It's not always about race

On NPR this morning I heard a great piece about why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  Now, before you click off this seemingly Marxist rant, don't.  The piece drew a powerful argument that it's easier to become wealthy if you start with wealth.  Well, duh, methinks.  But they went further.  They gave strong evidence that the American Dream is much easier to attain if your fore-bearers had resources to give you a leg up; be that an education, a downpayment on a house, or simply a nice, stable home.  Now here's where I snorted at the story: they drew the comparison between a single black mom and a married white couple.  But the key difference wasn't race it was heritage.  How long had their respective families been in America?  It was clear the single black mother came from poverty.  And they made it clear that her fore-bearers had been poor, probably because they were descendants of slaves who were given nothing.  The white couple had inherited $60,000 from a rich aunt that they used to buy a house.

But my father came from very modest means.  His father was a teacher.  His grandfather was a coal miner.  And before that his fore-bearers were immigrants with next to nothing.  But because his mother put a premium on education, and because my father worked his butt off for 30 years, he's now independently wealthy.  But that jump to wealth didn't happen in a generation.  It happened over several generations and was catalyzed by my father's work ethic placed on top of several generations of his family slowly, incrementally improving their lot.

The NPR piece also made significant mention of the social programs that helped the single black mom go back to college to get her degree and buy a house after living on the streets.  The State had stepped in to accelerate her improving living standard.  And it worked.  Funny, but social programs do work from time to time.

NPR mis-interpreted the ENTIRE phenomenon when, in the exit promo for the next segment, they titled it "Race and the Wealth Gap".  This story, this phenomenon, this fresh interpretation of achieving the American Dream had much less to do with race than it did with heritage.  It takes generations for immigrants to slowly, incrementally improve their family's living standards.  And sure, racism makes it doubly hard for people of color in America to break through economic barriers.  But rather than celebrating the triumph of the single black mom in the story -- and there were triumphs aplenty to celebrate -- they chose to, once again, promote it as a "race" story.  It cheapened the story and dishonored the black mom in it.