Climbing the White Escalator
"America is a meritocracy," my father always told me. The harder he worked, the more money he got: clear cause and effect. From individuals' prosperity or poverty, he believed he could determine their effort and talent. Therefore the poor black people in a nearby city clearly hadn't applied themselves.
My father had a legacy that he couldn't see, a legacy he only got because he is white. His ancestor, John Prescott, came from England in 1638. The Massachusetts Bay Colony granted him land in Central Massachusetts � something no people of color got -- and he built the first sawmill there. As far as I can tell, none of his descendants have ever been poor. Some of my ancestors moved west to Ohio in the 1800s, where they may have received land under one of the Homestead Acts �government programs closed to people of color.
My father is a World War II-era veteran, and he went to graduate school on the GI Bill. Most veterans of color were unable to access these education benefits. The few black colleges were swamped with applicants, and most other colleges accepted white students only. Job training programs in the South were segregated and under local white control. African Americans were one-third of the WWII vets in the South but got one-twelfth of the job training slots.
My parents bought our first house with a Veterans Administration mortgage. The cheap subsidized mortgages of that era could not be used in mixed-race neighborhoods, or in inner cities. Because most banks issued only government-subsidized mortgages, most WWII veterans of color had to remain renters.
Betsy Leondar-Wright/Common Dreams May.20.04
