Black elites’ economic gains have coincided with worsening conditions for the black majority

Evidence

We have witnessed forty years of economic expansion among African Americans—even with the devastation of the Great Black Depression. We have seen the emergence of the black 1 percent, people like Kenneth Chenault and Oprah Winfrey. But the fact that we now have a few more rich black people doesn’t mean that the majority are better off. In fact, in the time we’ve witnessed the growth of the black 1 percent, we have also seen the rise of mass incarceration, increased poverty, the reversal of gains in black homeownership, and an expansion of the black poor. Creating more black millionaires, as Robert L. Johnson, the founder of BET, wants to do, matters only if you subscribe to a kind of racial trickle-down economics: give rich black people more access to capital and that will help poor black people. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 338

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Black elites’ fortunes were bound to the masses through shared Jim Crow constraints — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 285; Black communities deteriorated economically during Obama’s presidency despite a black president — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 20; Black economic progress has stagnated since the 1960s civil rights reforms — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 566