African American

please forgive me.

Your view of economic parity with regards to at least my community is, to put it nicely, skewed. Your attempt to sever it from racism is misguided.

Economic disparity -- together with the resultant lack of power in a political system that many would just as soon leave in the hands of the wealthy -- is the primary weapon of racism, not the gun, not the KKK march, not even the 66 million Pollies who voted for Trump. This is because economic disparity is not "White guy makes $15/hour, but I make $10/hour" and for this reason it is not corrected when, to use your examples, Barack Obama became the greatest president in history, or Oprah became wealthy. That is accepting the same "tokenist" argument used against us by white folks as your starting point. It is also the reason why we will never be anything to white folks no matter how many of us become individually wealthy.

Economic disparity begins with the $60 TRILLION of wealth white folks stole from us during the Atlantic slave trade and the institution of North American slavery and it grows from there. So long as this remains a capitalist country, we will not be free and equal until it is repaid because we will never have any power other than that which white folks allow us to have. The generational wealth gap is simply too great by multiples to correct it with education, opportunity, and whatever piecemeal solutions they propose because there will never be enough of us to change seat of power. It is this fact which makes the achievements of Barack Obama so monumental, so above anything any white politician has ever accomplished. It is what makes Oprah's wealth so much more impressive than Trump's. It is what makes the rise of someone like Cornell West to the platform committee of the Democratic Party almost unimaginable. They didn't end economic disparity, they conquered it.

This, by the way, is why the most prominent figures in the fight for liberation, from Huey Newton and the BPP to Martin Luther King to Malcom X were socialists. As much as they valued education, opportunity and the like, they knew that curing this disparity, the disparity created by 400 years of slavery, was the only path to our liberation as a people and the only path to political power commensurate with our numbers AND our contributions.

Why do the racist chant with greater fervor than they have for years? Because they can. Because they have the privilege that comes from controlling a disproportionate amount of this country's wealth and they know that many of the people we call friends will not lift a finger to change that. Because they know that we can, but more often can't, win redistricting lawsuits but all they have to do is just draw a new district.

AND

Because they know far too many of us have forgotten what OUR leaders taught us and listen instead to people who don't look like us when they say to keep being patient even though it has been more than 4 centuries after they took everything from us AND that all we have to do is to win the next election. I have never voted for anyone but a Democrat since my first election in 1968 -- and that was even after being a participant in a third party "convention" -- and I never will -- I know what I lose when Republicans are in power -- but I am still not so naïve as to believe that one. We will be free when we get what is ours.