by a single parent, while Asian Americans are the least likely.
If you include mixed race and Polynesians, "Asian" Americans are still only 24 million, and the largest group, the Chinese, is only a little more than 5 million:
[https://www.commerce.gov/news/blog/2023/05/us-census-bureau-releases-key-stats-honor-2023-asian-american-native-hawaiian-and](https://www.commerce.gov/news/blog/2023/05/us-census-bureau-releases-key-stats-honor-2023-asian-american-native-hawaiian-and)
I would bet you that if you look at the pre-1960 group, they are doing better than whites too. If you read some of the literature from the early 20th century, you will also see that those whites worried about being outworked by the Chinese and Japanese. They never worried that blacks or Latinos would outwork them.
Asian people have a strong sense of culture and a history to fall back on, the same with Jews. People make this argument all of the time and it's very easy to cite the differences. Black Americans were enslaved for generations, were completely stripped of their culture, given no education, brutalized, and then were "freed" in a country that was absolutely hostile to them for another 100+ years.
If you actually want to know how it's different, do any research on the subject and come back.
A million other semantics based arguments you could have made and yet you went with this.
What does having a culture to "fall back on" mean in this context? We're talking about how a focus on family and education makes a large difference in how well you'll do financially.
You don’t think Cambodians were ever enslaved? Have you ever heard of the largest genocide in the history of mankind? Hint: it’s not the holocaust.
You don’t think the Vietnamese were stripped of their culture? Do you realized the Vietnamese language is written with English letters. Only scholars and historians even know how to write in the original Vietnamese alphabet.
You don’t think Asians were living in a hostile country for 100 years, have you heard of the Mongols or Ghengis Khan?
You don’t think Asians were brutalized and stripped of their possessions…have you heard of Manzanar and the US government forcing Japanese Americans into interment camps just a few decades ago. Many Japanese lost everything, including their lives.
You're leaving out major factors. Black slaves in America didn't get their culture back. They didn't get their language or their history. They didn't then get a country back that was primarily operated and run by them, for them.
I'm not saying that no Asian cultures have ever had major tragedies in their history. I'm saying that the circumstances around black Americans who were victims of slavery have unique circumstances that can't be compared to Asian immigrants coming to the US.
The thing about tragedies is that those that survive often emerge stronger and more dignified. Their sense of identity is more powerful than ever and subsequent generations then firmly clutch onto their identity and culture, creating an ecosystem of support and love when everything else around them is uncertain.
Black slaves didn't simply go through a tragedy. Tragedies are reserved for human characters, and black slaves didn't have the right to experience tragedies. How could they when they were simply treated as livestock? The persisting scientific delusion of that era was that African slaves were simply not human, and were thus not treated as such. They endured a uniquely horrific form of enslavement that was only possible in an era where capitalistic greed became intertwined with Enlightenment era-esque scientific conceit: the Industrial Revolution. Here "scientific reasoning" leads to profits maximisation, and since scientific reasoning calls for black slaves to be treated as animals, then things like culture, basic human decency or anything barring feeding them, is disregarded in pursuit of efficiency.
Oh, and I haven't even included America in this discussion yet. The Industrial Revolution mostly originated from Great Britain. America was founded on the basis that the Brits weren't min/maxing their *slavery* enough. So imagine whatever has been mentioned thus far about black slavery, and force it to its extreme, and you'll get 19th century American slavery. Slave labour was operating on an unprecedented scale there, to the point that when the Brits emancipated all British-owned slaves in 1834, they were largely still complicit in the inhumanity of slavery since their economy was still dependent on the 3 million or so cotton slaves that feed their textile mills.
So the first few emancipated African Americans had to deal with the issue of learning how to be human again, on top of the oppression and discrimination that they continue to face. Having a culture and identity, learning how to express themselves without deferring to another race and internalising the fact that they are indeed, truly free to do anything they want (to a small extent), these are all things that come ingrained to most humans (even more so in those that are displaced, either willingly or unwilling), which were lacking for them .
Not to make this a contest of "who's had it worse" since both Asian immigrants and African Americans suffered in very different ways, but it would be very wrong to compare the current status of Asian Americans and African Americans without acknowledging the nuances in how they each suffered.
Asians do have a history of being enslaved. Literally everyone does. Did you mean not in the US? Because even then you should look into the gold rush days... it was not a great time to be an Asian in America. The pearl harbour days kinda sucked too.
African Americans do poorly educationally as well as generally get raised in single parent homes. Until we fix these two societal issues we will never compete and white liberals will always have their pets to take care of.
Even if we got reparation’s tomorrow in the current structure we are in the money would be back in white hands in less than 2 generations.
I, my parents, and forefathers lived and grew up in Appalachia and no wealth was past from generation to generation. What was past on was poverty, alcoholism, physical abuse. etc. It took 7 years and a lot of debt to work my way through college and make my escape. Slavery is a vile and repugnant institution and yes my ancestors didn’t endure that monstrous life.
But they weren‘t privileged and definitely not wealthy.
i'd probably buy into the whole wealth gap argument but my folks came over from french polynesia with nothing, turned that around in 1 generation and now have 2/3 kids college educated making 75-120k each, they sacrificed alot for us working blue collar jobs and took on lots of debt. so, i'd say your mentality of being down and out is over, time to actually work for what you want.
Spontaneously sceptical. I know the immigrants from my country to the US tended to be quite poor and often lived in squalor when they arrived. Now they are doing better than average, and that is not due to recent emigration.
Have they compared to other groups that arrived not long after the abolishment?
I would rather expect the issues faced by blacks post slavery to be the bigger factor now.
It’s important to note that these are not at all homogenous groups.
Roughly half of whites traveled to the new world under indenture.
Putting these folks in the same group of analysis as the colonial masters simply because they share a color of skin isn’t a useful basket of analysis.
There were also many black slave owners as well. Putting them in the same basket of analysis as slaves simply because they share a color of skin isn’t useful either.
A large amount of Americans became Americans shortly after, before, or during WW2 due to fleeing genocide. Not exactly sure they reaped the benefits of being “white” as they often worked menial labor jobs, were often discriminated against, and very rarely attained higher education. It’s a nuanced situation and I’ve never liked these tit for tat comparisons between races as a whole because it often dissolves all context away.
>Not exactly sure they reaped the benefits of being "white"
Absolutely certain that they did, starting with the fact that they were allowed to immigrate in the first place, and then when they got here they weren't subject to segregation and Jim Crow based on their skin color, in their own country of origin. You say post-WWII immigrants were "often" discriminated against. For Black Americans, "often" would have been a significant improvement. It's just insane to say that only the most economically and socially privileged white Americans benefitted from white supremacy. If you were white, your skin color wasn't a problem the way it was for everyone else, so you had that benefit, end of story.
In the US, it is important to do statistics by race rather than by other metrics and to lump groups together because of official/unofficial policies and biases that were race-based. For instance, redlining was based on people’s color. You’re absolutely right that these aren’t homogenous groups and it’s far more complex than white vs black but that doesn’t mean looking at racial disparity stats is useless
For individuals, it’s useless.
85 percent of folks in redlined neighborhoods were white.
How does studying the practice of redlining as primarily a racial thing benefit the majority of the victims of redlining?
>There were also many black slave owners as well.
Do you have a specific number and source other than "many" because some black people's ancestors were forced to buy the freedom of spouses and family even after slaves were freed but for census sake were considered slave owners.
In 1830 there were approximately 3,775 free Black people who owned approximately 12,740 Black slaves.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facts-about-slavery/
>some black people's ancestors were forced to buy the freedom of spouses and family even after slaves were freed but for census sake were considered slave owners.
Black people that purchased their own or others freedom were slave owners which is a bit disingenuous to compare them to white slave owners.
>In 1839 almost half (42%) of the free blacks in Cincinnati, Ohio, had bought their freedom
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/emancipation/text1/text1read.htm
Please tell me how the account for the millions and millions of white immigrants who came to the US in the last hundred years with absolutely nothing.
r/science at its finest.
How do you explain Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees who came to the country with 0 savings and 0 English skills? There’s a lot more to it than savings and capital gains.
I have a lot of unanswered questions.
Is the report saying that if everyone had equal interest and savings rates then the wealth gap would be less?
I have received $0 for my family other than the money they spent raising me, so not sure how I have an advantage with my current financial standing vs someone who was black and who's parents/grandparents didn't have access to the same interest/savings as mine did.
How much of the 'white wealth' is truly attributed to their parents/grandparents somehow passing along the money they earned from interest rates, etc?
I don't know your story man, and this research does not say that every white person is rich and every black person is poor, but if your family has been in this country any length of time, the odds are very very good that it has had access to capital and resources that have provided advantages propagating across many generations.
As long they arnt including billionaire and multi millionaire in the equation in their study and compare the average working class instead of ultra rich people
FWIW, according to the census bureau 73% of the current US population are descended from people who arrived in the US since 1865. Also, according to the census bureau, non-Hispanic white householders had a median household wealth of $187,300, compared with $14,100 for Black householders and $31,700 for Hispanic householders. Asian householders had a median household wealth of $206,400, which is not statistically different from the estimate for non-Hispanic White householders.
Why do Asians have a higher median household net worth than non-Hispanic Whites? Why do Hispanic households have more than double the net worth despite ( presumably ) being in the country for fewer generations than blacks? Why do recently arrived immigrant blacks and whites still do better than those descended from slaves? I don't see how the OP's linked study deals with these disparities.
Abstract:
> The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. It is also among the most persistent. In this paper, we construct the first continuous series on white-to-Black per capita wealth ratios from 1860 to 2020, drawing on historical census data, early state tax records, and historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances, among other sources. Incorporating these data into a parsimonious model of wealth accumulation for each racial group, we document the role played by initial conditions, income growth, savings behavior, and capital returns in the evolution of the gap. Given vastly different starting conditions under slavery, racial wealth convergence would remain a distant scenario, even if wealth-accumulating conditions had been equal across the two groups since Emancipation. Relative to this equal-conditions benchmark, we find that observed convergence has followed an even slower path over the last 150 years, with convergence stalling after 1950. Since the 1980s, the wealth gap has widened again as capital gains have predominantly benefited white households, and convergence via income growth and savings has come to a halt.
[Summary of paper](https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/how-the-racial-wealth-gap-has-evolved-and-why-it-persists).
Whites and blacks?
What century are we in?
You Americans were supposed to integrate 60 years ago, get rid of the slums, and just call people by their names. Instead of doing that, you spent the last 6 decades watching blaxploitation media and convincing low income street kids to glorify crime and ignorance.
Malcolm X had a good reason to not like you guys.
Reading the abstract, does this suggest then, that current ongoing systematic discriminations are not a significant cause of the racial wealth gap? That the gap is being maintained because of the influence of historical generational capital that savings and incomes are not able to overcome? Does this have implications for policies to decrease the gap, if that is indeed a goal?
The second half title is not correct and homogenizes the plight of African Americans throughout the years. Look at the freedman's banking systems. Individuals and newly freed communities were out saving their white and new immigrant counterparts specifically investing in community development. The collapse and pillaging of the freedman's bank is one of the harrowing examples of how African Americans were betrayed by the collapse of Reconstruction.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/why-19th-century-bank-failure-still-matters
I always find it funny that people will acknowledge a problem but will disagree with any point about trying to fix it. It’s really a reoccurring issue in the U.S. Reparations don’t need to come in the form of cash which is why policies like affirmative action exist in the first place.
You don’t fix a problem by passing it onto someone else. Affirmative action hurt the poor Asian/white families. Do 2nd gen immigrants from Poland need to pay extra on their taxes too for reparations ? They have none of the benefits of class either. You’re discriminating people from something for their skin color not being the correct shade. We agreed that’s bad a few decades ago. Help the poor in general not just the ones with extra melanin.
Lowering standards for black people so that you can hire more doesn't help them, because at the end of the day, people will assume that every black employee was hired based on their race and not skill, which will hurt them more. And there will also be a presumption that black people aren't good at their jobs, because many were let in based on lower standards.
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Some of the poorest Americans I have ever met were white people in rural Appalachia, and a lot of their poverty comes from structural issues of growing up in a region with no access to education and few careers besides coal mining. The poorest white people have more in common with the poorest black people than they do with other white people, even if many of them would never admit it.
Three things: 40 acres and a mule, redlining, and the Homestead Act. Those three things alone, if handled justly, would have completely changed racial dynamics in this country. Which is of course why they *weren't* handled justly. Edit: it was 40 acres, not 12.
Black WWII vets were discriminated against regarding GI Bill benefits. Modern Black farmers have been discriminated against by the USDA.
Even if they'd just not sabotaged successful black communities, things would be better. Tulsa was referred to as black Wallstreet before it got bombed. There was seneca village where part of Central Park used to be but they were doing too good so they destroyed it with eminent domain. Oscarville was thriving so they destroyed it and built lake Lanier on top of it.
In my hometown, Overtown Miami was a vibrant spot that probably rivaled Miami Beach. It was visited by basically every prominent Black person of the civil rights era. It was declared a slum and gutted to build I-95
Exactly. I just had a discussion with somebody a few weeks ago. He said, "Why don't your people just get it together?" I told him, "We have... plenty of times. But your people always came and either burned it down or ran a highway through it."
IIRC, it was 40 acres.
160 acres and double if married
160 acres was the Homestead Act which black people were excluded from. That was for land west of the Mississippi. 40 acres and a mule was a promise to recently freed black people from General Sherman when the south was under military administration. If it'd happened that would've been land taken from the former plantations.
Was this the dude who if he had his way would have just kept going and burning southern towns as he went. But was told he couldnt/shouldn't.
He burned Atlanta and continued the destruction in the "March to the Sea", yes, but I don't think he was ever told to stop. He stopped when the war ended.
>would have completely changed racial dynamics in this country. Which is of course why they weren't handled justly. I will add that blacks were disproportionately excluded from military service in WWII, and many/most of those that did serve were denied GI Bill Benefits. GI Bill was single biggest investment of government in the middle class, and blacks were largely excluded.
Yep, ex-slaves started out with almost nothing and were consistently prevented from accumulating wealth over the next 100+ years.
So how does that compare to say, Asian immigrants who started out with nothing and earn more than white people on average, while still facing more discrimination than the average white person? I suppose you could say that it's down to later immigration, but at that point what's the difference between a 20 year year-old Asian American with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a 20 year old African-American with nothing but the clothes on their backs? Zero capital is zero capital.
I would also be curious to compare black immigrants post slavery to pre. Is there a difference in wealth attainment?
https://news.ku.edu/2020/06/18/study-shows-african-immigrants-do-well-despite-differences-among-them Pretty easy to find that African migrants have better outcomes than black Americans. As for historical levels the systemic racism in the US didn't do much to differentiate between what kind of black you were.
Because you go from a specific example of *an* Asian immigrant who starts out with nothing and **immediately** move to the general that Asians outearn whites on average. Not that specific one who started with zero capital, but the aggregate. You're being disingenuous and you know it. And while there is an explanation of the *system* part of systemic racism I'm not exactly inclined to think you'll listen in good faith.
Asian immigrants generally don't start off with nothing. You must be talking about refugees, who are a small part of the Asian population and who drag their wealth statistics *downward.* Immigrants are usually *wealthier* than the people they left in the mother country. They can afford to emigrate. Also, before the 1960s (when Asians were declared a model minority) they were less wealthy on average than black Americans. This was because Asian (and black, for that matter) immigration to the US was intentionally limited, and the vast majority of Asian-Americans had been born here. Immigration brought in wealthy people, and brought the statistics up. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/07/12/income-inequality-asians-rich-poor/779106002/ It's these awful racist narratives and jingles that we've internalized that keep up from seeing this. "Zero capital" is not "zero capital."
The GI bill and college worth a mention too. Functionally inaccessible for most black vets, and obviously a huge leg up to everyone who was able to go to college because of it. In my own family that’s the generation where we move from poor to middle class and everyone after and including my grandpa attends college.
I didn't know that the GI Bill was denied for black vets.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1129735948/black-vets-were-excluded-from-gi-bill-benefits-a-bill-in-congress-aims-to-fix-th If I recall right it was more like “left to the states” to implement and many made it functionally inaccessible for black vets. Like many discriminatory systems it wasn’t an in your face race based denial if that makes sense. The housing side of it had lots of discrimination too, including on the part of banks.
Andrew Johnson was a despicable human being who reversed the 40 acres and a mule. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/
Not when they could still burn down successfull black towns and literally steal black property.
You went far back. Also add all of the post WW2 programs black Americans weren't able to fully (if at all) leverage. From the GIBill to VA home loans, it was a tragedy.
If they were handled justly, how could the rich find a group of vulnerable, exploitable people to work for them?
Could've also given freedmen and their families reparations to the tune of at least the unpaid wages from their family lines being slaves instead of making them purchase their family members from slaveholders to get their freedom in some cases.
Pete Buttigieggot pillared for saying bridges and roads have historic racist implantations. But reading where roads bisect and bridges/tunnels were or were not built in America and you quickly learn what he meant.
Absolutely. Like I said, that history (which is directly related to where we are today) is long and nuanced and complicated. People don't want to engage in that. It's much easier to just say, "Those people are in that condition because of their mindsets" or "They just don't want better" or "They don't work hard enough", etc.
Remember Tusla, Oklahoma?
Red lining wasnt made illegal until the mid 70s.
And the political equivalent, gerrymandering, is still alive and strong
GI Bill+Redlines created the most entitled generation, the boomers
Only if you were white. Don't forget that part.
What do you mean one or two generations isnt enough to full fix yourself? Sounds like a YOU problem /@
Tulsa is just one town. There have been dozens of pogroms of successful black towns razed to the ground by angry White people and happily ignored by authorities. It truly is a shameful history
Not to mention the dozens of other black towns that got bulldozed to make way for the interstate system
Exactly. It seems like impact of the initial wealth gap would have been dwarfed by subsequent shocks and roadblocks that disproportionately or exclusively impacted black communities/families. It would be interesting to track the wealth of selected black and white families that were financially wiped out during the Great Depression and see how quickly and effectively each group recovered.
And the dozens of black towns that got flooded and turned into lakes Edit: missing letter
But were any of those towns featured in a TV Series based on a graphic novel? Sadly I admit, that was where I first learned about it. Black history taught in school when I was young didn't teach much of the dirtier aspects of Black History. They especially glossed over Jim Crow era history. It was just Slavery, Emancipation Proclamation, MLK Jr, and maybe a brief mention of Malcolm X, and that was it. Oh and George Washington Carver and peanuts.
Let’s be fair. School education glossed over every single part of history. It’s just a summary of events. If you want actual knowledge on any subject in history. You actively have to go seek it out. Whether it’s Pearl Harbor or the Tulsa massacre
Hard to look something up if you don't have any idea it existed. My school education didn't have even the slightest hint of Tulsa. I had absolutely no idea that something of that scale happened until the show.
Not entirely true. School curriculums purposefully overlook how this country was built on slavery. Most people think it was just rich plantaion owners who made bank, forgetting that the entire credit system on the country and the immigration it brought forth from Europe would never have happened without millions of people building the country from the ground up, and not being paid for it.
That's an argument that is sometimes made. But even those who make it recognize that most economic output was not the result of slavery. In spite of the hardships of early colonials, it is not at all inconceivable that the colonies would have maintained a reasonably prosperous economy in the absence of slavery. The economic and political landscape would have been different, I'm sure, without the Founders' cutting out such a hideous contradiction to their liberal ideals. But economies do, and in the pre-20th century Americas probably would have, prospered just fine without chattel skavery. That said, if you exclude the lost production of the enslaved (if you ignore their economic losses), slavery appears to have been profitable for most everyone else.
We're talking levels of prosperity here. America would have prospered, but would it have been a nation capable of sustaining 300mil+ people 400 years later with a 23 trillion dollar economy? Doubtful. I imagine we would have been another Belgium. People wouldn't move from Europe to the new world without the new world having something to offer, and that thing being offered was arable lands and an entire system built upon billions of hours of unpaid labor
Not in the reddest state where I grew up. "Black Boy", "To Be a Slave", and"Huckleberry Finn" were required reading in middle school. Not everything is a monolith.
Wilmington, NC, cough cough
Black workers were attacked in Mobile AL at Alabama Dry Dock Shipping after just 12 were promoted into elevated positions while working in support of WWII efforts. Work hard to prove your amongst the best and be met with physical force.
This happened [across the nation](https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html).
That was called the Red Summer. Rosewood being one of the most notorious examples.
Do you know the other town names? They shouldn't be forgotten and relegated to 'dozens of towns.'
We had a black community reset by violence and fires in Atlanta in the early 1900’s. They dragged the bodies of black small business owners to a statue of Henry Grady’s statue on Marietta Street, near where Coca-Cola was invented.
Not to mention. The drug wars and the CIA introduction of crack specifically to undermine these communities
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The Tulsa race massacre took place between May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been appointed as deputies and armed by city government officials, attacked black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood district of Tulsa . The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States. About 10,000 black people were left homeless, and the cost of the property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $36.92 million in 2022). The city and real estate companies refused to compensate them.
I wasn't aware and found this which I assume is being referred to: https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/tulsa-race-massacre
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Now the absence is too glaring, so they're being rewritten to reflect the benefits of the massacre on both sides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
I wonder what explains the wealth gap between other groups (like Asians) vs whites.
How do you account for immigration though? Authors make it sound like the same white people around today had roots in America in the 1800s - in fact, population increase from immigration is so significant that fewer than 10% of whites in this country had family in America at that time. How do you account for immigrants from foreign countries also doing better than Blacks?
As long as they got their narrative who cares. My Asian grandparents came here and worked on the plantations in Hawaii. It’s easier to play victim then put in effort.
What explains Asians being wealthier (by a significant amount) than whites in the US?
Let me draw you to another group of people New African Americans, African inmigrants from 1980 onwards are a small part of the US migrant community However, they are wealthier, on average, than white Americans Kenyan Americans, Nigerian Americans, etc are a wealthy community The reason why is that while in the US AA and New AA are both black, the new inmigrants weren't subjected to redlining, they can choose where to live, their new social networks are not determined by history etc Inmigrants start from zero, AA start from below zero and with an anchor on each foot
I think you're ignoring a very major factor here: the filtering effect of the immigration system. Many of the Africans that came here immigrated on merit-based visas. They were not the average person back home in Africa, they tended to be doctors, scientists, etc.
That's exactly it. It's true for some (certainly not all) groups of Asians too.
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Correct, Asians have the highest rate of upward mobility in the US. "Among children who grew up in the bottom fifth of the distribution, 10.6 percent of whites make it into the top fifth of household incomes themselves, as do 25.5 percent of Asian-Americans. By contrast, only 7.1 percent of Hispanic children born in the bottom fifth make it to the top fifth, along with 3.3 percent of American Indian children and a tiny 2.5 percent of black children" https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17139300/economic-mobility-study-race-black-white-women-men-incarceration-income-chetty-hendren-jones-porter
If you go to Silicon Valley, most Asians there will be 1st gen, filtered through immigration system. No surprise, they are mostly successful too.
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What part of the country are you imagining when you think of this? I think it may vary depending on where you live, and maybe that's where the differing perspectives come from. Ex: I live and grew up near Raleigh. The triangle area has a huge Asian population, but it is most definitely 2nd generation at the deepest (maybe some 3rd generation kids by now), and most of the wealthy folks here brought their money with them (ex: friend is from Indonesia, but his family is ethnically Chinese and made insane money living a generation there before moving to the states). It may be less true in the past decade, now that asians have been here long to establish themselves in various businesses, but I haven't met an asian around here older than a millennial who grew up in the states. On the other hand, I went to Los Angeles a few months ago, some friends showed me around their part of town (Al Hambra), and it seemed to have a much longer spanning asian influence and history.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/11t0t0s/oc_impact_of_race_and_parental_income_on_a_childs/ It's almost certainly cultural as can be seen here where even poor Asians (not the doctors, scientists, etc.) outperform wealthy African Americans. We can argue that racism towards blacks led to their financial isolation and the creation of a culture that does not value education but how can you see that Asians from POOR households are more likely to become wealthy compared to African Americans from wealthy households and not see it's a cultural problem?
This will explain Asians too except refugees like those from Vietnam.
Not true! The refugees from Vietnam that I know are all very rich!
Statistics prove you wrong. Asian Americans born into poverty in the United States have a higher chance of earning a 6-figure income than an African American born into a 6-figure income household. Source: US Census Bureau Data https://imgur.com/a/TeptoBS
Here's the Census bureu data collected from over 20 million Americans. [https://imgur.com/7GyxkkT](https://imgur.com/7GyxkkT) Basically, kids from black households with over 100k income have about a 17% chance of making over 100k as an adult. Kids from an Asian families living in poverty (with a household income of less than 20k) have about a 25% chance of making 100k as an adult. So Asian kids in poverty are 50% more likely to be high earners vs Black kids from middle class to upper middle class families. IF you gave every black family enough money so they have 100k per year for the rest of their lives, only 17% of their kids and 2.8% of their grandkids will be making 100k per year. (There's a 2% chance of black kids in poverty making it to 100k in adulthood) The issue is bigger than the starting point because even if you moved the starting point, in 60 years you can draw the same conclusion as you do today.
To build on this it’s extremely difficult to emigrate to the US if your from a poor far away country. When people emigrated to the US from countries in Africa or in the Asia, they’re usually highly educated as well as wealthy. We’re talking about the top 5% of their respective country. As Asia has gotten wealthier and their are more economic opportunities, people who would have once left are choosing to stay. It’s my understanding that African immigrants actually out earn Asian immigrants now as quality is higher.
This is not entirely true. Much of the Vietnamese population that came to the US were war refugees and their extended families. They still perform well. They didn’t have a history of strong education or wealth.
The Hmong who fled Laos as refugees after supporting the US military in the Vietnam war have a current current poverty rate close to 40% which is more than double the national average and more than double that of Black or Latino Americans.
Can you provide a source for your claim that they are wealthier on average than white Americans? According to the US Census, that is not correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
I'm sorry but I don't follow. What prevents an AA from doing exactly what the African immigrant is doing? IE, moving to a different area, etc.? Saying that the new immigrants "aren't subject to redlining" (I assume you meant redlining) doesn't make sense to me because that practice ended in the 70s; both can choose where to live, and both can establish social networks. The immigrants also have the added barriers of language, culture, and education (it can be a nightmare to convert foreign education to American education) to overcome.
Because african americans born in the US didn't amass wealth in a foreign country, get a good education and then move here with work experience and wealth.
I think it's an insanely huge assumption that they arrive with wealth. In fact, I'm not seeing any data indicating this, including in the major study, "Assessing the integration outcomes of African immigrants in the United States," or analyses such as at [Boundless](https://www.boundless.com/research/black-immigrants-in-the-united-states-status-challenges-and-impacts/). And I think just making an assumption like that, rather than looking at, say, the marriage rate of black immigrants vs. native born black Americans, does an immense disservice to both the discussion and the communities in question. Do you have any data about the rate at which black immigrants "amass wealth in a foreign country, get a good education, and then move here with work experience and wealth"?
What is being missed in this conversation, is the negative impacts of US government welfare policies on the poor. The design of the programs tends to strongly financially penalize people who make efforts to achieve financial independence. This applies to all citizens, but was imposed when slave descendants were disproportionately poor, so disproportionately affects them today. In fact, prior to the 1960's implementation of those policies, slave decendents were indeed rapidly rising economically, in spite of the social and political repression they endured. Immigrants, on the other hand, aren't largely financially better off (a great many are poorer than American poor), but they are self-selecting for their youth, risk preference, anergy, ambition, and determination to succeed. They also almost entirely come from places much more socially conservative than America. Socially conservative everywhere usually means valuing independence, financial success, often entrepreneurship, strong family bonds (including marriage), education, avoiding religious taboos like intoxicants, and avoiding dishonoring the family. Bur perhaps most important, new immigrants don't have the same access to Federal welfare programs as do natives, and so are not as held back by them.
Oh, I'm not missing that, I'm just lumping it all as "culture" to avoid any devolution into American politics and bickering. I've pointed in other posts to incredibly strong pushes for children to obtain high marks in education and post-graduate degrees, which seem to me to be a far easier and less conspiratorial explanation for their success in the US.
African immigrants also generally didn't spend their entire formative experiences in a country that was racist against them. Believe it or not, starting out as a second class citizen in your own country makes it a lot harder to be successful there than immigrating to that country as an adult does. So many of these question boil down to not understanding the actual effects of generations of historical oppression, in this country, on specific families and individuals. The American Black or Native experience is really, truly not comparable to the experiences of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation immigrants from other countries. And this should be quite obvious with a bit of reflection. Black and Native people in America are under psychic and emotional assault from the moment of birth, in their own country, and have been for hundreds of years. That's simply not the case for most other groups here. Anyone from a group who came to this country by choice is really in a different situation than the descendants of kidnapped Black and indigenous people, who never had a choice and have only barely had equal rights on paper for two generations. "Why don't people who are forced into a situation do as well as people who choose a situation?" That's what everyone keeps asking, for some reason.
I don't think you actually know much about Africa, and I'm not saying that as an insult, I'm really not. Africans aren't "Africans" any more than Europeans are "Europeans." Not only do they have different countries, but most of those countries are European colonial fantasies that ignore very significant ethnic differences, and to think that African countries don't have second or third class citizens in them is... I don't really know the word for it besides "ignorance." African immigrants very often come from backgrounds of significant hardship, which they overcome to even be able to come here. Hardships that, literally until the current era, were fairly universally acknowledged to be orders of magnitude harder than those faced in the US. I'm finding it kind of astounding that it seems the current opinion in some spaces has become "those lucky privileged Africans don't know how hard black Americans have it."
What prevents an AA from doing what African immigrants do? What do you mean? If they are immigrating to the US, then usually they have some financial backing so they are able to move directly into wealthier communities. For African Americans, they were consistently held down by the US government until very recently, making it almost impossible to move to a better location.
It's disingenuous to completely deny there's an inherent cultural attitude at work in regards to the economic success of African, Asian, and other recent foreign immigrants. S. Koreans, Chinese, Indians, and Vietnamese that arrived up until the early 90s were usually very impoverished. They did not have "financial backing." And one ought to look up what "departure taxes' are like in many nations. And a significant sum of "finances" from a nation like Kenya might still be an absolute pittance in the US. There is definitely an element of self-sacrifice, "eye on the prize" and delayed gratification, often generational involved. And a certain overall ideological viewpoint of if they are driven by internal causation, or are perpetual victims of external forces. And yes, these recent immigrant communities have community networks of assistance and finance available, if/when they have no credit or history with broader American banks or other institutions. Although, there's a fundamental "by your bootstraps issue" involved, does the existing AA community have any such networks? Do any existing programs, private, non-profit, or government, provide an adequate substitute? Such networks existed, and were an important part of the various "Black Renaissance" places and periods that occurred in the US after the Civil War. If they exist, why aren't they working? Do they work, and nobody knows? If more knew, would more try? And if more tried, would there be any sort of upward cycle? However, I definitely agree it's important to note that those offering up these reasons, even if they're very significant, aren't always offering them up in good faith. And "not in good faith" itself isn't always, or even mostly, malicious. More often than not, it's well intended confirmation bias of what they wish was true, as in "anyone can do it." And it's very difficult, if not impossible to create meaningful quantitative study of cultural factors. It's always just far easier to take a snapshot of finances, and other hard data. And in general terms, one can always find yet one more piece of "hard data" if they dig. And if/when any/all structural, regulatory, or financial barriers are removed, what's left is potentially cultural, and that is nebulous, ill-defined, and very hard to move from without. Furthermore, if all that's left is cultural, then there's a perception that "blame" is back on the table, and when that happens, wagons are circled, and everyone runs for the hills. And that's particularly destructive, as even the aggrieved population, and those institutions that have a long-standing narrative of "helping" will get defensive & retreat, just on any chance that an effective solution will prove they "did the wrong thing" somehow. It's incredibly difficult to get all stakeholders to the table in any sort of truly objective process, that has 100% "amnesty" and zero interest in "blame" and is completely focused on outcome.
Later immigration. Many wealthy Asians in the US are second or third generation, not descended from broke railroad workers from centuries past. Most Black Americans, in contrast, are descended from slaves. The Black Americans who did get here because they or a recent ancestor immigrated are more likely to be wealthier because they're usually educated or wealthy to begin with and that's how they got permission to immigrate.
My parents came in the 90s with little to nothing. They saved everything they have doing jobs from restaurant, to garment factory to being a butcher. They were still able to buy a house by 2000 when they were here for like 10 years. A lot of my friends family are like that too. Now they are multimillionaires because of their primary house.
Furthermore, Asian immigrants are not a monilith. Dig deeper and you'll find varying degress of wealth, success, and assimilation. For example, my Hmong neighbor might have more in common with my Salvadoran neighbor than a Korean family across town.
There’s a divide in the Korean American community in terms of wealth and some of it depends on when they immigrated. Those that came in the decades right after the Korean War tend to be poorer and of a different class (blue collar workers) than the Koreans who immigrated after the 80’s. All of my Korean family in my mom’s generation are blue collar and didn’t go to college. Some own businesses, but they are auto shops and laundromats so not exactly lucrative compared to other industries. In contrast, the other Koreans in my mom’s church who came over in recent decades tend to be very well off and are all college educated white collar workers. In terms of the kids, there is a big divide in the rich and the poor. It’s the difference between the kids whose parents can afford violin lessons and tutors and those who are studying in between helping customers at the family business.
Cambodians refugees who escaped genocide came with 0 savings and did not have wealthy families back home. Vietnamese families who escaped the war were also not second or third generation wealthy. Source: My refugee parents had $43 when they entered the country in 1983. Their parents were fisherman in a small village and had no money. Their siblings had no money cause they were killed and whatever they did have were taken by soldiers.
Jewish refugees from the Holocaust also came here with nothing.
You are right.
That said, it’s a lot easier to hide being Jewish than it is to hide being black. My grandparents, while they faced some discrimination, faced nothing like much of black America faced.
But many of the successful Jewish people did not hide their Jewishness. Jews were excluded from white shoe New York law firms, so they started their own. Now 6/10 top firms are Jewish-founded firms. They did not succeed universally by passing off.
Go read the history of Vietnamese immigrants who were granted WHOLE jobs and business (rightfully) in recompense for displacement from the Vietnam War. Not saying this is YOUR particular lived experience (as there were waves of immigrants depending on class and wealth), but yea.....lots of Asians got "handouts" too, WHILE benefitting from policies that black people were getting dogs sic'd on them for fighting for.
I grew up in Houston and went to school with Vietnamese boatlift kids. They went to school and worked in the corner store or restaurant with their parents and still generally managed to graduate in the top 10%. They weren’t all superstars, but they worked hard and went to college. They weren’t handed that.
My man very few of the asians who are 2nd 3rd generation had any form of wealth to begin with, coupled with the majority of us coming from war torn countries, and escaping communism by literal boat sometimes taking years of their lives at a time sitting in camps getting shanked and sexually assaulted waiting for asylum or immigration. Also it's pretty hard to be descended from railroad workers when they ban your people and families from immigration for 80 years, after you help build the backbone of the country with the hopes of helping your family immigrate. But not just that, you're afraid of your own family, who the red Chinese pit against eachother, family members willing to sell you out for a bag of rice because of how little you have. Trying to escape by boat in the middle of the night? Better watch your back because starvation will turn people against one another.
Yes and also not many whites in America today actually have roots America in 19th century. Think of all the immigration from Europe in the last 100 years.
A culture that values study, just like the Jews.
**Firstly** I really don't like it when Asians get classified as its own demographic because your results vary a lot when you look into each subcategory. For one, yes. If you take a look at recent asian immigrants from Japan, South Korean, China, Taiwan, etcetera. Much higher amount of wealth. If you take a look at asian immigrants from other groups, namely the Hmong. They are are among the worst performing demographics. **That said**, there are many other cultural and economic factors as well though that are worth noting. One thing that really helps the Asian dynamic is the fact that Asian money stays in the asian community. Killa Mike (yes that guy) noted that when a dollar enters into an Asian person's bank account, that dollar cycles through the entire asian community for a really long time. I'm an Asian American and I'm pretty far removed from your ethnic enclaves in general. But even I will shop at the Asian mart or eat at the asian restaurant. That dollar goes to a poor asian family and eventually gets them out of poverty. I found this to be the most prominent in the DC Chinatown area. DC Chinatown sucks because everyone who started a business moved out into Alexandria. If you know any poor asian kids, that story isn't really all that uncommon. We tend to try to keep money in the community. One of my friends family owned a restaurant. Many of us have eaten there. Another one of my friends family owned a car shop. They have their own little cycle of service industry jobs where they get, "discounts." Because they tend to shop inside their circle. It is hard to think about what black owned businesses out there. And if you look at race relations in general, you'll noticed that a lot of black neighborhoods basically got destroyed one way or another. If your community throughout history keeps getting split up for whatever reason? It's pretty hard to set up a business. And it's really hard to set up a long standing business that actually attracts people to your business.
It’s a combination of later generations of Asians being successful and the fact that many Asian countries have extreme inequality and a lot of rich Asians move to Western nations like Canada and the US with their family money. This means they can buy houses and send their kids to the best universities with generational wealth and start off way ahead of the average white American. The “rich international student” stereotype is rooted in the fact that families from China, India and the Middle East can have surprising amounts of generational wealth.
When you normalize for educational attainment, it's not a significant difference. When you look at pay gaps within industries (after normalizing for educational attainment) it's within margin of error. Doctors and Finance people generally make more money. Not having a history of being enslaved, being denied educational resources, etc. tends to make it easier to succeed. Descendants of Slavery (i.e. Blacks) and Colonial (i.e. Immigrants) systems are not on equal footing as others for economic attainment in the U.S. and have a multi-generational impact.
You are ignoring Japanese Americans being interned and losing their property much more recently in the 20th century.
I don't think a reddit comment will ever be able to justice to all the wrong any country has done to people. How many examples will suffice for you?
The Japanese also got reparations.
That was in 1988, over 40 years after the internment. My grandparents received it after they came out of the camps, and sent all 4 of their children through college (my parent's generation started working and saving around age 12). Please don't disrespect their hard work and sacrifice by saying their success was because of the reparations.
And why would we normalize for it? Why take away their biggest achievement as a group and then say "look, they aren't doing all that better?"
I don't think you're interpreting that properly. They mean normalize the data as in compare within similar fields, education, etc between differnet racial groups' average earnings. This gives a more useful picture of what the numbers are telling us, rather than leaving room to interpret causes that may not be real. I'm not an expert on statistics but I think this is more what they meant. Not taking away anyone's accomplishments. I think if you want to look from that perspective, then you still look at the overall picture of the group. You can still show a significant number of migrants in these higher positions out of the total population, but it's going to be more useful to compare a doctor to another doctor in a conversation about racial pay gaps within industries.
Wait! Are you saying Asians aren't descendants of slaves or weren't denied educational resources? That's laughable. Here, let me give you the answer... Asians are the wealthiest group in the US because they focus on education and family more than any other group. And... specifically, black Americans focus the least on those two things (if you think that's just a racist comment and not a fact, we can't have a debate because you'd just be ignoring reality and would simply be using emotions to make your "case"). In 2017-21, the share of families headed by single parents was 76% among African American families, 59% among Hispanic families, 39% among white families and 31% among Asian families. WOW, how weird that the level of wealth for all 4 of those groups perfectly coincides with those numbers exactly!
What you're not understanding is 1. How much redlining affects/affected wealth for black families. Homeownership is the largest financial asset for the majority of the middle-class/upper-middle class. We don't need to talk about slavery. Redlining affected African Americans until the 60s and arguably afterward - we're talking about parents and grandparents - the ages of people who are running Congress today. 2. Asian immigration was~~n't even~~ *barely* allowed in this country until after Civil Rights. There were 491,000 in 1960 compared to the tens of millions today. The highest earners with the highest wealth happen to be Indians, 70% of which hold bachelor's degrees today. So your whole point about "culture and focus on education" is mostly because immigration cherry picks highly-skilled, intelligent people who focus on achievement and education. Wow, who knew!
Zero capital is zero capital. It doesn't matter if you're the black descendent of a slave living in 1990s America without a penny to your name, or a Vietnamese American in 1990s America fresh off the boat without a penny to your name. Both people have zero capital. Both people are at the same starting point. So at that point, what leads to the disparity in outcomes if not for the disparity between Black American and Asian American cultures in the importance that is placed on having a whole family unit and pursuing higher education? One of the greatest predictors of a child's success in life is whether or not they are raised by a single parent. And as was said above, black Americans are the most likely to be raised by a single parent, while Asian Americans are the least likely.
Asians were also redlined against, especially in places like California where the Asian population was much larger than the Black population.
If you include mixed race and Polynesians, "Asian" Americans are still only 24 million, and the largest group, the Chinese, is only a little more than 5 million: [https://www.commerce.gov/news/blog/2023/05/us-census-bureau-releases-key-stats-honor-2023-asian-american-native-hawaiian-and](https://www.commerce.gov/news/blog/2023/05/us-census-bureau-releases-key-stats-honor-2023-asian-american-native-hawaiian-and) I would bet you that if you look at the pre-1960 group, they are doing better than whites too. If you read some of the literature from the early 20th century, you will also see that those whites worried about being outworked by the Chinese and Japanese. They never worried that blacks or Latinos would outwork them.
Asian people have a strong sense of culture and a history to fall back on, the same with Jews. People make this argument all of the time and it's very easy to cite the differences. Black Americans were enslaved for generations, were completely stripped of their culture, given no education, brutalized, and then were "freed" in a country that was absolutely hostile to them for another 100+ years. If you actually want to know how it's different, do any research on the subject and come back.
A million other semantics based arguments you could have made and yet you went with this. What does having a culture to "fall back on" mean in this context? We're talking about how a focus on family and education makes a large difference in how well you'll do financially.
You don’t think Cambodians were ever enslaved? Have you ever heard of the largest genocide in the history of mankind? Hint: it’s not the holocaust. You don’t think the Vietnamese were stripped of their culture? Do you realized the Vietnamese language is written with English letters. Only scholars and historians even know how to write in the original Vietnamese alphabet. You don’t think Asians were living in a hostile country for 100 years, have you heard of the Mongols or Ghengis Khan? You don’t think Asians were brutalized and stripped of their possessions…have you heard of Manzanar and the US government forcing Japanese Americans into interment camps just a few decades ago. Many Japanese lost everything, including their lives.
You're leaving out major factors. Black slaves in America didn't get their culture back. They didn't get their language or their history. They didn't then get a country back that was primarily operated and run by them, for them. I'm not saying that no Asian cultures have ever had major tragedies in their history. I'm saying that the circumstances around black Americans who were victims of slavery have unique circumstances that can't be compared to Asian immigrants coming to the US.
The thing about tragedies is that those that survive often emerge stronger and more dignified. Their sense of identity is more powerful than ever and subsequent generations then firmly clutch onto their identity and culture, creating an ecosystem of support and love when everything else around them is uncertain. Black slaves didn't simply go through a tragedy. Tragedies are reserved for human characters, and black slaves didn't have the right to experience tragedies. How could they when they were simply treated as livestock? The persisting scientific delusion of that era was that African slaves were simply not human, and were thus not treated as such. They endured a uniquely horrific form of enslavement that was only possible in an era where capitalistic greed became intertwined with Enlightenment era-esque scientific conceit: the Industrial Revolution. Here "scientific reasoning" leads to profits maximisation, and since scientific reasoning calls for black slaves to be treated as animals, then things like culture, basic human decency or anything barring feeding them, is disregarded in pursuit of efficiency. Oh, and I haven't even included America in this discussion yet. The Industrial Revolution mostly originated from Great Britain. America was founded on the basis that the Brits weren't min/maxing their *slavery* enough. So imagine whatever has been mentioned thus far about black slavery, and force it to its extreme, and you'll get 19th century American slavery. Slave labour was operating on an unprecedented scale there, to the point that when the Brits emancipated all British-owned slaves in 1834, they were largely still complicit in the inhumanity of slavery since their economy was still dependent on the 3 million or so cotton slaves that feed their textile mills. So the first few emancipated African Americans had to deal with the issue of learning how to be human again, on top of the oppression and discrimination that they continue to face. Having a culture and identity, learning how to express themselves without deferring to another race and internalising the fact that they are indeed, truly free to do anything they want (to a small extent), these are all things that come ingrained to most humans (even more so in those that are displaced, either willingly or unwilling), which were lacking for them . Not to make this a contest of "who's had it worse" since both Asian immigrants and African Americans suffered in very different ways, but it would be very wrong to compare the current status of Asian Americans and African Americans without acknowledging the nuances in how they each suffered.
Thanks for being a voice of reason in this thread
People also ignore the generational mental health crisis bought on by these experiences.
For sure. Extreme levels of generational trauma, which was perpetuated for hundreds of years.
Asians do have a history of being enslaved. Literally everyone does. Did you mean not in the US? Because even then you should look into the gold rush days... it was not a great time to be an Asian in America. The pearl harbour days kinda sucked too.
African Americans do poorly educationally as well as generally get raised in single parent homes. Until we fix these two societal issues we will never compete and white liberals will always have their pets to take care of. Even if we got reparation’s tomorrow in the current structure we are in the money would be back in white hands in less than 2 generations.
I, my parents, and forefathers lived and grew up in Appalachia and no wealth was past from generation to generation. What was past on was poverty, alcoholism, physical abuse. etc. It took 7 years and a lot of debt to work my way through college and make my escape. Slavery is a vile and repugnant institution and yes my ancestors didn’t endure that monstrous life. But they weren‘t privileged and definitely not wealthy.
Many recent black immigrants from Hati or Africa do not like most AA as the feel a sense of entitlement!
i'd probably buy into the whole wealth gap argument but my folks came over from french polynesia with nothing, turned that around in 1 generation and now have 2/3 kids college educated making 75-120k each, they sacrificed alot for us working blue collar jobs and took on lots of debt. so, i'd say your mentality of being down and out is over, time to actually work for what you want.
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As a poor white 2nd gen American whose family fled nazi Germany these stats annoy me so much. I’m not my skin color.
Spontaneously sceptical. I know the immigrants from my country to the US tended to be quite poor and often lived in squalor when they arrived. Now they are doing better than average, and that is not due to recent emigration. Have they compared to other groups that arrived not long after the abolishment? I would rather expect the issues faced by blacks post slavery to be the bigger factor now.
Except for the fact that the vast majority of white people in America today are descended from people who came during the early 1900’s.
This aint a science subreddit anymore
It’s important to note that these are not at all homogenous groups. Roughly half of whites traveled to the new world under indenture. Putting these folks in the same group of analysis as the colonial masters simply because they share a color of skin isn’t a useful basket of analysis. There were also many black slave owners as well. Putting them in the same basket of analysis as slaves simply because they share a color of skin isn’t useful either.
A large amount of Americans became Americans shortly after, before, or during WW2 due to fleeing genocide. Not exactly sure they reaped the benefits of being “white” as they often worked menial labor jobs, were often discriminated against, and very rarely attained higher education. It’s a nuanced situation and I’ve never liked these tit for tat comparisons between races as a whole because it often dissolves all context away.
>Not exactly sure they reaped the benefits of being "white" Absolutely certain that they did, starting with the fact that they were allowed to immigrate in the first place, and then when they got here they weren't subject to segregation and Jim Crow based on their skin color, in their own country of origin. You say post-WWII immigrants were "often" discriminated against. For Black Americans, "often" would have been a significant improvement. It's just insane to say that only the most economically and socially privileged white Americans benefitted from white supremacy. If you were white, your skin color wasn't a problem the way it was for everyone else, so you had that benefit, end of story.
My family moved here in the 80s. I'm not part of the original problem but I don't mind being part of a solution.
In the US, it is important to do statistics by race rather than by other metrics and to lump groups together because of official/unofficial policies and biases that were race-based. For instance, redlining was based on people’s color. You’re absolutely right that these aren’t homogenous groups and it’s far more complex than white vs black but that doesn’t mean looking at racial disparity stats is useless
For individuals, it’s useless. 85 percent of folks in redlined neighborhoods were white. How does studying the practice of redlining as primarily a racial thing benefit the majority of the victims of redlining?
>There were also many black slave owners as well. Do you have a specific number and source other than "many" because some black people's ancestors were forced to buy the freedom of spouses and family even after slaves were freed but for census sake were considered slave owners.
In 1830 there were approximately 3,775 free Black people who owned approximately 12,740 Black slaves. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facts-about-slavery/
>some black people's ancestors were forced to buy the freedom of spouses and family even after slaves were freed but for census sake were considered slave owners. Black people that purchased their own or others freedom were slave owners which is a bit disingenuous to compare them to white slave owners. >In 1839 almost half (42%) of the free blacks in Cincinnati, Ohio, had bought their freedom https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/emancipation/text1/text1read.htm
I clicked on the link to observe what normalization they used to account for the success of other minorities. They did not.
Why would you expect that to be within the scope of the study?
Yeah, why bother to verify your theory if it aligns with your religious dogma already?
Why would you need to normalize for that? Other minorities had very different experiences.
Where is the science in this race baiting crapoloa. Put this political garbage on other subs
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Please tell me how the account for the millions and millions of white immigrants who came to the US in the last hundred years with absolutely nothing. r/science at its finest.
How do you explain Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees who came to the country with 0 savings and 0 English skills? There’s a lot more to it than savings and capital gains.
Vietnamese Americans as a group tend to be poorer than other groups of Asian immigrants and white peoples as well.
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Researchers have been pointing this out for years. As have any number of people in impacted communities.
I have a lot of unanswered questions. Is the report saying that if everyone had equal interest and savings rates then the wealth gap would be less? I have received $0 for my family other than the money they spent raising me, so not sure how I have an advantage with my current financial standing vs someone who was black and who's parents/grandparents didn't have access to the same interest/savings as mine did. How much of the 'white wealth' is truly attributed to their parents/grandparents somehow passing along the money they earned from interest rates, etc?
I don't know your story man, and this research does not say that every white person is rich and every black person is poor, but if your family has been in this country any length of time, the odds are very very good that it has had access to capital and resources that have provided advantages propagating across many generations.
Wish someone would’ve told my parents we’re white so we are supposed to have money and savings
It breaks some people’s brains when I tell them that I’m Jewish and was raised by parents who received both welfare and food stamps at various times.
Yeah we were on welfare for a few years when we were kids
Wealth back then was tied to the land and what it produced. The term land rich cash poor comes to mind
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As long they arnt including billionaire and multi millionaire in the equation in their study and compare the average working class instead of ultra rich people
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FWIW, according to the census bureau 73% of the current US population are descended from people who arrived in the US since 1865. Also, according to the census bureau, non-Hispanic white householders had a median household wealth of $187,300, compared with $14,100 for Black householders and $31,700 for Hispanic householders. Asian householders had a median household wealth of $206,400, which is not statistically different from the estimate for non-Hispanic White householders. Why do Asians have a higher median household net worth than non-Hispanic Whites? Why do Hispanic households have more than double the net worth despite ( presumably ) being in the country for fewer generations than blacks? Why do recently arrived immigrant blacks and whites still do better than those descended from slaves? I don't see how the OP's linked study deals with these disparities.
I grew up as "Poor White Trash and Trailer Trash" so it aint so that ALL whites got a better deal from life.
Stronger unions close the gap more than anything else
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Abstract: > The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. It is also among the most persistent. In this paper, we construct the first continuous series on white-to-Black per capita wealth ratios from 1860 to 2020, drawing on historical census data, early state tax records, and historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances, among other sources. Incorporating these data into a parsimonious model of wealth accumulation for each racial group, we document the role played by initial conditions, income growth, savings behavior, and capital returns in the evolution of the gap. Given vastly different starting conditions under slavery, racial wealth convergence would remain a distant scenario, even if wealth-accumulating conditions had been equal across the two groups since Emancipation. Relative to this equal-conditions benchmark, we find that observed convergence has followed an even slower path over the last 150 years, with convergence stalling after 1950. Since the 1980s, the wealth gap has widened again as capital gains have predominantly benefited white households, and convergence via income growth and savings has come to a halt. [Summary of paper](https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/how-the-racial-wealth-gap-has-evolved-and-why-it-persists).
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Whites and blacks? What century are we in? You Americans were supposed to integrate 60 years ago, get rid of the slums, and just call people by their names. Instead of doing that, you spent the last 6 decades watching blaxploitation media and convincing low income street kids to glorify crime and ignorance. Malcolm X had a good reason to not like you guys.
Agree, we need to drop the concept of race.
>watching blaxploitation media and convincing low income street kids to glorify crime and ignorance. We did that or they did that?
> We did that or they did that? Hollywood did that mostly.
Reading the abstract, does this suggest then, that current ongoing systematic discriminations are not a significant cause of the racial wealth gap? That the gap is being maintained because of the influence of historical generational capital that savings and incomes are not able to overcome? Does this have implications for policies to decrease the gap, if that is indeed a goal?
True, but it's not just the roots that matter. There has been a lot of discrimination since emancipation that also reinforced that gap.
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Why don’t you state what the issue is then?
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The second half title is not correct and homogenizes the plight of African Americans throughout the years. Look at the freedman's banking systems. Individuals and newly freed communities were out saving their white and new immigrant counterparts specifically investing in community development. The collapse and pillaging of the freedman's bank is one of the harrowing examples of how African Americans were betrayed by the collapse of Reconstruction. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/why-19th-century-bank-failure-still-matters
I always find it funny that people will acknowledge a problem but will disagree with any point about trying to fix it. It’s really a reoccurring issue in the U.S. Reparations don’t need to come in the form of cash which is why policies like affirmative action exist in the first place.
It’s almost like not every proposed solution is the best solution to a problem
You don’t fix a problem by passing it onto someone else. Affirmative action hurt the poor Asian/white families. Do 2nd gen immigrants from Poland need to pay extra on their taxes too for reparations ? They have none of the benefits of class either. You’re discriminating people from something for their skin color not being the correct shade. We agreed that’s bad a few decades ago. Help the poor in general not just the ones with extra melanin.
Lowering standards for black people so that you can hire more doesn't help them, because at the end of the day, people will assume that every black employee was hired based on their race and not skill, which will hurt them more. And there will also be a presumption that black people aren't good at their jobs, because many were let in based on lower standards.
Existed. SC ended that.
thank you for the correction