Prometheus 6

Let me be clear.

What follows is simple fact. Understand your own reaction to it before making a comment. Then feel free to comment.

by Betsy Leondar-Wright

“America is a meritocracy,” my father always told me. The harder he worked, the more money he got: clear cause and effect. From individuals’ prosperity or poverty, he believed he could determine their effort and talent. Therefore, the poor Black people in a nearby city clearly hadn’t applied themselves.

My father had a legacy that he couldn’t see, a legacy he only got because he is white. His ancestor, John Prescott, came from England in 1638. The Massachusetts Bay Colony granted him land in central Massachusetts—something no people of color got—and he built the first sawmill there. As far as I can tell, none of his descendants have ever been poor. Some of my ancestors moved west to Ohio in the 1800s, where they may have received land under one of the Homestead Acts—government programs closed to people of color.

My father is a World War II-era veteran, and he went to graduate school on the GI Bill. Most veterans of color were unable to access these education benefits. The few Black colleges were swamped with applicants, and most other colleges accepted white students only. Job training programs in the South were segregated and under local white control. African-Americans were one-third of the WWII vets in the South but got one-twelfth of the job training slots.

My parents bought our first house with a Veterans Administration mortgage. The cheap subsidized mortgages of that era could not be used in mixed-race neighborhoods, or in inner-cities. Because most banks issued only government-subsidized mortgages, most WWII veterans of color had to remain renters.

My father’s parents got Social Security old-age benefits, which spared my father from supporting them. This enabled him to pay for our college educations. Social Security initially excluded domestic and agricultural workers, which meant that most people of color did not qualify in the first decades of the program. The minimum wage still excludes agricultural workers. The parents of today’s middle-aged people of color typically had to support their own parents, and so couldn’t save for college tuition as easily as my parents saved for mine.

Of course effort and talent make a difference in climbing the staircase to prosperity. But for most white men, the staircase has been an escalator powered by public assistance. I saw this in my own family. My father had a relative who was unambitious, sweet but slow-thinking. He got a middle management job and stayed in it for decades, and lived in the same small house until he retired with a pension. He was carried gently up the escalator, ending up lower than my dad, who put a lot of effort into climbing and so reached upper management. That was the range for college-educated WASP men of their generation: middle management and small homes, or high-level jobs and big homes. They started in the middle of the staircase and got help to rise. Working-class white men may have started at the bottom, but in that era they had opportunities and assistance to climb upward.