The Black Tax
andrew.im
andrew.im
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
Culture and genetics are a substantially bigger factor than skin colour.
Ghanaiain-American and Nigerian-American migrant households earn more than median White households.
If there is anything systematically racist against African-Americans, its a welfare system that encourages single motherhood, and a drug law system that locks up fathers for petty drug dealing, possibly in addition to a culture which glorifies thuggishness and disdain for education ('acting white').
Systemic Racism has always slowed the economic progress of those whose family roots are tied back to the first generation of slaves. It’s easier to build wealth as an immigrant than it is to build wealth after generations in a system that churns and spits out Black bodies without a second thought.
This essay talks specifically about the tax of being successful and Black in America: what did your comment aim to do other than try to dismiss that people with a different skin color have difficult lived experiences?
If you truly believe this you're too far gone to be brought back to reasoned thinking.
A black person in America is born into the richest country the world has every seen, already speaking the right language, with the right accent, is surrounded by safety, welfare, libraries, schools, colleges.
An immigrant has to work ten times harder to get the opportunity to even apply for a job remotely in their second or third language, leave their friends and family, entering a new country with zero credit and starting everything from scratch.
Absolutely ridiculous to suggest that an immigrant has it easier just because it doesn't fit the narrative you want to set. Maybe spend some time with Black and Brown immigrants and ask what they have been through, what they have witnessed since arriving, and how they feel about things.
I’m sorry I’m not a model minority in your eyes, but it’s rich you’re telling a black person to spend more time with black people. These aren’t just my lived experiences, it’s subject matter that comes from thousands of hours of talking with the very people you claim I should spend more time with.
You’re so uncomfortable with race and acknowledging racism you’d rather pretend you are the expert. I’m not “too far gone,” I simply live a life you can’t bring yourself to understand.
If it’s such a ridiculous statement then I invite you to provide anything backing up that claim. Because all those resources you claim are available to Black Americans are often the very things lacking in Black communities: https://www.epi.org/blog/the-racial-wealth-gap-how-african-a...
I mean Christ, have you even heard of a food desert?
I've been hurled racial slurs/insults throughout my life at various points. Sometimes randomly on the street, sometimes as a joke, sometimes when I didn't even catch the meaning of what was said until I had gotten home and it was too late to reply.
Despite that, I cannot subscribe to this thread that somehow people, of any colour, born in the most prosperous country the world has ever seen are somehow disadvantaged compared to those that arrive on its shores.
You may have spoken thousands of hours to people from all walks of life, but you are dangerously wrong with your assertion and it are perpetuating the falsehood that it's always someone else's fault as to why population X (whoever it might be, in whichever Western country) has an issue.
Racism still exists, however it's not the answer to every question.
If you're right and that an immigrant has to work "ten times harder" to apply for a job, then surely the immigrant population represents a. It would be a damning indictment of America if these people were not more successful than the average citizen - and if you look at the data, they're just a few percentage points ahead of median white people.
And Nigeria and Ghanian immigrants were cherry-picked because those two groups represent largely first and second-generation immigrants, who still largely have wealth and prosperity to go around from these original highly-qualified applicants.
(Also, why do you capitalize white? Usually it's just white-supremacists who do that, so you might want to reconsider your choice.)
You could remove race from the whole thing and the same would be true for anyone coming from the same economic starting point.
This is not a black tax. All those struggles are the same regardless of race.
You’ll have more job opportunities presented to you, more people willing to take risk. Of course it also helps not to have hundreds of years to systemic racism on your next as well which allows other members of your family to likely not be poor — thus able to support you.
You can’t erase race because you don’t understand it and it makes you uncomfortable to acknowledge that being white has its benefits. That’s why the American Dream is so far out of reach to many: https://andrew.im/essays/a-journey-to-the-american-dream
"Self-aware" refers to white people who realize they are racist.
Edit: Removed my own opinion from this to try to make it purely factual.
You misunderstand. The comments are not about race, but the individual decision that's always available to you, to break away from a losing game.
Likewise, I was dragged down by my family who defined what I should aspire to (ex: being a doctor or a professor or a lawyer while I liked computers) and what I should do (ex: give them money to help them). I tried to do what I was told and realized it caused failure.
> which allows other members of your family to likely not be poor — thus able to support you.
After noticing and analyzing the pattern of failure in my family, I decided it would stop with me - by disassociating from them.
From your post:
> That is why it should come as no surprise that so few Black people have successfully built generational wealth: we’re always actively trying to keep the current generation alive
That's your mistake.
Eventually, I decided "screw them, I don't give a flying fuck even if they starve to death" -best decision of my life!
Yes, it involved a lot of risk, as I knew they would never help me again in return, but being in the US it was almost a given I would never return.
Now I'm a young retiree.
I was asked money- more than once, especially after they knew I had made it. I told them in very clear term I'd rather burn my money and become a bum than give them a single dollar. That stopped the claims :)
> That’s why the American Dream is so far out of reach to many: https://andrew.im/essays/a-journey-to-the-american-dream
You're so wrong. The American Dream is out of reach because selfishness is unfortunately not taught. We give people wrong values (help your friends, support your family etc) and act all surprised they fail in life.
It's a honest mistake to make- the same as having kids in the hope they will help you in the future (they might) while they will certainly cost you in the present and the future (they sure will)
This comment ignores large scale affirmative action programs in education and in large corporations. How do you know for sure there are in fact less opportunities for one group or another?
The way opportunity plays out for various people is fantastically complex, how do you know you’ve figured it out to a degree that is useful for creating change?
While I acknowledge your point of view and opinion, I do not agree with your premise. Racism is not as important as the current political discourse would have us believe.
I leave these topics of race to comedians who bring so much needed levity. Theo Von
However, it does seem to me like the specific things you speak about in this essay could be considered to be more of a Poor Tax, which disproportionately affects Black Americans more than White People, due to the factors above. But taking just this specific essay, one could replace every instance of the word "Black" with "immigrant" or "Latino" or "Native American", etc, and it would be just as true.
Again, not to take away from the main point that Black people have it harder than many other races in the Americas (and some other places). But as an immigrant to the US, from a family that sends streams of money and goods to support our family members back home, it's nearly impossible not to think "hold on, this isn't an exclusively Black experience" when reading this essay.
Around here at least almost everyone in positions of power are old white men. And some white employees gossip among each other about the incompetence of black superiors. (Though in their defense some have praised those black coworkers they've seen working hard for themselves.)
Different regions probably have different dynamics. Yet all the stats I've read about imply skin tone is a huge filter for opportunity in life.
"In the 2019 survey, White families have the highest level of both median and mean family wealth: $188,200 and $983,400, respectively (Figure 1). Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than White families. Black families' median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of White families, at $24,100 and $142,500, respectively."
Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
An entirely different paradigm ...
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
Through most of human history there were various mechanisms in place to punish people who weren’t ‘doing their fair share.’
It seems like it shouldn’t be such a big deal but I wonder if it can actually be crippling to have no good mechanism to address whether someone is coasting off of others.
"predictably the comment section for this essay on HN is a slew of people saying " - https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1368649088292417536
FYI - The Black Tax - "a colloquial term for financially assisting ageing parents, siblings and other relatives"
I think it is a fucked name since I've seen in so much in SE Asia and other non black countries, we are talking billions of people who are not black enough who also have to deal with this.
I think that alone makes it incendiary and it also needs explaining on HN who are not all embedded in USA politics.
I’m an Iranian refugee. I grew up in poverty and I had to help my mom with basic tasks (interpretting gov letters, making calls etc). I was isolated from all my extended family.
I think this is more a class tax, than it is a black tax.
We buy a couple of dozen cestas básicas and give them away to a friend to feed families in a neighborhood nearby. We are paying for college and school for a handful of friends (father won't buy food for his kids but will drop off food for the dog in his new Jeep) and family - so many people are constantly hustling and churning through jobs.
At the current exchange rate with our apartment and school, this help costs less than my rent in nyc did, and it's ridiculous how little help there is here from institutions in the midst of a pandemic.
One good reason for suggesting a friends and family round is networks are a valuable ingredient of success.
So a good filter for an investor faced with uncertainty is to see if you have a network and can convince someone in it to bet on you. Your network has more information about you than the VC does, so your network's judgement of you is a useful signal.
Instead of taking the advice literally and trying to figure out how to build a network to signal quality to investors, he is going to assume it's just racism in which case there is no reason to do anything because nothing can be done.
That is a real shame.
Having experienced actual racism I can infer when someone is making a comment from a place of privilege vs. being malicious. The entire point of that section was to frame things.
That misattribution is why I thought it might be an example of the "other racism tax" (which needs a better name.)
I'm glad you went on to find success. Onwards and upwards.
Of course the woke brigade might show up and throw a judgement that any white person's blind spot, like not knowing that a Black man would most likely not be able to do a "friends and family round", is racism, but IMO that's super idiotic too. And assuming Black people are poor is also... troublesome.
On the other hand people measure success relative to those around them. In that sense, being poor gives you a 'success dividend'.
It's relatively easier to feel successful, satisfied, and enjoy other people's admiration when they are all poor, and you've achieved mediocre wealth.
Whereas with a rich start, you need to become a unicorn to feel the same adulation.
Perhaps this 'early satiation' also drives the statistics.
Human nature is tribal, and we can't know large numbers of people very well. That leads to mental shortcuts that don't work as well in our interconnected, multicultural societies. And many poor cultures are seen as havinh "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" in the US. Never mind that their light skin meant they could blend in by just dropping an accent and changing clothes.
Regardless, by working closely together and keeping an open mind we can overcome unintentional assumptions.
The things you want them to talk about are perfectly reasonable things to talk about, but they don't have much to do with the article and I don't see how their absence means that "the author oversimplified their argument". What argument do you think the author is making that would have been made better by talking about reparations, or a "black tax" in the sense (completely unrelated to that of the title) of tax imposed to finance reparations, or systemic racism on the part of the US government?
I think the article is trying to do two things. One of them -- sharing some aspects of the author's experience as a black entrepreneur that many readers will likely have no inkling of -- doesn't involve any argument at all. The other is objecting to criticisms of the idea of a "wealth tax", on the basis that lots of people are already facing a "tax" that will likely stop them becoming wealthy, and it doesn't stop them working hard. The things you want the article to mention wouldn't have had any relevance to either of those.
Whether being black is a better predictor of that than being poor, I don't know, but I can imagine how it might be.
(The author may also be suggesting -- it's not 100% clear -- that part of the "tax" is a cultural difference where black people are more likely than white people to feel responsible for supporting their friends and family who are poor.)
The only race argument IMHO is 'are poor people more likely to be black'.
Being black tends, for obvious reasons, to run in families. So race-associated poverty will do so too. Some other factors that tend to go along with poverty run in families, some not. There is some tendency for people to associate with others of the same race, and some tendency for people to associate with others of similar social class. It's not obvious to me whether being black is a better or a worse predictor of having poor friends and families than being poor is.
It does for lots of reasons.
> If you're poor, from a poor background, it's likely your friends are also poor, regardless of race.
If your even modestly successful and black from a poor background, it is more likely that you are the most successful person at a given network distance from people in your network than if you are equally successful and from an equally poor background but white. This is largely an effect of past racism.
But it's also less likely that people in your network can work their way up without your help. And that's largely a product of current racism, both of the institutional and the more direct, active, personal kind. (Also past racism, too.)