Money and Power in the Black Perspective These aren't original ideas but I don't see many people mentioning or talking about it, yet whenever it's explained it's always shut down as if it's common knowledge and not a recurring and ever expanding problem. I'll try to stick to the more widely accepted and socially digestible sources. This view DOES intentionally disregard the fact that this issue also affects and always has affected European people as well, only because we all know the deeper and obvious issue is the deep-seated racism and not that white people=bad. People are only products of their environments and these days it barely can be only about race because it's split into “Good people/Bad People ,Good intentions/Bad intentions , The Affected/The Unaffected. If you're poor then they hate you and will never think twice if it's between them or us. The sooner we realize this as a society and not just as a culture, the sooner we can get to the next stage as a species. —------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Money is, and always has been, the purest and cleanest form of value and power that we as humans have ever had access to. Sure you could beat someone up and take their goat or whatever but why would you do that when you could give them a couple pieces of shiny metal you found so they'll just give it to you. This form of trade and understanding of value is what separates us from a lion's pride or a flock of birds. Objectively, it can be understood that money equals power ,and power that's held without the greater good in mind is less than ideal for the people not in mind. SO, my brash, initial and UNORIGINAL position is “The old Euro-Centralized view of capitalism is rigged against the black population.” Of course this is NOT as simple as it seems nor is this even the surface level of how deep this concept goes.(See Critical Race Theory). This concept dates back all the to way before the Civil War ,(Slavery and Capitalism this article does a good job at showing how the current system was BUILT for slavery and its evolution and inception) where when black people were allowed to work, there was a surge of newly freed slaves who flooded the workforce. To keep the power dynamic tilted towards the lighter tone, they essentially “delivered” the more undesirable representations of POC but yet still somehow mostly white people, to push out the black labor force and put POC in a bad light to have the representation bias stacked even more against us. Why? That is an entirely different and deeper conversation for another time (again, see Critical Race Theory). The focus is, everytime we almost have an honest way to approach the epidemic (racism not covid) that was forced on US it's FORCIBLY taken away or the message or point is heavily sedated. We even took the bad and tried to flip it the best we could! Martin Luther King was going the honest, “talk it out'' path but when that stopped working,(MLK And The Pivot From Non-Violence), he had realized the vision would need to be a little more heavy handed about a year before he was assassinated. Malcom X was on that wave from the get go, but he messed with the wrong people at the wrong time and he was taken away as well. Bob Marley almost brought together all of trenchtown and was almost a much larger bridge between cultures than he already was from his music. (It's arguable that the qualifications to being a threat to the agenda is getting lower and lower because now you're in danger whenever you even bring it up or are even a little too confident or beneficial to the movement or even offend one person's idea of what they think is right or wrong, ((See Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Aurbry, George Floyd, Emmett Till, my cousin who was JUMPED by feds who were looking for somebody completely different Know Their Names)) They gave us crack, we made it a booming, country wide, cross continental phenomenon and had SOME of the fastest introduction of true entrepreneurship that those generations have ever seen (not saying we didnt have other jobs, we were always great at figuring out how to make money its just that way is what despicably hooked the community the fastest and most consistently,sadly), it made money more accessible and gave an alternative from the performative sports or entertainment field as well as gave us a taste of moving away from working the slave-like, back breaking 9-5 that we’re usually shoveled into. It was another “Way Out” if you will. They gave us music and we influenced and demolished not only their market, but also invented our own. (not saying black people invented and pioneered music itself, but there are hundreds and hundreds of years worth of black history that occurred before we even came to the continent). Speaking of music. You could find examples of this everywhere, the music industry for example ( in light of recent events that i'm not entirely up to date on, its kinda not great to use Kanye as a reference but the music goes objectively hard) the media, (typically and mostly run by lighter people), have always pivoted AWAY from showing people of color that they can be just as successful or are capable of making good decisions as the lighter people.“...One thing I gotta call out boy, take a look at fallout boy, they aint black so when they get money they don't ball out boy, they just buy tight pants till they nuts hang all out boy…”-KW, (‘This Ain't A Scene It's an Arms’). The media has zero problem showing that black people can earn large amounts of money “sure they can but this is what you probably wanna spend it on, this is what you SHOULD be spending it on.” Iced out chains, fast cars, “Liquor Women Weed'' -Freddie Gibbs. This lack of representation in both color and character are NOT beneficial to the movement and development of people of color, again in both representation and character. When all you know is that when or if you get money by being one of these designated black positions then these are the types of things that would work out best for us, if you bought them. It seems it's deliberately kept from our community that there are actual assets and good and bad decisions that can be made with money. So unless whoever is hearing whatever type of media is actually able to understand and separate “What they're told is true or reliable” from “What they think or know is reliable” then they are probably fine but children and easy impressionable masses should not be fed garbage that makes them turn out not their best. Of course we figured it out because we historically always figure a way forward from the situation we find ourselves put in. Also if you notice, all of these things are just obstacles that were put up between us and holding our own value, be it property with not letting us buy homes or earn money, our voice with not letting us vote, our freedom by associating our color with illegality, etc etc. Currency and tangible items (ie property) are the purest form of value that we as people can get our hands on these days and the fact these things have very rarely traded hands or been kept in the community is definitely a cause of concern. =/:(:-