America. Land of the free. Home of the brave. A place where people from all over the world come to achieve the dream of financial independence. Can you make that happen in America? Yes. But if that’s the case, why are so many black families failing to be financially free?
There are a lot of dynamics involved when we look at black people in America and their money. I will expose only a few here:
1) Black families start out at a huge disadvantage. Most of the time they grow up in homes where all they saw their parents do was struggle financially. Even when you had a mother and father in the same house, the jobs they held were not very well paid, so they struggle to provide a stable existence for the family. This fighting mentality carried over into the adult lives of the children, who had a hard time breaking the cycle.
2) There was no real emphasis on higher education. Many families wanted their children to do better, go to college, get a good job, and for some that dream came true. But not for many of them. When you come from a home where your parents don’t excel educationally, it’s very difficult to pass that on to their children.
3) There is little or no conversation in the home about money. As adults in the real world, many black Americans realize they were never taught the basics of money management: the importance of saving money, budgeting, banking, lending, and home value. . Their white counterparts had been exposed to this since their youth and when they started working they began to implement the strategies that they were taught and saw in their parents. For many black children, all they saw was an economic struggle.
4) Many foreigners come to the United States and success runs in the family. It is not uncommon to have entire families with cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and siblings, all living close to each other and all committed to the family business. They work long hours and focus their children on getting a higher education. This sense of family helps them weather the storms that come with building a business.
Black families, on the other hand, don’t have this sense of “we all work together for the success of all of us.” The swaggering black family has been destroyed by the implantation of slavery that had at its roots separation to maintain control. As such, you rarely find a black business where all the families are involved in its success. A lot of times it’s a family trying to do it all. And educating children is not always the goal. Survival is the goal.
It will take more than speeches and promises to erase the stigma and curses placed on black America by an indifferent society for hundreds of years. It can start when black families begin to realize the importance of entire families sticking together for a common goal and of successful black people stepping back to share their success with other black families. If we want to see the black race rise to the level of which it is capable, it will take a concentrated effort from all of us.