Dear Emmanuel Acho,
I want to first thank you for your Tik Tok video. I look forward to watching the full video soon.
I wanted to also tell you that I appreciate what you are trying to do and I can see the virtue in your intentions. The unfortunate thing about this Tik Tok is that it introduces a subject and immedately sends people in the wrong direction. In your attempt to make white people comfortable, you have made some tacit assumptions that serve more to undermine your goal than I think you are aware.
When you grant your viewers the notion that there is a lack of success in black people, you are painting black people with the same miopic brush that your viewers use. There are 10 black billionaires in the United States and hundreds of millionaires. This is hardly expressive of an inability to succeed. Yet you go with it. Why would you concede that black people are unable to succeed? Black people are not monolithic. In 150 short years, despite all odds, black people have progressed through society in ways that we have not seen from a formerly enslaved group of people in all of history. To that end, there can be no doubt that Black Americans are the richest, most successful black people on the planet by any measure. To be a modern Black American is to be successful already in so many ways. Statistically, the black middle class in America has exploded and is growing at a faster rate than the subculture of poverty that so many people want to characterize as “black.” You tacitly approve of this in your video.
You then continue by admitting that you “thought about it” rather than researched it. You proceed to tell us what seems like logic, at least from your perspective. But you fail to account for the time period after slavery was abolished when black families were strong and stayed together despite all odds. You see the way that black families were decimated systematically by slave holders didn’t destroy a belief in family. If anything, it gave cause for black freed citizens to cherish family more than anything. Slavery absolutely was terrible and it destroyed a great number of black families, but it instilled in freed black communities the importance of family. Look back only 3 generations and it you will find black couples still married having raised dozens of children and grandchildren. It cannot be Slavery that destroyed the black family or those families would have been even more heavily influenced than black citizens are today.
And we see this despite Jim Crowe, despite widespread acceptance of racial bias against blacks. Literally despite all odds, black families persisted. What changed?
If you would please listen to this speech by Glenn Loury at the National Conservatism Conference where he addresses this exact topic in much more eloquent detail than I ever could. He’s an award winning economist and his concern is for Black Americans as he is a Black American himself. Please consider what he says.