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| Screenshot from The Americanization of Emily (1964), starring Julie Andrews |
1. Continue racial and religious segregation across American cities, assuring areas with the progeny of former slaves will have fewer economic opportunities than others;
2. Fund K-12 education through local taxes or complex state formulas, thereby guaranteeing comparatively less funding for racially segregated areas and less attraction for top teachers due to longer travel times and inferior student quality;
3. In non-segregated areas, promote legal immigration, especially of immigrants holding degrees in engineering, math, and science;
[Note: all American STEM hubs have substantial immigrant populations, which attract venture capital.]
Venture-backed companies outperformed the overall economy in terms of creating jobs and growing revenue... In recent decades, venture capital has played an instrumental role in creating high-tech, high-growth industries such as information technology, biotechnology, semiconductors and online retailing... -- IHS Insight, "Venture Impact" (2009)
On real estate, in particular, if I had one piece of advice--go where the creative and technology types are, because those are the markets where there will be the most economic activity... Tech is driving so much of the growth in this global economy. -- Blackstone Group Inc. President Jon Gray (Bloomberg News, June 11, 2021)
4. In segregated areas lacking viable educational, economic, and extracurricular opportunities, watch as the environment promotes short-term thinking and thus less long-term family creation, which impacts inter-generational wealth creation and transfer;
5. As single motherhood increases in more racially segregated neighborhoods, blame everything except vestiges of Christian and Catholic-led chattel slavery and the de jure, then de facto segregation resulting from it;
6. When K-12 graduates from more segregated neighborhoods are comparatively less prepared for college and professional growth, watch as they are either coddled and advanced or treated equally and failed unless exceptional;
7. When non-K-12 graduates mature, watch as they confront a formal labor market without significant advancement opportunities and an informal labor market with comparatively superior opportunities;
Seeing dead bodies and machine guns, that is what I remember most from my childhood in the South Side of Chicago. Drive-by shootings. It was the biggest black ghetto in the worst depression. There was nothing but gangsters around us and I wanted to be one, too. -- Quincy Jones (2010)
8. For both recent graduates and non-graduates in segregated American neighborhoods, watch as well-funded military recruitment centers offer a way out of the inferior formal job market and the superior but riskier informal job market;
[Fact: Quincy Jones, Malcolm X, Mark Twain, and James Lipton all worked for pimps or as pimps/mecs, proving the draw of the informal labor market in recessionary or exclusionary times.]
9. Watch as well-funded, finely-tuned military propaganda convinces deliberately under-prepared young adults to join an organization that gives them opportunities they lacked in their first 18 years of life--as long as they follow orders;
I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. -- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam" (1967)
10. Watch as the United States military, through negligence, fear, and funding, replaces the father figure in the African-American community.
And so it goes.
© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2021)
Dedicated to Dr. Vincent Harding and Veterans of Hope.
Bonus: American mainstream religion lost moral authority as military spending became unaccountable and all-encompassing at the same time lawyers perfected tax shelters. The lure of low-cost debt in an age of increased tax resistance was bound to reduce civilian government's efficacy, but the impact on communities, especially segregated ones, was perhaps more profound than anticipated. Without civilian government offering principled leadership or effective service, American women reasonably sought community in religious structures while their men reasonably joined the cult of the military.
Bonus: "Negroes have always held the hope that if they really demonstrate they are great soldiers and if they really fight for America and help save American democracy, then when they come back home, American will treat them better. This has not been the case... for the Negro GI, military service still represents a means of escape from the oppressive ghettos of the rural South and the urban North. He often sees the Army as an avenue for educational opportunities and job training. He sees in the military uniform a symbol of dignity that has long been denied him by society. The tragedy in this is that military serve is probably the only possible escape for most young Negro men... They know that life in the city ghetto or life in the rural South almost certainly means jail or death or humiliation. And so, by comparison, military service is really the lesser risk." -- Martin Luther King, Jr., Playboy Magazine, January 1969, pp. 236, published posthumously
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