The Black Middle Class is On a Meteoric Rise, As Passports and Travel Are Becoming A Cultural Norm For Black Americans In Order To Economically Support the Diaspora! White Supremacist Systems Cannot Afford To Oppress People and Fight Climate Change Simultaneously.
Nationwide protests have cast a spotlight on racism and inequality in the United States. Now a major bank has put a price tag on how much the economy has lost as a result of discrimination against African Americans: $16 trillion.
Since 2000, U.S. gross domestic product lost that much as a result of discriminatory practices in a range of areas, including in education and access to business loans, according to a new study by Citigroup. It's not an insignificant number: By comparison, U.S. GDP totaled $19.5 trillion last year.
And not acting to reverse discriminatory practices will continue to exact a cost. Citigroup estimates the economy would see a $5 trillion boost over the next five years if the U.S. were to tackle key areas of discrimination against African Americans.
"We believe we have a responsibility to address current events and to frame them with an economic lens in order to highlight the real costs of longstanding discrimination against minority groups, especially against Black people and particularly in the U.S.," wrote Raymond J. McGuire, a vice chairman at the bank and the chairman of its banking, capital markets and advisory team.
Wall Street itself has also faced accusations for years of discriminatory practices against African Americans, such as limiting approval for mortgages or not providing enough banking options in minority neighborhoods, which are among the damaging actions identified by Citigroup researchers. Now that system is crumbling because black people see other options such as investment in African nations that are welcoming them with open arms, land and citizenship!
WHITES TEND TO THINK OF RACISM as a problem for people of color and something we should be concerned about for their sake. It is true that racism is devastating to them, and if we believe in justice, equality, and equal opportunity for all, then we should be trying to end it. As we saw in the last Presidency, racism does produce material benefits for white people. However, the costs of racism to white people are devastating, especially to those without the money and power to buffer their effects.
They are not the same costs as the day-to-day violence, discrimination, and harassment that people of color have to deal with. Nevertheless, they are significant costs that Whites have been trained to ignore, deny, or rationalize away. They are costs that other white people, particularly those with wealth, make the Whit middle class pay in their daily lives.
It is sobering for white people to talk together about what it really costs to maintain such a system of division and exploitation in American society. They may even find it difficult to recognize some of the core costs of being white in our society. For example, one of the costs of assimilating into white mainstream culture is that people are asked to leave behind the languages, foods, music, games, rituals, and expressions that their parents and/or grandparents used. Whites lose their own “white” cultures and histories.
Sometimes this loss leads them to romanticize the richness of other cultures and cling to myths and false narratives as truths. Whites have been given a distorted and inaccurate picture of history and politics because the truth about racism has been excluded, the contributions of people of color left out, and the role of White people cleaned up and modified to support oppression and unearned privilege. Whites also lose the presence and contributions of people of color to their neighborhoods, schools, and relationships. We see nationally that those neighborhoods are literally dying out from old age. In fact the Whitest State populations have the lowest birth rates. We are given a false sense of superiority, a belief that we should be in control and in authority, and that people of color should be maids, servants, and gardeners and do the less valued work of our society. Our experiences are distorted, limited, and less rich the more they are exclusively or predominantly White.
Recent research, focusing specifically on the effects of climate change on average temperatures, points in this direction. Temperature has been found to affect income via agricultural yields, the physical and cognitive performance of workers, demand for energy, as well as the incidence of crime, unrest, and conflict. Every three weeks, the United States experiences an extreme weather event that produces $1 billion worth of damage, according to the latest US National Climate Assessment report, released earlier this month. Compare that to 40 years ago, when extreme weather episodes that cost an inflation-adjusted $1 billion happened once every four months on average.
As of November 8, there have been 25 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That exceeds last year’s count — even without data from the last two months of the year. In total, extreme weather events cost the US $150 billion per year, due to direct impacts such as infrastructure damage, worker injuries and agricultural losses, the authors of the report estimate. And the cost of extreme weather events is expected to grow in the near term with a projected rise in sea levels and temperatures, the report states.
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