I guess I'm out of touch.

According to Wikipedia, there are 7 $billionaires with known sub-Saharan ancestry.

Bob Johnson and Oprah are two obvious ones. Bob Johnson's ex-wife got about $500M in the divorce

 

I think you're making a big mistake with this line of reasoning.

Every black player in the NBA (and NFL, and MLB, etc.) making $1M or more in salary/season is in the top 1% of earners in the nation.

Sports isn't the only way people make $1M/year either. There are plenty of black lawyers and doctors and businessmen who are in that class.

 

Though I didn't vote for Obama, I'm happy in many ways that he won (and have said so all along). The biggest reason is exactly because of his race and what it means for race relations and hopefully another dagger to the heart of racism itself.

Maxie, you're a good guy and all that, but you are out of touch. I appreciate and respect the losses to your family going back thousands of years, but all that misses the point here.

When John Adams first moved into the White House (he was the first president to live there), it was still under construction. The construction workers were black slaves. He was served by black slave servants. And Adams was an abolitionist at the time!

The White House is symbolic of how white culture in the US has been built on the backs of blacks (and Chinese and others, but mostly blacks) and slavery. And later, institutionalized racism in the form of laws and rules meant to keep blacks as a source of cheap labor and without the full rights of citizenship or even guests of the nation that everyone else enjoyed. It was OK to work AT the White House as a maid or cook, but not aspire to live there as president. Until the last 20 years or so.

Run BJM's post couldn't begin to describe how institutionalized racism affects black people to this day. The most obvious forms of it are gone (black drinking fountains), it's true. But those racist assholes didn't go away by fiat or declaration by the Supreme Court, and found ways to stick it to black people in other ways. Like fucking up the schools in black neighborhoods, or putting toxic waste dumps in those neighborhoods, or the police patroling those areas making ridiculous traffic stops to effectively hassle people for the color of their skin, or even worse there are stories and lawsuits won by black people over police outright torturing black people after arrest. Roddney King wasn't that long ago. You do realize that until the 1960s (in my lifetime!), black people were systematically denied the right to vote with poll taxes and tests? How about Vietnam, where young men were drafted to serve in a 500,000 man force over there, and blacks served in ridiculous %'s/numbers because they didn't have the societal positions to get out of serving?

My experiences/stories are many on this subject. I'll make this post longer by adding a couple.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the govt. built housing for low income people. Nice shiney new buildings with grinning white guys (like DEMOCRAT mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago) inviting black people to move in. Once the people did move in, they built freeways around those areas to keep the black people in. The economies of those areas outright sucked because the people were poor and nobody with money would build a business there. Then the govt. let those once fine buildings run down - to the point the paint peeled off the walls and the elevators didn't work so people had to climb 10 flights of stairs with their groceries. These places existed until the 1990s and even in this century - not so long ago indeed. Think Chicago (a northern city) is the only place? Think of South Central or East Palo Alto in California (or even Oakland with the bay as a natural barrier for separation) or Detroit or Cleveland or many other NORTHERN cities.

...

In the 1960s, there was a major migration of black people from the south to the northern cities. I was living on the South Side at the time, in Obama's neighborhood in fact. As black people moved into the neighborhoods, white people fled for the suburbs, taking their money and businesses with them. What was left was some of the most awesome architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright stuff) and people too poor to maintain it. Whtie people go to the banks and get loans to form businesses or buy homes. In my neighborhood, the banks red lined the place and refused to give (black people!) these kinds of loans. The homes declined to the point many were boarded up, dead cars on the lawns up on blocks, landscaping gone to ruin, and those sorts of things.

Things turned around for the people there when they stopped looking to govt. for help and took their own destinies in their own hands. They pooled their money and bought the corner/local banks. The banks gave out loans to the people and businesses formed. The boards came off the windows and the houses were restored. The cars on blocks were removed, the landscaping redone to its once fine look. AND THEN, white people started to move back!

...

If there's a downside to Obama's election, it's truly that it's not about race. He should be appointing black people to every prominent post in his administration, but he won't. He's a tool of the party, unfortunately, which is the biggest reason I could not vote for him. If he did appoint all black people to those positions, it wouldn't be affirmative action - he has the right to appoint who he wants. What it would do is create a new generation of Washington power brokers where there is no glass ceiling for black people.

My $.02.

 

Many of the very richest people founded internet companies or high tech companies in the past few years. The Walton family has several on the list of top 10. There are several financial moguls on the list as well.

Oprah is probably the richest african american at $2.5B, certainly in the top 100.

 

Expanding wealth takes time. Oprah's gone from $200M to $2.5B in a good amount of time.

 

(This is a post for another site, but it looks like it could go here)

Congratulations to the President-elect.

I sincerely hope he is the man he said he was (and is going to be) from the campaign, and not from his past. I sincerely hope he changed his stripes, and didn't just dupe the American people with a great sales pitch of a campaign.

I'm trying really hard not to play the race card, but it saddens me that 92% of black voters voted for Obama. I mean, is there ANY group of people that unanimously agree with the principles and character of a candidate? Even the heavily-Obama "youth vote" was "only" 70/30. Women voted ~65% for Hillary in the primary season. Maybe now that the excitement of "first black president" ceiling has happened, we can go back to voting for the best candidate (which is fine if you think Obama is the best candidate), not the one who looks most like you. That's racism. It's not because he went through the "perils of slavery". He's a first-generation bi-racial Kenyan. And I'm kind of with Maxie on this one, which doesn't seem too popular. Any other white guys in here been to the Apollo? I thought it'd be cool to go w/a bunch of my black Navy buddies during Fleet Week. Show was funny as heck, for the most part. Though the first 2 minutes of each comedy routine were usually set aside to make fun of the white guy in the audience. It was ok, though, not like being a Blazer fan at Staples.

Many of you know I really like collecting "experiences". For instance, I lived with 3 black guys in South Carolina at one of my duty stations. I ended up watching a lot of BET. One was a special on the use of the N-word (circa 2002). The correspondents were asking rappers/entertainers why they still used the n-word, while denouncing when guys like Eminem used it. They would, to a man/woman, say that it's a word for black people to use, b/c others didn't know anything about slavery. When asked about Jennifer Lopez, who had just used it in one of her songs, the reply was "Oh, for her it's ok. She's Puerto Rican. That's basically a Mexican N*****".

We have, in the military, many generals and admirals who are minorities (to include Asian-Americans, black people of all nationalities -- including Ricky Williams' cousin Mel -- women, Muslims, etc). Do a lot of minorities say "I'm joining the military, because people who look like me have risen to the pinnacle of the profession?" That's not been my experience...maybe someone can enlighten me. We have, in my office at an Aerospace Engineering firm, many minorities making a lot more money than those who just went on strike, but relatively few African-Americans. Is it because of our hiring practices? Or that there aren't as many African-Americans getting engineering degrees as Asian-Americans, Native Americans, Indians or women? Is it racist that most of the hourly labor at the company is comprised of lower-middle-class white people?

Maybe I've been lucky. I've been in the military since i was 2. I've lived in many more varied places than Oregon and Washington, to include the Northeast, deep south, California, Northwest, Native American reservations, Europe, Japan and Africa. I've lived alongside about every aspect of society other than big-city inner cities (never in LA, Chicago, NYC). I don't consciously treat people differently based on skin, sexuality or gender. I do treat people differently based on their merits. For instance, contracts person that didn't do a good job for me wasn't used anymore, so I went to another contracts person to get better results. It wasn't because he was a man and she was a woman. It was because one did the job and one didn't.

I mean, would it be right if I voted McCain just because "he was white?"

That said, I hope the President-elect does what he said he would. I hope that his government will I have to figure out how to get into government.