There are wealthy Black, Hispanic, Asian, etc. families that have been multimillionaires for a few generations (maybe even billionaires), but my question is: how did these Black and other families of color maintain their wealth through racist times?
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Money transcended race or…
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They were murdered and white people stole their wealth.
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Take a wild guess
It’s money
Racism is largely a tool BY the wealthy elite to divide the poorer class. If you are in the elite, you don’t participate in it.
I mean, you are technically still benefiting from the racist systems set up by the elite even if you are working class, so you’re still technically (unwittingly) participating in it. But you can (and should) still do your best to not actively advance the system.
I would say they participate in it the most, since it helps maintain their gluttony.
Money can be a great whitewasher.
Also you have the means to easily move out of a country and into a more pleasant clime
Black people of wealth maintain that wealth by exploiting labor.
So do whites, what’s the point?
This is a super broad topic and is going to vary a lot by who the exploited and exploiters were and what type of society was present. I’m going to stick to Africa and the US white/black relations because that’s what I am the most read up on though I am nowhere near a historian.
Generally, POC got to keep their wealth or amass it if they were performed some sort of function for whites or were not perceived as a threat which would invite confiscation. Sometimes Europeans were not interested in settling a territory but were interested in extracting capital from that territory. In such cases, Europeans would rely on a few natives to do their bidding and those natives may have even had some administrative role. Think the Dahomey raiders of Benin, the Tutsi of Rwanda, Americo-Liberians (although technically not natives). There were those like the Ethiopians who resisted conquest and colonization altogether but I don’t know much about them.
When Europeans settled/colonized a land and thus extracted resources and administered that land themselves, IMO those POC’s best bet to maintain wealth was to not draw white ire. In the US, black people tended to do okay in DC as there was some access to well paying federal jobs and for the most part the federal government prevented race riots in the capital city. To this day, the DC and broader DC/Maryland/Virginia area tends to hold more successful black people. There were some black enclaves in Wilmington, NC (“The place for black opportunity”); Tulsa, OK(Black Wall Street); Atlanta (Sweet Auburn) and elsewhere where black people were well off financially. They made money through commerce with other black people until that white ire befell them. The Wilmington and Tulsa Riots destroyed those black communities. Atlanta had a race riot as well though successful black communities persist there.
Segregation actually helped with that. While most communities were exploited and failed, some took off.
Or got bombed to hell
Tulsa and Wilmington are two examples of reactions to black people starting to build themselves up, as per the American Dream.
And as an NC grade school student, do you think Wilmington was mentioned at all in any history class? But we learned all the governor names…
Don’t forget the “war on drugs.”
Oh yeah, classic Nixon. Afterwards repeated and finetuned by Nancy and Ronald McDonald
Why would you assume they wouldn’t?
You know that there are countries where the majority of people are Black (ie all of Africa…), or majority of people are Asian (ie all of Asia…), or majority of people are Hispanic (ie LatAm… not to mention that “Hispanic” is not a racial category in LatAm—there are white settlers, indigenous people, Black people, etc in LatAm too), right? You know that non-white countries also colonise and plunder, and may have colonial wealth from that (eg Japan)? You know that inequality and class exist in these countries and some families will be wealthy for the same reason that families are wealthy in majority-white countries? And you know that white supremacy is not the only racist system in the world—in a place where Hindu nationalism is the order of the day, for example, being a brown Hindu is not going to cause you disadvantages in society.
“Old money” vs. “New money” is a particularly American concept, though.
Nah
Yuh
I don’t think I’m familiar with the term. If it just means inherited wealth, though, I’m afraid that’s a thing everywhere there’s private property.
