It Was 400 Years Ago, They Said

[Sir San Diego]

oh look, a Tariq Nasheed supporter flustered over open ideas and outside the box thinking

color me surprised

You can't help but quote me. Continue.

Here's my IG. Follow me all day @oh_worrrrrrd

 

[handullz]

You can't help but quote me. Continue.

Here's my IG. Follow me all day @oh_worrrrrrd

Shoot me a rep if you went to Brolics Instagram.

 

[Mr.Guy]

Wow. I don't even know where to begin with those statements. If you're into black history for the approval of white folks and not to know where you came from and what you're capable of... [emoji]127997[/emoji]‍[emoji]127997[/emoji]‍

Im out.

To be honest I really don't care. I care about Black American history not African history. I went to an HBCU and many of my African classmates see AFrican-Americans as inferior and a historyless and culture less people. Many Africans don't identify with us.We have a strong history here so we don't always need to connect ourselves back to Africa because many Africans come here and look down on us. I'm not African, I'm Black..

 

[dathbgboy]

The thing is, none of this is farfetched, just frustrating that not too many of us in the same locale have the same vision.

its unfortunate that outside of Boyce and Claude Anderson you really dont see too much or too many programs dedicated to financial literacy and the importance of understanding economics

oh but you'll find a million programs with laser focus on youth programs and fathers in the household like its a magic pill

effectively reaching the youth is extremely difficult if the whole family isnt on board. The Harlem Zone does it, im sure there are others, but no where near enough. when i worked with juvenile offenders, we could transform their thinking in 9 months....only to see it knocked over like dominoes over a weekend home visit.

and fathers in the household isnt as simple as its advertised. a lot of these guys have no business raising anyones child. some of these women too truth be told.

you cant buy a man in a jar, add water, and *poof*, end up with an adequate provider and role model for your children

Facts. U have to start w/ the men and women and then they can teach the younger ones or help everyone grown collectively. Most of these programs look at people like victims, which is the problem. That's demoralizing. They need to take off the gloves and use the tough love approach. My wife wants to start a community school in our neighborhood and I'm on board so I can help teach both young and old what I know about things, like financial economics, car maintenance, cooking, etc. If you can learn to be self sufficient, that will carry a long way.

 

[All Ready]

boys kill me with the fake tariq outrage

the fact that the fake outrage is ramping up only allows me to know his moves are effective

and he does tell people how to move better within society

boys just making stuff up

far more people are hip to the notion of progress but eh

 

[handullz]

To be honest I really don't care. I care about Black American history not African history. I went to an HBCU and many of my African classmates see AFrican-Americans as inferior and a historyless and culture less people. Many Africans don't identify with us.We have a strong history here so we don't always need to connect ourselves back to Africa because many Africans come here and look down on us. I'm not African, I'm Black..

You bugging, my g.

So many of the cultural norms derive from African ancestry.

It's obvious that those Africans that are tripping on American blacks have been convinced through media depictions. If that's all they see, they're going to come over here with a screwy Outlook on us.

It's our job to extend the hand and say "yo, let's squash what THEY say about us and work directly with each other and discover that way"

And if some Africans ain't down, cool... There won't be some American blacks down, cool...

Just gotta get the ones who are willing to chop it up

 

[Brownstone]

African history?

A semester on Kenyan history alone wouldn't suffice. Africa is comprised of hundreds of cultura, tribal histories and customs.

 

[jaysrcrak]

IMO the government could offer us better and free education, free financial and investing education, government grants to start businesses,
and a multitude of other things, but it still would not matter until we collectively( or at least a majority) decide to CHANGE OUR MINDSETS AND PUT VALUE INTO THESE THINGS.

We must make THESE things AS or even MORE important than the things that we currently put immense amounts of focus on.

We all say, " we need better education" and there are some that volunteer and even teach but many more that stand by during their children's most important developmental years and let that time be wasted. The amount of kids age 5 and under that can Hit the Quan and JuJu on the beat with amazing skill is a testament to that, yet that same kid cant count to 100. The kid didn't come out the womb dabbin. Someone taught him that or they were exposed to it enough to where they picked it up. It doesn't matter how much free education the government gives us if we don't VALUE education as much as posting a cute video of your kid doing the latest dance.

We say that we need to be financially literate in terms of investing and starting businesses. And there are some that do just that.
Then we have a whole subculture that would rather spend their time and energy selling dope and using that money to buy cars, rims, clothes, and jewels.
Have you ever wondered why 90% of underground rappers rap about selling dope and shooting guns?

And the gag is, selling dope IS a business. They could use their same business acumen and just sell a different product.
But for some reason, in the black community we have this INCORRECT mindset that selling dope is a path to accumulate wealth. (It's NOT!)
And alot of us don't see ANYTHING wrong with that hustle. We accept it as a part of life, that we sell poison to each other
It doesn't matter how many grants to start small businesses the government offers if we don't put VALUE into starting legitimate businesses.
This is especially true considering that there are a lot of grants like these available RIGHT NOW but most of us won't ever get them, because we don't value that enough to put the time and effort into learning how to do it, filling out the paperwork and following through til the end of the process.

And so on and so forth...
Until we change OUR mindsets about some things it wouldn't matter if the system was oppressing us or not
because with some of these issues we oppress ourselves by being willfully ignorant and refusing to change the ways about us that aren't working.

There are MANY things that we do have the right mindset on, and like the saying goes "If it ain't broke don't fix it", but when it IS broke, should we just keep doing it?
That's the real question.

 

[Brownstone]

America is not our "home" country. When the constitution was originally written it was written for a certain group, then amended to include everyone else unless you commit one of the many crimes and then it's back to slavery you go.

If that's "home" why are there different rules for us that are unspoken, but understood? Hell, my ten year old daughter knows there are different rules and that's not because I'm at my house playing Malcolm X speeches all day, it's because even a child can see it.

We were stolen from our homes, forced to work under the threat of violence, cut off from our history and culture and then turned lose with no aim. Home is a place where you have a sense of ownership and comfort... a place where you can escape and be protected. Is the US any of that?

None of what you say here is deniable.

When I say home country, I mean blacks are American. Equality is not the same as having a home. The US is not any of what you mentioned, but for blacks, it is as home as it gets. And we aint leaving.

 

[gotjz]

Pretty much read through the thread. Don't even know if my actual response is needed for the thread due to it'll probably spiral out of control. But I will say most of what was touched is surface level. Statuses have to change to reclassify how we interact with the system but more importantly vice versa. But I don't even feel that's NEEDED. As men (I'd prefer to use Gods but different discussion) we really have to question certain things. While I do support the notion of black businesses and the like 200%, are we acquiring business licenses? Which in the simplest and most stark reality, is asking "them" to grant permission for you or us to conduct business...? 10 year olds can sell lemonade. Acquire means to manufacturing, make it social law and build the environment (like someone stated) where it's to support our own. Notice how nobody has to try or think to support white business or even other groups businesses. It's just engrained in the construct of the establishment created. But it takes a lot of fundamental changes first. We have to start eating food, drinking actual water lol... We're damaged, killing ourselves, calcifying our pineal glands, etc. But different conversations.

 

[hand2handking]

[h1]The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide[/h1]
https://iasp.brandeis.edu/pdfs/Author/shapiro-thomas-m/racialwealthgapbrief.pdf

 

[hand2handking]

It’s Not Class, It’s Race: Why America Can’t Move Forward Until It Addresses the Racial Wealth Gap

http://www.theroot.com/it-s-not-class-it-s-race-why-america-can-t-move-forwa-1819275543

We don’t tend to look at the wealth gap as a form of violence, even though it’s certainly rooted in it.

Take the massacre in Wilmington, N.C.

The 1898 race riot is one of those stories that have been willfully erased from history, even though it is the only coup d’état to ever take place on American soil. Thirty-three years after the South lost the Civil War, gangs of white men took to the streets in the port city of Wilmington. In a single day, they murdered as many as 60 black people, drove untold others from their homes, burned black businesses to the ground and overthrew the mixed-race government that had been elected two days prior. Before Nov. 10, 1898, Wilmington was a majority-black city.

It hasn’t been ever since. And the names of the white supremacists who assumed power after the massacre remain emblazoned on street signs, government buildings and college auditoriums.

One of the businesses burned down was the Daily Record, a black newspaper at the center of the riot. I thought of how that business, along with many others, was stopped in its nascency—never allowed to gather value, never allowed to prosper. How it would never be passed down within the family, the way Katharine Graham inherited the Washington Post.

How do you account for that sort of absence? What untold millions has this country given up—willingly—to keep black bodies in their place?

Black wealth, stifled at the root and then stamped on subsequently, in each following generation, in myriad cruel, deliberate ways.

To look at the wealth gap as it is in 2017 is to look at the evidence of an accumulated, and ongoing, economic massacre.

(Not) Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap

Spoiler

The statistics are consistent, and they are overwhelming. For every $100 in wealth a white family has, black families hold just $5.04. The average white family is worth an astonishing $600,000 more than the average black family. Black middle-class families may have zero wealth in less than 40 years. One study found that, without the family car, black wealth would “barely exist.”

The black middle class is shrinking, but despite the abundance of research that illuminates this, there is no urgency. In fact, one recent study found that both white and black Americans vastly underestimate how big the wealth gap really is.

The problem? Americans don’t seem to understand what wealth means.

Income, the amount of money you earn every year, is frequently confused with wealth, which is the sum total of all your assets—minus your debt. It’s a basic financial concept, but at least one study has shown that Americans may not really grasp the difference.

Michael Kraus, one of the Yale researchers who conducted a study that looked at how black and white Americans perceive the racial wealth gap, explained: “The estimates looked the same for wealth and income, which suggests that people are not differentiating.” This, even though respondents were given explicit definitions of wealth vs. income.

Knowing Your History

Spoiler

The causes of the racial wealth gap are well-documented. For hundreds of years, black Americans were either denied the ability to purchase land or start businesses—or run the ones they had built. In the 1950s, when the U.S. government made owning a home the cornerstone of the so-called American dream, racist housing policies locked black people out of the market. That history alone is difficult ground to make up.

But add to that the impact of mass incarceration. Anti-black job discrimination hasn’t improved in over 25 years. Tax policies continue to privilege the very wealthy (who are disproportionately white). Bank of America and Wells Fargo are still being accused of predatory lending by targeting minority home buyers. And the student loan debt crisis—fueled by the exploitative practices of for-profit institutions—disproportionately affects black graduates.

Yet all too often, the gap in prosperity is treated as though it’s some moral failing on the part of black Americans, that it’s a lack of personal responsibility. That is, if it’s talked about at all. It’s how people like Amanda Seales can continue, in 2017, to chastise people for buying “Jordans and Nike suits,” as if poor consumer choices are what drives black America’s wealth crisis.

The United States of Amnesia

Spoiler

“People either forget about it or look for reasons to explain it away.”

—JENNIFER RICHESON, YALE PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR

It’s hard to assess wealth at face value. Two people can have the same job, wear the same clothes, drive the same car and have two very different wealth profiles. And because we can’t immediately perceive the wealth gap, it may be tempting to forget it’s there—even though we’ve seen the headlines repeatedly.

As Yale psychology professor Jennifer Richeson—a co-author of the racial-wealth-gap study—told me, some cognitive dissonance is at play. No matter how many times people encounter the data on the wealth gap, many are still shocked.

“People are surprised because we have this clear ... narrative of racial progress and these clear examples, like Barack Obama. Surely we must have made some progress,” said Richeson, who received a MacArthur “genius” grant. The persistence and expansion of the racial wealth gap goes against everything some people believe to be true about “equal-opportunity America,” she added.

“It’s very difficult and challenging, and either people forget about it or ... look for reasons to explain it away,” Richeson said.

A belief in meritocracy also primes people to believe that the racial wealth gap isn’t that bad—and both black Americans and white Americans are susceptible.

Richeson and Kraus found that a belief in societal fairness led Americans to overestimate racial economic equality. This, they say, is because people generally like to believe that their wealth is earned through their hard work and talent. But this myopia can and does blind us to the reality of how wealth actually works.

Solutions

Spoiler

The wealth gap is measurable. The stats are dizzying. The causes are clear. It is not accidental. If there is any good news, it’s that there are a number of policy fixes—clear, specific proposals that would target the yawning gap between white families and families of color.

Because so many people have analyzed the racial wealth gap in this country, there is no shortage of targeted, specific solutions. In casual conversations, I often hear friends and acquaintances talk about addressing economic problems on personal terms: We need more financial literacy, they’ll say. Or we need to support black businesses.

While those initiatives are important, the racial wealth gap is so dire—and draws from so many causes—that policy solutions are not just necessary, they’re overdue.

In Fortune magazine, Josh Hoxie, director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation and co-editor of Inequality.org, listed several such policies. They include expanding mortgage interest deductions, which promote homeownership by offering tax breaks; government-subsidized children’s savings accounts; and a federal jobs guarantee—an idea championed by none other than Martin Luther King Jr.

Tackling the student debt crisis is also imperative. Despite what many Americans believe, education alone cannot close the wealth gap—a fact made soberingly clear by the fact that black families with a college graduate still have less wealth than a white family with a high school diploma. For-profit colleges need to be taken to task for defrauding graduates—a solution that is frustratingly unlikely with Betsy DeVos helming the Department of Education.

This is important to consider as we head into another election year when economic issues continue to dominate the political landscape.

“Solving [the racial-inequality problem] would solve the class-inequality problem more broadly.”

—MICHAEL KRAUS, PROFESSOR AT YALE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

Until Americans take the racial wealth gap seriously, addressing racial and economic equality is simply impossible. At the heart of it all is accepting the notion, once and for all, that class and race are inextricable.

When I asked Richeson what she thought of the phrase “It’s not race, it’s class,” she said that Americans can’t talk about one as if the other doesn’t exist or matter: “Denying the significance of race is really not going to solve this problem or any number of other problems.”

Kraus, meanwhile, thought the phrase ought to be reversed.

“The race-based economic-inequality problem that we observed is historical. The economic wealth of our country is built on it,” Kraus pointed out.

“The racial-inequality problem, solving it would solve the class-inequality problem more broadly,” he added. “Our data suggests that.”

 

[hand2handking]

‘University English courses look like an exercise in whiteness’: ways to decolonise your reading

https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/21-1...to-make-your-own-reading-a-little-less-white/

Brannavan Gnanalingam writes about the overwhelming whiteness of English literature as taught in New Zealand – and throws down a challenge to the gatekeepers, including the Spinoff.

UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph caused a stir in October with a front page story about a black Cambridge student who had “force[d] Cambridge to drop white authors”. The Telegraph‘s coverage wasn’t so much a dog-whistle as a flashing neon sign saying “uppity”. Of course Lola Olufemi, who wrote the open letter in question, had said no such thing. In fact the Telegraph had to write a hasty clarification, which it buried in the **** end of the paper.

The thrust of Olufemi’s open letter was that English literature at Cambridge should be “decolonised” to take in more black and other minority ethnic writers. Students should also study more post-colonial thought. The letter attacked the focus on the ‘canon’ – largely made up of white and/or male writers. The letter stated that the emphasis on the canon wilfully ignores, misrepresents, and sidelines writers from the Global South. It notes that you can complete a degree without noticing the absence of non-white writers.

It’d be fair to say the same thing happens in New Zealand. Surveying various universities’ English courses looks like a general exercise in whiteness. As at Cambridge, it seems it’s still fairly easy to complete an English Lit degree without studying a non-white writer. Even in courses that profess to cover post-colonial writers, their interest seems token. I’m only picking on Otago University because it was rash enough to publish its course texts online, but its recent post-colonial English Lit paper featured more white writers (Conrad, Fugard, Atwood and Frame) than non-white (Kincaid, Dangarembga and Sinha).

Why does it matter? It all comes down to the framework of what is considered “good” writing. Weighting English Lit courses towards white writers reinforces the idea that white Western literature is universal and speaks to the human condition. Non-white literature, on the other hand, is “other”, “different’ and most definitely “culturally specific”. We never get to be universal, even if that was our intention (which, let’s face it, is a pretty hubristic ambition). Still, if anyone wants to tell me that Spenser’s The Faerie Queen is more relevant than Tina Makereti’s Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings, I’m all ears. But you’ll be wrong.

In 2017, it’s pretty hard to mount a defence of whitewashing English literature studies. The novel itself isn’t even a European-born artform – the Indian Sanskrit writers, Arabic writers, Japanese writers and Chinese writers were expanding the scope of the novel centuries before the first major European novel, Don Quixote, came along at the start of the 16th century. If we’re willing to accept that English is the lingua franca of the world while acknowledging the role of colonialism in spreading it, then it’s even harder to dismiss the artistic outputs of non-white peoples.

The dominance of the literary canon extends to what agents and publishers consider commercial. White is universal and can sell; non-white is too risky. It flows through to awards – as made clear in contemporary literature’s ultimate form of canonisation, the Nobel Prize. There have been more winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature from Sweden than there have been from Africa (of which only Wole Soyinka and Naguib Mahfouz were non-white) or Asia. No offence Sweden, but your literary output is not better than two separate continents.

Of course I’m not suggesting that writing by white people should be ignored or banned from curricula. But we need to acknowledge that Western writers are just as historically and culturally specific as anybody else. Any claim that they’re simply better betrays a laziness of critical thought and a refusal to engage with unfamiliar texts. In a higher education setting, that’s fatal. And it fundamentally betrays why most of us read: to explore other worlds. As I’ve said before on the Spinoff, if your framework for what is good writing simply upholds the status quo, the problem’s your framework.

I’m not saying you can’t study the “great” texts. But the thing is, the texts are great because they’re weird. Like, deeply weird. Don Quixote is as postmodern as The Simpsons. What’s going on with time in Notes from the Underground or Hamlet? Finnegans Wake makes marginally more sense if you read it aloud, drunk, in an Irish accent. Anna Karenina spends a tedious amount of time on Levin’s political theories. One of my all-time favourite books by a white man – JR by William Gaddis – is barely readable. These texts are great because they force you to see the world from other angles, from different perspectives. Why then is there such unwillingness to do the same when ‘Other’ writers are concerned?

TINA MAKERETI AND HER NOVEL ‘WHERE THE RĒKOHU BONE SINGS’

So what can be done? A lot, actually. There are plenty of great pieces from non-white writers at the moment about the structural problems in literature. But how can we, as readers, decolonise?

I started thinking about this when I first looked hard at the books I was reading. Like most writers, I catalogue the books I’ve read, and have done so since I was a teenager. When I was 22, I analysed my literary diet so far. Ninety percent of the books I’d read were by men. Ninety-five percent of them were by white writers. I was forced to acknowledge that the majority of what I’d read conformed with canonical frameworks, and what other, mostly white, academics and writers considered “good” writing. So I set myself some rules – and my writing and reading has got immeasurably better as a result. It also meant I avoided reading any Bukowski, which was great, because Bukowski fans are the worst. Here’s what I decided to do:

1. Read in theme. I travelled in North and West Africa for three months and in preparation I only read books from that part of the world. I gained a far better understanding of some of the places I’d be visiting than I would have through a Lonely Planet. And I discovered some amazing writers, like Mongo Beti, Ayi Kweh Armah and Christopher Okigbo. Also, having read Ousmane Sembene helped me in a tricky situation when I was inadvertently arrested for murder.

2. Set some rules. These days I don’t read consecutive books by men, and I don’t read consecutive books from the same country (unless they’re Kiwi books). I’ve managed to push this out to every three books being from three different countries with no major issue. I don’t read consecutive books by white people (men or women). My stats are starting to get better. I also set goals to read books from countries I’ve never read literature from. This year I’ve read novels from Guyana, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Zimbabwe for the first time. Libraries are genuinely the greatest sources for world literature in New Zealand.

3. Do some background research. If I read a book by white writers on a non-white subject, then I’ll read a non-white critique of it. Heart of Darkness is fine, but Chinua Achebe’s critique of it was far more influential on my own work. By the way, I think white writers can totally write about non-white subjects. But if you do it badly, then prepare to be called out. If you write a book about cricket, then you’ll be criticised if you call a bat a stick and an umpire a referee. Get basic things wrong and you’ve got no-one to blame but yourself. It’s no different if you’re trying to talk about a group of people who have been defined by, and define themselves through, discursive frameworks, stereotypes and specific cultural practices (like, well, everybody).

COURTNEY SINA MEREDITH AND HER SHORT STORY COLLECTION, ‘TAIL OF THE TANIWHA’

4. Listen to other voices. And when they criticise a representation of themselves, listen to them. Sure, get all defensive about Kerouac, but On the Road is racist and fetishistic. VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River is racist, and more egregiously racist than its inspiration, Heart of Darkness. White saviour narratives of uncouth darkies are never a good idea. Listening to other viewpoints also helps challenge your own assumptions about what is good. I’ve read too many great critiques of Lolita by women to feel comfortable talking about that book’s greatness (men, please don’t @ me aboutLolita’s greatness).

5. Get some recommendations. If I’ve read a non-white writer, then I’ll find interviews with that writer to see what has inspired them. I know from my own experience as a writer, we’ll tell you – we’re not going to privilege exclusively white writers if we can help it. For example, right now, I’m really digging Can Xue, Assia Djebar, and Alain Mabanckou. And I thought Courtney Sina Meredith’sTail of the Taniwha was brilliant.

6. Remove the expectation that novels must be universal or immediately understandable to you.You don’t need to see yourself in a narrative for it to have resonance. I didn’t see myself in the 95% of books I read before I was 22. I was fine. It takes surprisingly little effort for me, or other non-white readers, to engage with “great” literature – and it’ll be just as easy for white readers to engage with non-white voices. If you’re willing to accept a 19th Century Russian nobleman’s utterances, then you sure as hell can comprehend a contemporary non-white voice.

7. Challenge gatekeepers who are stuck in old models. Gatekeepers will only change if they somehow feel guilty, or if commercial reality hits. Or maybe they’ll eventually get sick of being asked “what are you doing to fix things?” when we all know they’re doing piss-all. Ask a publisher in New Zealand, “what’s your approach to fixing the fact there are such few non-white voices in New Zealand literature? Are you ashamed about it?” If you control an arts section, think carefully about how you construct your pages. You could pretend that books pages get read because you cover commercial books by white writers (hahahahahaha) or you could craft them to match how you think book pages should look.

It’d be great if books didn’t get defined by the writer’s ethnicity. Personally, I’d love it if I wasn’t always seen as an ‘Other’ writer. But those existing divisions are only magnified when we accept structures that keep us on the margins. If diversity is a priority for you – including in your reading – you’re going a long way towards making difference normal, rather than token.

The latest novel by Wellington writer Brannavan Gnanalingam, Sodden Downstream (Lawrence and Gibson, $29), is available at Unity Books.

 

[hand2handking]

World's richest 0.1% have boosted their wealth by as much as poorest half
Inequality report also shows UK’s 50,000 richest people have seen their share of the country’s wealth double since 1984

https://www.theguardian.com/inequal...-increased-wealth-same-amount-as-poorest-half

The richest 0.1% of the world’s population have increased their combined wealth by as much as the poorest 50% – or 3.8 billion people – since 1980, according to a report detailing the widening gap between the very rich and poor.

The World Inequality Report, published on Thursday by French economist Thomas Piketty, warned that inequality had ballooned to “extreme levels” in some countries and said the problem would only get worse unless governments took coordinated action to increase taxes and prevent tax avoidance.

The report, which drew on the work of more than 100 researchers around the world, found that the richest 1% of the global population “captured” 27% of the world’s wealth growth between 1980 and 2016. And the richest of the rich increased their wealth by even more. The top 0.1% gained 13% of the world’s wealth, and the top 0.001% – about 76,000 people – collected 4% of all the new wealth created since 1980.

“The top 0.1% income group (about 7 million people) captured as much of the world’s growth since 1980 as the bottom half of the adult population,” the report said. “Conversely, income growth has been sluggish or even nil for the population between the global bottom 50% and top 1%.”

The economists said wealth inequality had become “extreme” in Russia and the US. The US’s richest 1% accounted for 39% of the nation’s wealth in 2014 [the latest year available], up from 22% in 1980. The researchers noted that “most of that increase in inequality was due to the rise of the top 0.1% wealth owners”.

The world’s richest person is Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, who has a $98.8bn (£73.9bn) fortune, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index. Bezos, the biggest shareholder in Amazon, has seen his wealth increase by $33bn over the past year alone. Collectively, the world’s five richest people – Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortega, the owner of Zara, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – hold $425bn of assets. That is equivalent to one-sixth of the UK’s GDP.

In the UK, the richest 1% control 22% of the country’s wealth, up from 15% in 1984. The very richest in the UK have seen a huge increase in their wealth. The top 0.1% – around 50,000 people – have seen their share of the nation’s wealth double from 4.5% in 1984 to 9% in 2013.

“The increase in the concentration of wealth in the last four decades is very much a phenomenon confined to the hands of the top 0.5% (the richest 250,000 Britons), and in particular the top 0.1% (the richest 50,000),” the report said.

The richest people in the UK are the Hinduja family, who control a conglomerate of businesses including cars and banks, and are worth $15.4bn.

The economists, led by Piketty who shot to global fame after the publication of his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, said there was a “huge gap” in wealth between the richest people in the UK and everyone else in the country. They said the bottom 90% of people in the UK had an average wealth of £68,000, compared with £321,000 among the richest 10% and the top 0.5%, who were worth £3.7m on average.

While inequality was high in north America and Europe, the researchers warned that the problem was even more acute in Africa, Brazil and the Middle East, where they said “inequality has remained relatively stable at extremely high levels in recent decades”.

“The top 10% receives about 55% of total income in Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa, and in the Middle East, the top 10% income share is typically over 60%,” the report said. “These three regions never went through the postwar egalitarian regime and have always been at the world’s high-inequality frontier.”

The report warns that unless there is globally coordinated political action, the wealth gap will continue to grow. “The global top 1% income share could increase from nearly 20% today to more than 24% by 2050,” the report said. “In which case the global bottom 50% share could fall from 10% to less than 9%.”

However, the economists said increasing inequality was “not inevitable” if countries acted to bring in progressive income tax. “It not only reduces post-tax inequality, it shrinks pre-tax inequality by discouraging top earners from capturing higher shares of growth via aggressive bargaining for higher pay.”

The authors said taxation alone was not enough to tackle the problem as the wealthy were best placed to avoid and evade tax, as shown by the recent Paradise Papers investigation. The report said a tenth of the world’s wealth was held in tax havens.

 

[hand2handking]

We Absolutely Could Give Reparations To Black People. Here’s How.
A step-by-step guide to paying the descendants of enslaved Africans.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/reparations-black-americans-slavery_us_56c4dfa9e4b08ffac1276bd7

Let’s say you’re driving down the street and someone rear-ends you. You get out of your car to assess the damage. The person who hit your vehicle gets out of his car, apologizes for the damage and calls his insurance company. Eventually, you receive a check for the harm done.

Now, let’s say that for years, if not generations, your family and families like yours have been damaged by your country’s political and economic system — by law and widespread practice, with the intent of benefiting families not like yours — then the checks for the harm done would be called reparations.

Beginning with more than two centuries of slavery, black Americans have been deliberately abused by their own nation. It’s time to pay restitution.

Black activists and intellectuals have been making that point with increasing volume over the last few years, turning what was an obscure thought problem into a political issue. The question of reparations has even entered into the Democratic primary, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) struggling to explain to black voters why he has built such a strong social justice platform on every issue but this one.

Sanders was put on the spot last month when a reporter asked him if he would support reparations as president. “No, I don’t think so,” he said, describing the likelihood of congressional passage as “nil” — as if those odds normally stopped him.

Every year since 1989, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has introduced the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act. As the name indicates, H.R. 40 does not require reparations. It simply calls for comprehensive research into the nature and financial impact of African enslavement as well as the ills inflicted on black people during the Jim Crow era. Then, remedies can be suggested.

Every year, the bill stalls.

Fifty-nine percent of black Americans think that the descendants of enslaved Africans deserve reparations, according to a June 2014 HuffPost/YouGov poll. Sixty-three percent of black folks support targeted education and job training programs for the descendants of slaves.

Most other Americans still aren’t listening.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most prominent voice now pushing reparations, laid out why black Americans deserve even more than repayment for slavery in a sweeping 2014 article, “The Case for Reparations.” The exploitation didn’t stop with the Emancipation Proclamation, so any restitution must reckon with the discrimination that followed and deal with the living victims of these ills.

Last month, Coates criticized Sanders’ decision to shy away from the issue:

If not even an avowed socialist can be bothered to grapple with reparations, if the question really is that far beyond the pale, if Bernie Sanders truly believes that victims of the Tulsa pogrom deserved nothing, that the victims of contract lending deserve nothing, that the victims of debt peonage deserve nothing, that that political plunder of black communities entitle them to nothing, if this is the candidate of the radical left — then expect white supremacy in America to endure well beyond our lifetimes and lifetimes of our children.

Let’s change that — let’s bother to have the hard but necessary discussion of what black Americans are owed for what was taken from them. If reparations ever come, what would they look like?

1. Let’s Figure Out Who Deserves Reparations And Why

Rubin Stacy was lynched in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in July 1935.GETTY IMAGES
Simply put, reparations are due to the millions of black Americans whose families have endured generations of discrimination in the United States. Most black Americans count among their ancestors people who endured chattel slavery, the ultimate denial of an individual’s humanity.

William Darity, a public policy professor at Duke University who has studied reparations extensively, proposes two specific requirements for eligibility to receive a payout. First, at least 10 years before the onset of a reparations program, an individual must have self-identified on a census form or other formal document as black, African-American, colored or Negro. Second, each individual must provide proof of an ancestor who was enslaved in the U.S.

Why does this huge group of Americans deserve restitution? Because starting with slavery, the damage done was institutionalized and inescapable. Darity has created a “Bill of Particulars,” including such specific grievances as:

• The extended history of government-sanctioned segregation and other forms of racial oppression in the Jim Crow era
• Terror campaigns launched by the Ku Klux Klan, often in collaboration with government officials
• Post-WWII public policies that were designed to provide upward mobility for Americans but in practice did not include black people (such as the GI Bill)
• Redlining, which made home ownership a possibility for white people while shutting out black folks
• Ongoing discrimination against and associated denigration of black lives

Eric J. Miller, a professor at Loyola Law School, said the case for reparations starts with an honest accounting of the racism that black people have experienced. “Part of our history is our grandparents participating in these acts of terrible violence [against black people],” he said. “But people don’t want to acknowledge the horror of what they engaged in.”

White America built its wealth on those generations of legal and physical violence — a fact most white people today would rather not dwell on.

“People don’t want to believe that they got their gains in an ill manner,” Miller said. “The cognitive dissonance of learning that your property is got and preserved on the back of the misery of others is not an incredibly nice thing to live with. So people would rather discount it.”

But when the harm is great enough, it’s not enough to say you’re sorry and try to fix problems going forward. Germany made an effort to repay the Jews for the horrors of the Holocaust. Japanese-Americans were repaid for suffering in internment camps. Black Americans deserve no less.

This leads us to our next step.

2. So How Much Are We Talking About, Exactly?

No one really knows. (That’s part of the reason Rep. Conyers wants a commission.) But there are some numbers out there.

A 1990 study by Richard Sutch and Roger Ransom, professors at the University of California, Riverside, estimated that industries fueled by slave labor, like cotton and tobacco, made profits of $3.4 billion (in 1983 dollars) between 1806 and 1860. Darity has estimated that if you throw in an annual interest rate of 5 percent, that number jumps to $9.12 billion (in 2008 dollars).

Larry Neal, an economist at the University of Illinois, came up with an even higher number. His studies concluded that $1.4 trillion (in 1983 dollars) was owed to the descendants of enslaved Africans based on the compensation their ancestors did not receive for their labor between 1620 and 1840. With interest, that amounts to $6.4 trillion in 2014, according to The New Republic.

None of these numbers account for the physical and sexual violence inflicted upon enslaved Africans.

“I don’t think we really grasp quite how financially lucrative and important slavery was in America — including things like the illegal slave trade that continued after the Constitution forbade it,” Miller said.

The figures mentioned also don’t include compensation for housing segregation and other forms of racial discrimination in the years since slavery ended. Nor do they factor in the extent to which American industries have profited — and continue to profit — fromexploiting low-income workers, many of whom are black.

How do we measure those kinds of losses — the chance at upward economic mobility that was stolen from millions? One way is to compare property values between majority-black neighborhoods that were redlined and white neighborhoods that were not — or property values within a single neighborhood before and after redlining.

Another way is to gauge lost educational opportunities. Good public schools are usually found in majority-white suburbs where people pay higher property taxes. Poorly performing schools are found more often in economically disenfranchised areas with larger black populations.

Bottom line: reparations are going to cost a lot of money. But America is a wealthy nation that can afford to pay for its misdeeds. For perspective, consider that in fiscal year 2014, the U.S. government spent $3.5 trillion, which is only 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product of about $17.5 trillion.

3. Now, How Would This Money Be Paid Out?

We could just divvy it up among eligible black Americans, but reparations advocates propose a more institution-based approach.

Darity suggests that financial payouts be divided between individual recipients and a variety of endowments set up to develop the economic strength of the black community. His model is inspired by Germany’s restitution payments both to victims of the Holocaust and to Israel.

The advantage of individual payouts, Miller notes, is that they maximize autonomy. But much of that money would land back in the white-dominated economy and “the one percent would become one percentier,” he said.

Hence the value of using a portion of reparation funds to create programs geared toward aiding black people in combating the damage of racism.

“One could think of Black America as being a community that could benefit from development investments,” Darity said. “So you could have a trust fund that was set up to finance higher education, [another] to create greater opportunities for opening one’s own business, and so forth.”

Darity envisions the U.S. government establishing and overseeing these programs. Although it might seem counter-intuitive to give this power to the very institution that committed so much discrimination against black people, the professor said the government should be heavily involved precisely because of that history.

“The U.S. government is the responsible party because of the entire legal apparatus that supported both slavery and, subsequently, Jim Crow and continues to permit ongoing discrimination,” he said.

Miller emphasizes that the reparations-funded programs must be fully accessible to and controlled by members of the black community.

“Unless institutions exist that are controlled by and accountable to the community, then the community will always be dominated, or prone to domination, by others,” he said.

4. But Will This Ever Happen?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Congress hasn’t even managed to pass H.R. 40. And that’s really no surprise since most Americans are not pushing their lawmakers to do anything on this issue.

YOUGOV.COM
Only 6 percent of white Americans support cash payments to the descendants of enslaved Africans, according to that HuffPost/YouGov poll. Only 19 percent favor reparations in the form of education and jobs programs, while 50 percent of whites don’t even believe that slavery is one of the reasons why black Americans have lower levels of wealth.

They’re wrong. “The connection between slavery and the pillars of American society are tight. There are no pillars of American society without slavery,” Miller said. “You might think about that even literally. The columns of the White House and the Congress were built by slave labor.”

To deflect discussing why reparations are needed, some people request a developed strategy for reparations or a detailed legislative proposal before they’ll contemplate the issue. The suggestion, in itself, fits into a tired line of thinking that victims of injustice must explain themselves fully — and convincingly — to the system that harmed them before any recognition is provided.

“These demands always struck me as akin to demanding a payment plan for something one has neither decided one needs nor is willing to purchase,” Coates wrote. As he has tirelessly reiterated, we must start with a robust discussion on why reparations are owed to black Americans.

If anything, the expansive U.S. history of anti-black racism is the deterrent — but letting that deter us today is itself anti-black.

This returns us to the criticism of Sanders. The symbolism of specifically calling for reparations matters. A white presidential candidate who vows only to fight police violence and other modern ills affecting black Americans is essentially urging that we put a bandage on past injustices without true reconciliation.

If we don’t look back and reckon with what has been done, there is no moving forward.

 

[hand2handking]

Dem. Presidential Candidate Calls for $100B in Slavery Reparations
“We need a moral and spiritual awakening in the country.”

Marianne Williamson at the 2010 BraveHeart Awards, Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel, Century City, CA (s_bukley / Shutterstock.com)

https://www.ebony.com/news/dem-presidential-candidate-calls-100b-slavery-reparations/

Marianne Williamson, a best-selling author. spiritual teacher and activist, announced her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination on Monday. On Thursday, she sat down on CNN’s New Day, where she said the United States needs to pay African-Americans reparations for slavery.

“We need a moral and spiritual awakening in the country,” the candidate stated. “Nothing short of that is adequate to really fundamentally change the patterns of our political dysfunction.”

Her platform includes proposal for free public college, universal health care, Medicare for all, a green new deal and $10 billion per year for slavery reparationsto be paid over the course of a decade.

“I believe $100 billion given to a council to apply this money to economic projects and educational projects of renewal for that population is simply a debt to be paid,” Williamson said.

Watch the full interview below to hear what she believes to be the “deeper truths” about what has failed the American people.

 

[tay1]

The figure is off but it's a start. At least the conversation is there.

 

[htg designs]

Im wit it. I hope she knows this just guarantees an L tho

 

[nawghtyhare]

So how much would I get

 

[sharpshooter718]

THAT NUMBER NEEDS TO BE ABOUT 1 QUADRILLION

 

[sooperhooper]

History of this country definitely needs to be addressed. Got people out here like Tomy Lauren who think her ancestors founded the country.

 

[hand2handking]

Netflix Made $845 Million In Profits And Paid $0 In Taxes Under New GOP Tax Law


Netflix Made $845 Million In Profits And Paid $0 In Taxes Under New GOP Tax Law

Chances are you, and everyone else you know, paid more in taxes than Netflix did thanks to the Republican tax plan.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports:

“The popular video streaming service Netflix posted its largest-ever U.S. profit in 2018—$845 million—on which it didn’t pay a dime in federal or state income taxes. In fact, the company reported a $22 million federal tax rebate.

After a year of speculation and spin, the public is getting its first hard look at how corporate tax law changes under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act affected the tax-paying habits of corporations. The law sharply reduced the federal corporate rate, expanded some tax breaks and curtailed others. The new tax law took effect at the beginning of 2018, which means that companies are just now closing the books on their first full year under the new rules.

If Netflix’s earnings report is any indication, not much has changed. Many corporations are still able to exploit loopholes and avoid paying the statutory tax rate—only now, that rate is substantially lower.

Netflix’s tax avoidance should come as no surprise to those who followed the debate leading up to the passage of the new tax law: A 2017 ITEP report identified Netflix as one of 100 profitable Fortune 500 corporations that paid a 0 percent federal income tax rate in at least one profitable year between 2008 and 2015. In fact, Netflix did it twice, and paid an average tax rate of 13.6 percent over the eight-year period, meaning that the company sheltered more than half of its profits from the 35 percent federal income tax rate in effect at the time.

Leading up to the 2017 tax battle, the hope of reformers was that Congress would take a fiscally responsible approach and weed out loopholes that made Netflix’s tax avoidance possible. Instead, GOP leaders who championed the law and President Trump chose to focus on cutting the corporate tax rate as far as possible—from 35 to 21 percent—while leaving in place special breaks and loopholes.”

For the rest of the article, visit the ITEP here.

 

[hand2handking]

The Racial Wealth Gap Could Become a 2020 Litmus Test
With black votes in the balance in the Democratic primary, would-be candidates are already developing aggressive policies to target inequality.

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS / AP
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/new-litmus-test-2020-racial-wealth-gap/579823/

When Senator Elizabeth Warren announced that she’d formed a presidential exploratory committee, she hit all the populist notes that have become standard in her career, addressing a besieged middle class that’s constantly undermined by powerful corporate and political elites. “In our country, if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to take care of yourself and the people you love,” the senator said in her video announcement. But the second part of her message stood out for the way she acknowledged how many Americans, namely people of color, are barred from reaching the middle class. “Families of color face a path that is steeper and rockier, a path made even harder by the impact of generations of discrimination,” Warren said.

As the first high-profile politician to announce a presidential run, Warren is the pacesetter for the 2020 Democratic primary. Her prominent mention of the racial wealth gap signals that it could become a defining issue in the race, especially at a time when people of color matter more than ever to the Democratic Party’s chances. With surging black and Latino voting power offering new pathways to victory in 2020, candidates might feel more compelled than in past races to offer bold strategies to fix the enduring economic legacy of white supremacy.

The racial wealth gap is a straightforward issue that almost nobody can agree on how to fix. White people have way more money than everyone else, and it’s not just income: Although there are persistent differences in wage, salary, and benefits between races, much of the wealth gap is attributable to real estate and other individual assets, as well as disparities in familial assets and incomes. As described in a graphic in Warren’s video, and confirmed by recent studies of economic data, the median wealth of white families sits north of $100,000, while black median wealth hovers around $10,000, and for many families in poverty might even be negative.* And while the differences between white and black Americans are the most extreme, other underrepresented minority groups also face vast deficits relative to white families.

The cause of those wealth gaps is relatively straightforward, too: racism. According to Sandy Darity, a Duke University economist and one of the country’s leading researchers on race, wealth inequality, and economic policy, the enduring black-white disparities trace all the way back to slavery. “I would start with the failure to grant the formerly enslaved the 40 acres and a mule that they were promised,” Darity told me. “Had those land grants been made, I think we would be talking about a very different America from the one that we are experiencing now.” To that history, Darity adds the theft of black life and wealth by lynch mobs and perpetrators of more common acts of violence.

He and other economists also point to the racism baked into the policies that built the American middle class over the past century, including the New Deal and the G.I. Bill, and joint public-private ventures in racism, such as school segregation and housing discrimination. All are ways in which people of color were carved out of massive transfers of wealth that their white peers used to buy homes and pass money down to their children, exacerbating disparities over time.

What to do about those disparities? That’s another matter altogether. Legislative proposals include variations on standard progressive-policy ideas, such as universal basic income, cash transfers, housing vouchers, child savings accounts, tax breaks, a federal jobs guarantee, and free college tuition. Many of these policies are updates on ideas found in the Freedom Budget, a sweeping and ambitious set of anti-poverty policies first proposed by Martin Luther King Jr., the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and the civil-rights organizer Bayard Rustin in 1966, with the help of dozens of economists.

Warren’s preferred fix during her tenure in the Senate has been increasing universal access to affordable, equitable housing and homeownership, and her introduction in September of the $450 billion American Housing and Economic Mobility Act teed up the issue for her on the campaign trail. As my colleague Madeleine Carlisle has written, that legislation “is perhaps the most far-reaching assault on housing segregation since the 1968 Fair Housing Act.” It would use revenues from higher estate taxes—restored to levels before a dramatic tax cut went into effect in 2010—to fund a massive expansion of federally subsidized housing.

To specifically combat the racial wealth gap, the legislation would provide grants for certain first-time home buyers in low-income neighborhoods that have been marked by redlining, a housing-segregation tactic that was common over the past 50 years. It would also aid homeowners who owe more on their mortgage than the value of their home, a group that a recent report from theleft-leaning Center for American Progress indicates is significantly more likely to include families of color than white families. In October, Darrick Hamilton, an economist who collaborates frequently with Darity, and Mehrsa Baradaran, a University of Georgia law professor who wrote The Color of Money, one of the most influential recent works on the racial wealth gap, praised Warren’s plan, saying it “has the potential to lift historically marginalized communities by reversing more than a century of capital exclusion and housing discrimination.”

But Warren’s proposal isn’t the only one circulating among Democratic heavyweights who might soon enter the 2020 field. One policy seems especially popular: a federal jobs guarantee. According to Capitol Hill aides I talked to, Darity and Hamilton’s work on the potential effect of a jobs guarantee on the wealth gap has caught some offices’ attention. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker introduced legislation in April to create a 15-city pilot program for jobs guarantees, a plan that Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Warren herself co-sponsored. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, too, has talked about proposing a federal jobs guarantee.

Booker in particular has been active in proposing new economic-justice policy in the Senate, and has featured the racial wealth gap prominently in speeches over the past year. In October, he introduced the American Opportunity Accounts Act, which would, like Warren’s housing program, use a restored estate tax as funding. Under the act, all American children would receive a $1,000 deposit in an interest-accruing account upon the occasion of their birth. The account would be untouchable until they reach adulthood, and it would grow by up to $2,000 each year, with the amount dependent on their family’s income.

A Booker aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the office’s internal policy agenda, told me that this program would target the racial wealth gap by targeting poverty. Because black and Latino children are considerably more likely to be poor, or near-poor, than their white counterparts, they would, on average, receive more money. According to the aide, the Booker team estimates that the average amount white children would earn by their 18th birthday would be roughly $14,000 to $15,000. For black children, that amount would be about $28,000, and for Latino children, about $26,000.

It is still unclear whether the Democrats’ policies would do enough to fix the underlying gap. Darity noted, for example, that Warren’s plan to provide housing grants could help the wrong people: Development in the designated areas could actually lead to gentrifiers receiving grants, instead of families who felt the effects of redlining. “You will not necessarily provide the benefit to those who were victimized by the process by going this route,” Darity told me.

Reparations is perhaps the one big policy idea for closing the racial wealth gap that hasn’t gotten traction somewhere in the 2020 Democratic primary field, and it’s the main policy that its supporters say would provide direct benefit to people based on victimization. “I have to say that the policies that have received the [most enthusiastic] reception are those that I might describe as universal policies that are not race-specific, but they are race-conscious,” Darity said, including both Warren’s housing grants and Booker’s baby bonds in his assessment. “What we haven’t gotten to is the point at which the most significant race-specific policy has become an object of legislative design, which is a program of reparations for black Americans.”

The only real champion of reparations in Congress was former RepresentativeJohn Conyers of Michigan, who left Capitol Hill amid sexual-harassment allegations in late 2017. But Darity thinks the spread and acceptance of racial-equity language, such as Warren’s and Booker’s, even in universal policy could begin warming Americans up to the idea of reparations as they think of ways to fix or advance affirmative action, a policy that’s been under attack by several federal lawsuits over the past five years. Of course, that retreat could also mean the opposite: that the door is closing on public and political will to specifically address the ways government and private actors victimize people of color.

Voters seem to be driving the shifts in the Democratic Party’s thinking on economic- and racial-justice issues. It wasn’t so long ago that former President Bill Clinton led a New Democrat movement that slashed the safety net and expanded mass incarceration. That movement responded to racist tropes about black people on welfare and relied on a fundamentally conservative argument that individuals’ choices influenced most of the wealth gap. President Barack Obama’s two terms in office differed in many ways from Clinton’s; his reversals of some welfare work requirements and his passage of the Affordable Care Act certainly acted as racially conscious economic stimuli. But much of his administration’s proactive policy on the wealth gap focused on individualfinancial literacy and capability. Many of the policies seriously being considered right now would have been regarded as farce during his presidency.

But the landscape has shifted in the past two years, in part because of the growing political power of black and Latino voters. This change was illustrated most vividly in the 2018 midterms. “We knew that there were going to be some candidates that would think about [the racial wealth gap] and, depending on their beliefs or personal backgrounds, they may include race as part of their overall economic message,” says Akunna Cook, the founding executive director of the Black Economic Alliance, a political action committee that funds candidates who pledge to make narrowing the racial wealth gap part of their platform. But economic justice was brought “to the forefront.”

In what Cook describes as a surprise even to her group, a large cohort of Democrats in 2018 made the racial wealth gap part of their message, including Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum in the Georgia and Florida gubernatorial races, Beto O’Rourke and Mike Espy in the Texas and Mississippi Senate races, and Antonio Delgado, Lauren Underwood, and Joe Cunningham in their House races. With record-breaking black turnout in 2018, the election, in part, showed that platforms emphasizing the racial wealth gap could motivate voters.


That’s perhaps especially true in red states—including Georgia and Mississippi—where Democrats’ better-than-usual performances were based on a new strategy of mobilizing black voters and unlikely voters. Those successes have given the Democratic presidential nominee new pathways to 270 electors in 2020. “That opened a lot of people’s eyes to the fact that we have a lot of states and districts that have been ignored for a long time, and the black vote could be impactful,” Cook told me.

A strategy that’s centered on economic and racial justice and aimed at disengaged voters could pay even more dividends in a presidential primary than a general election. In the Democratic primary, the electorate is blacker and more progressive than the broader electorate, and is heavily focused in the South.

The genuine movement in this policy area won't automatically translate to a reduction of the wealth gap. Proposed policies and campaign promises are not the same as actual governing, and the Democratic nominee will need to first beat Donald Trump and then persuade Congress to execute their agenda—difficult tasks, to say the least. There’s also an alternative path the Democratic Party could still take: targeting older white swing voters without taking up racial justice as a serious mandate.

Economists and politicians still have plenty of arguing left to do about which policies would be most efficient at boosting minority wealth (and, among some, arguments about whether it’s even the government’s business). There will always be opportunities for discrimination and adverse implementation of universal policies, too. And, as of yet, nothing en vogue targets the sin of white supremacy head on.

But, as Warren said in a 2015 address, there is plenty of agitation, among voters and politicians alike, for “less talk and more action about reducing unemployment, ending wage stagnation, and closing the income gap between white and nonwhite workers.” After 400 years of heading in the wrong direction, any movement the other way would be big news.

*This article originally misstated the median wealth of black families. We regret the error.

 

[KHUFU]

Cause I remember
It was four hundred years or more
Since you came to crucify
And they were taken far away from home

There were promises of paradise
But if they had been told that day
That they would be sold this way
To satisfy the souls of chosen men

See I had to look carefully
At the shame of my ancestry
To redefine the story line again

Hey, if I was taken for a day and shown another way
Now every child can learn a different thing
See I tried a million times but I had to change my mind
Oh, sadness was the best thing I can bring

On the inside he was dead and this is what he said
As he took away the bloom above the clouds
Oh, superiority was clearly meant to be
So destiny will manifest in time

So where has love all gone?
A troubled trail of tears will tell the take
Of how I was put down where I don't belong
Woman, child and man for sale

For ethical slavery is just an absurdity
How can you be alive when you are dead?
With these chains of hypocrisy, the shame of my ancestry
Forever stained by blood in which you tread

Hey, if I was taken for a day and shown another way
Oh, now every child can learn a different thing
See I tried a million times but I had to change my mind
Oh, sadness was the best thing I can bring

On the inside he was dead, oh, and this is what he said
As he took away the bloom above the clouds
Oh, superiority was clearly meant to be
So destiny will manifest in time

So where has the love all gone
So wanna know where, wanna know where
Wanna know where, wanna know where
Somebody tell me where the love has all gone



Read more: Jamiroquai - Manifest Destiny Lyrics | MetroLyrics

 

[$tatus $ymbol]

Good to see you back b hand2handking