At $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) in 2016.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/
In other countries social status is less stratified by race. In the United States our social caste system was set up around the concept of race and racism. So in America oftentimes when you say it is an extension of wealth you are often synonymously referring to race. The United States is very backward compared to Europe. Other more evolved countries should keep this in mind when viewing American issues on a world stage. African Americans are akin to the Jews of Germany except in our case the government has never apologized or even recognized their wrongdoing. We still interact with Nazis on a daily basis at our jobs and in our schools. Nazis are still responsible for educating Jewish and German children in our schools.
(Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Eine Lehrerin verabschiedet ihre Schulkinder mit dem Hitler-Gruss. Photographie. Um 1933.]
Nazis work at our financial institutions. Nazis still work in our government.
I’m sorry to have to report this fact to the outside world but spend some time as a black person in the Southern United States. I had white American teachers bullying me from the time I was six years old.
Mostly adult white women. The teacher in question actually refused to let me read out loud for an entire year. I attended a 98 % white Southern Christian private school. When a classmate told me I was not allowed to attend her birthday because I was black the teacher in question punished me for crying and blackmailed me not to tell my parents. I was six years old and it was the 1990s. I walked into a bar just before the pandemic with two white men who I’ve been friends with for awhile and the bartender (though not directed at me I’m biracial I look “ambiguous” and often mistaken for Latina as an adult)
mentioned lynching in conversation. This is at a bar in the South in 2020. America is not what you think it is. The media portrays a different image to the outside world than what is really happening. Even the horrific things you hear come out of our news aren’t even half of what goes on here. We have had at least ten known cases of black people being discovered hanging from trees since 2010.
They are ruling them as suicides.
I am fully aware “white” is just a societal label and that “white” in Europe is not the same as “white” in the United States. I view Europeans as totally separate from “white Americans.” In the past 50 years Europe has made great strides in education, equity and justice. Just please remember the United States has not. We are still living in the 1950s over here even though we have iPhones and MacBooks. I had a friend many years ago who was from Sweden. He was visiting the United States in the South where I live. After he went back to Sweden he spent a couple years after that calling me once or twice a week. I was young at the time only seventeen. He was in his mid twenties. Before I became aware of how different American society is to the rest of the world I thought he was just being nice. I now realize he was trying to figure out how to get me out of America. He invited me many times to live in Sweden but I was much too young and uneducated to take him up on his offer. I was raised by conservative Republicans and staunch evangelical Christians. I had grown up brainwashed and was unable to think for myself. I still look at his act of kindness even now. This is how I have personal experience with the citizens of Europe and why I know how different Americans are from Europeans. He lived in the Southern US for two years and realized immediately how absolutely crazy and detrimental it was for an African American to grow up there. He realized I had been traumatized and brainwashed. He kept checking on me for years after that. Every European friend I have made in the past ten years immediately treated me like a human being. Often times they treated me with more respect after 3 days than white Americans who I had known for my entire life. Don’t be fooled into thinking that because white Americans have a few European ancestors that they are anything like you. They have been socialized in America and that is a horrible environment to be socialized in. I understand that your desire to see wealth as the main contributing factor comes from an altruistic European perspective. I have no doubt that in Europe wealth plays the biggest factor but in America even a wealthy African American is not likely to receive the same treatment as a even a middle class white American. Wealth helps in many cases but racism is the status quo of the United States.
