One of the best lines from the series Little Fires Everywhere was when Kerry Washington’s character says to Reese Witherspoon’s character:
“You didn’t MAKE good choices, you HAD good choices.”
There’s literally no such thing as a “self-made man” because literally, no man has ever made or given birth to himself.
All of us, only exist because of choices and actions far beyond our control that happened years, generations, even centuries, before we were born.
I’ve previously explained how privilege compounds across an individual’s lifetime and across generations. Today, I want to pick up that conversation again and to help explain some of the color-based wealth gaps that exist in different societies.
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Because lighter-skinned people historically had greater access to financial, political, educational, and social capital than darker-skinned people within their race, their children and descendants likely benefit from compounding generational advantages. Although not all these descendants would necessarily have light skin, this phenomenon does partly explain the perpetual socioeconomic disparities over time.
In some Asian cultures, this has shown up through caste systems where lighter-skinned groups retain systemic power across multiple generations.
Among African Americans in the United States, this has shown up in lighter-skinned communities excluding dark-skinned people from schools, churches, neighborhoods, and social clubs that were designed to protect and elevate various forms of capital–financial, political, and social.
Insights & Takeaways:
1) The ongoing wealth gaps we see that correspond to skin tone are partly explained by present discrimination in hiring and pay. However, persistent wealth gaps are also the result of the literal inheritances that lighter skinned (or white) parents, grandparents, etc. have been able to pass down to their progeny. Such inheritances include money, but also inheriting professional and social networks, inheriting financial knowledge, institutional knowledge, etc.
Of course, people from historically marginalized groups have unique, rich, prosperous inheritances of their own that are worth acknowledging and celebrating. Those inheritances provide us wealth in ways that have often been suppressed and devalued in capitalist societies and oppressive systems. (More on this for another day!)
2) The circumstance we’re born and raised in don’t always determine or decide our path, but they do greatly influence our paths. One of the initial influences our circumstances have is simply our awareness or lack of awareness about what paths already exist, what other paths are possible, and even the pathways to those paths. There’s a lot to be said about being exposed to a variety of edifying, educative, perspective-expanding experiences throughout your childhood.
When I get to the week where I discuss health, I’ll also share how this applies as far as epigenetic inheritances.
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Homework: Consider the compounding generational impact of what your parents, grandparents, and other ancestors had access to. How has that opened up, delayed, or previously denied you access to spaces, resources, knowledge, networks, opportunities, etc.?
Affirmation: I actively cultivate self-awareness as a foundation for my justice and equity work.