By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
Amerikkkans — and even Americans — who don’t want to deal with the issue are fond of insisting that Barack Obama’s election as United States president in 2008 proves that the “home of the brave, land of the free” is now a post-racist society.
Well, the latest statistics on the average wealth of Americans — and Amerikkkans — broken down by race, are now out and they paint a very different picture.
The average African-American (Black) man, woman or child is, of course, at the bottom of the heap with an average net worth of about $5,000. (I wonder how much lower this average would be if the 2,000-3,000 African-Americans who have made it to the top levels of sports and entertainment were subtracted from the equation.)
Next come Latino-Americans (Hispanics). One might have expected that with the language barrier so many face and with so many illegal immigrants having to work for less than the minimum wage, that their average wealth would be no greater than the average net worth of African-Americans. But this is not the case. In fact, the average Latino-American man, woman and child is about 50% wealthier than his or her average African-American counterpart, with an average net worth of about $7,600.
Next come Asian-Americans. Although they haven’t been in the U.S. anywhere near as long as the African-Americans or the Latino-Americans, their average net worth is almost double that of Latino-Americans and almost three times that of African-Americans.
At the top of the heap, of course, are European-Americans (Whites). The average European-American man, woman and child is worth about $111,000. That’s almost nine times as much as the average Asian-American, more than 14 times as much as the average Latino-American and about 22 times as much as the average African-American.
There is no separate breakout for the average net worth of American Indians, who might actually be even worse off than the average African-American.
The glaring racial economic inequalities that persist in Amerikkka even to this day are no accident. Nor are they a reflection of innate natural physical and/or intellectual inequalities among the various so-called races. They are the persistent and inevitable consequence of a history of one race — the European-American race — or, more particularly, the Top One Percent of the European-American race, exploiting and preying upon the other races that have shared this continuing history.
It is an inescapable reality that Amerikkka’s status as a global power and empire, was attained largely as a consequence of the genocide committed by European-Americans against so-called American Indians and the brutal slavery imposed on early African-Americans. And it was these horrific crimes against humanity — committed over the course of three centuries — that nurtured the evolution of the corporate capitalist jungle that is today ripping the heart out of Amerikkka and the world. The passage of time and the enactment of a variety of laws and social programs have done little to alleviate the still-festering wounds of the savage dehumanization visited upon both African-Americans and so-called American Indians.
Nothing short of a massive, protracted program of both Black Reparations and American Indian Reparations will ever truly heal the wounds, ensure equality of opportunity or allow the various American — and Amerikkkan — races to truly become one.