Submitted 14 hours ago by PixelNomad@sopuli.xyz to [deleted]
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?
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.
Black people of wealth maintain that wealth by exploiting labor.
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...
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.
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.
mech@feddit.org 14 hours ago
Racist ideology is a tool used by the rich to divide the poor.
If you’re rich enough, you’re one of the “good ones”.
FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I don’t think this is true most of the time.
In the case of black people in america though, we see that most of the hate towards them is via ideas of them being criminals or poor and lazy. If you’re rich, you circumvent all three of these things. (Because rich people apparently can’t be criminals heh) Whoopee!
I think rich people generally don’t start shit with their neighbours or social circle, rather if they do it’s more like passive aggresive shit that all neighbours are made to suffer equally. So that might be part of it.