9 ms·

The Black Tax

44 points by andrewmd5 6y ago

Bluestein 6y ago
"For many Black people who have found success, the idea of 'personal wealth' doesn’t exist because to have wealth is to share it. Their money isn’t just theirs; it’s their mom’s rent, their sisters used car, food on the table of a struggling family member, Christmas gifts under the tree. For every dollar earned, you don’t value it based on what it can get you, but how far it can go for others." An entirely different paradigm ...
- whiddershins 6y ago
  This is not uncommon for poor people the world over, including poor white people in the US.
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    It's pretty much the norm for most of history. Even medieval farmers did the same thing[1]. It's a very rational risk mitigation strategy. [1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/ https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
    - whiddershins 6y ago
      The only issue is that there is a nasty side effect from the freeloader problem. Through most of human history there were various mechanisms in place to punish people who weren’t ‘doing their fair share.’ It seems like it shouldn’t be such a big deal but I wonder if it can actually be crippling to have no good mechanism to address whether someone is coasting off of others.
xyzzy4 6y ago
Maybe the black tax is partly an IQ tax - black people on average have lower IQs according to every study on the matter. As unfortunate as that may be.
flyinglizard 6y ago
Isn’t the author just talking about a “poverty tax”? (I’m not an American so I’m not well versed on the cultural aspects here).
- lgleason 6y ago
  They are, but in recent years the wealthy have ginned up the race wars to get everybody fighting and distract from the real issue of income disparity which continues to get wider in the US.
- gjm11 6y ago
  I think it's slightly different. The "tax" is associated not so much with being poor oneself, as with having all one's friends and family also poor. Whether being black is a better predictor of that than being poor, I don't know, but I can imagine how it might be. (The author may also be suggesting -- it's not 100% clear -- that part of the "tax" is a cultural difference where black people are more likely than white people to feel responsible for supporting their friends and family who are poor.)
  - jacknews 6y ago
    I don't see why race would affect this. If you're poor, from a poor background, it's likely your friends are also poor, regardless of race. The only race argument IMHO is 'are poor people more likely to be black'.
    - gjm11 6y ago
      Well, poor people definitely are more likely to be black, and black people are more likely to be poor. (In the US, which is the country OP is talking about, and in the UK, where I am, and in many other places, though maybe not everywhere.) Being black tends, for obvious reasons, to run in families. So race-associated poverty will do so too. Some other factors that tend to go along with poverty run in families, some not. There is some tendency for people to associate with others of the same race, and some tendency for people to associate with others of similar social class. It's not obvious to me whether being black is a better or a worse predictor of having poor friends and families than being poor is.
epx 6y ago
Not exactly a pure Black problem, being dragged down by family money problems is very common in poor and lower middle class. At least in my culture (Brazil). Family freeloaders are more difficult to spot because things are generally hard, so the support network ends up being spread thin. One must to learn to be tough, and live with the reputation, if they wants to accumulate some wealth.
- simtel20 6y ago
  Yes, this resonates. I am living in Brazil, but have fewer direct relatives because I am not brazilian, and my wife is. We buy a couple of dozen cestas básicas and give them away to a friend to feed families in a neighborhood nearby. We are paying for college and school for a handful of friends (father won't buy food for his kids but will drop off food for the dog in his new Jeep) and family - so many people are constantly hustling and churning through jobs. At the current exchange rate with our apartment and school, this help costs less than my rent in nyc did, and it's ridiculous how little help there is here from institutions in the midst of a pandemic.
lgleason 6y ago
What the author described is the difference between coming from a rich family and a poor one. There are many poor people of many ethnicities that face the same exact problem.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
simplecto 6y ago
That is not a uniquely black experience. You could remove race from the whole thing and the same would be true for anyone coming from the same economic starting point. This is not a black tax. All those struggles are the same regardless of race.
- andrewmd5 6y ago
  Author here. This comment section is almost self-aware, which is nice to see. While it’s nice to believe everyone would have the same struggles from the same economic starting point, the reality is that as a poor white person it is much easier to find your way out of poverty. You’ll have more job opportunities presented to you, more people willing to take risk. Of course it also helps not to have hundreds of years to systemic racism on your next as well which allows other members of your family to likely not be poor — thus able to support you. You can’t erase race because you don’t understand it and it makes you uncomfortable to acknowledge that being white has its benefits. That’s why the American Dream is so far out of reach to many: https://andrew.im/essays/a-journey-to-the-american-dream https://andrew.im/essays/a-journey-to-the-american-dream
  - whearyou 6y ago
    “This comment section is almost self-aware” can you expand on what you mean by that?
    - caffeine 6y ago
      It is terminology from Critical Race Theory, which is an ideology whose basic premise is that all white people, irrespective of their actual behavior or beliefs, perpetrate racism against everyone else. "Self-aware" refers to white people who realize they are racist. Edit: Removed my own opinion from this to try to make it purely factual.
  - 1996 6y ago
    > the reality is that as a poor white person it is much easier to find your way out of poverty. You misunderstand. The comments are not about race, but the individual decision that's always available to you, to break away from a losing game. Likewise, I was dragged down by my family who defined what I should aspire to (ex: being a doctor or a professor or a lawyer while I liked computers) and what I should do (ex: give them money to help them). I tried to do what I was told and realized it caused failure. > which allows other members of your family to likely not be poor — thus able to support you. After noticing and analyzing the pattern of failure in my family, I decided it would stop with me - by disassociating from them. From your post: > That is why it should come as no surprise that so few Black people have successfully built generational wealth: we’re always actively trying to keep the current generation alive That's your mistake. Eventually, I decided "screw them, I don't give a flying fuck even if they starve to death" -best decision of my life! Yes, it involved a lot of risk, as I knew they would never help me again in return, but being in the US it was almost a given I would never return. Now I'm a young retiree. I was asked money- more than once, especially after they knew I had made it. I told them in very clear term I'd rather burn my money and become a bum than give them a single dollar. That stopped the claims :) > That’s why the American Dream is so far out of reach to many: https://andrew.im/essays/a-journey-to-the-american-dream https://andrew.im/essays/a-journey-to-the-american-dream You're so wrong. The American Dream is out of reach because selfishness is unfortunately not taught. We give people wrong values (help your friends, support your family etc) and act all surprised they fail in life. It's a honest mistake to make- the same as having kids in the hope they will help you in the future (they might) while they will certainly cost you in the present and the future (they sure will)
theklr 6y ago
Unfortunately the author oversimplified their argument. There could be a case for the “black tax” as a form of reparations, but never even discusses the long history of the government thwarting any gains black people attempted over the years. Such a shame.
- gjm11 6y ago
  The author's argument doesn't say anything about (or anything about anything like) 'the "black tax" as a form of reparations'. The "black tax" of the title isn't a literal tax, but the extra costs the author finds associated with being poor and having friends and family who are also poor: it's difficult for them to support you if you need to raise money, and if you get money you need to use some of it to support them.
  - theklr 6y ago
    That’s what makes me disappointed. “The Case for Reparations” from Ta-Nehisi Coates digs into this and how American government has been active in keeping that a multigenerational issue in black communities in particular.
    - gjm11 6y ago
      I tend to think that "this person wrote an article but it was about what they wanted to talk about, not what I wanted them to talk about after seeing the title" isn't a strong criticism. The things you want them to talk about are perfectly reasonable things to talk about, but they don't have much to do with the article and I don't see how their absence means that "the author oversimplified their argument". What argument do you think the author is making that would have been made better by talking about reparations, or a "black tax" in the sense (completely unrelated to that of the title) of tax imposed to finance reparations, or systemic racism on the part of the US government? I think the article is trying to do two things. One of them -- sharing some aspects of the author's experience as a black entrepreneur that many readers will likely have no inkling of -- doesn't involve any argument at all. The other is objecting to criticisms of the idea of a "wealth tax", on the basis that lots of people are already facing a "tax" that will likely stop them becoming wealthy, and it doesn't stop them working hard. The things you want the article to mention wouldn't have had any relevance to either of those.
jacknews 6y ago
I don't agree with the race argument here, it's simply a case that elevating yourself from a poor background is much harder than from a rich background. On the other hand people measure success relative to those around them. In that sense, being poor gives you a 'success dividend'. It's relatively easier to feel successful, satisfied, and enjoy other people's admiration when they are all poor, and you've achieved mediocre wealth. Whereas with a rich start, you need to become a unicorn to feel the same adulation. Perhaps this 'early satiation' also drives the statistics.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Once my SO started teaching in black neighborhoods I finally saw the systemic racism beyond the usual poverty issues common to all races. It's the subconscious racism in the culture that treats those with darker skin as different, often bucketed by negative stereotypes. Those kids faced it everyday and everywhere they lived, studied, worked. And their interconnected family-first culture was sometimes both a blessing and a curse, depending on ones birth lottery. This was different than the experience of the latinos and poor whites I have known. Human nature is tribal, and we can't know large numbers of people very well. That leads to mental shortcuts that don't work as well in our interconnected, multicultural societies. And many poor cultures are seen as havinh "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" in the US. Never mind that their light skin meant they could blend in by just dropping an accent and changing clothes. Regardless, by working closely together and keeping an open mind we can overcome unintentional assumptions.
  - caffeine 6y ago
    Can you give a specific example? I always hear about this systemic racism, but I don't really know what that means.
    - leephillips 6y ago
      https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/66151/309090-Mortgage-Lending-Discrimination.PDF https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/66151/...
jc01480 6y ago
It’s like someone just discovered life is hard and twisted it with a race factor. I honestly don’t intend for this to sound mean, but it’s probably unavoidable in modern society.
- frongpik 6y ago
  It's the rich trying to divide the poor along the skin color lines.
theflork 6y ago
Victim mentality on full display.
snicker7 6y ago
This post is basically an advert for the wealth tax.
jasonhansel 6y ago
The Fed's statistics show just how big this disparity is: "In the 2019 survey, White families have the highest level of both median and mean family wealth: $188,200 and $983,400, respectively (Figure 1). Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than White families. Black families' median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of White families, at $24,100 and $142,500, respectively." Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
- nicbou 6y ago
  That's much more than I would have thought. Thanks for this contribution.
caffeine 6y ago
I think this article unwittingly speaks to a different "black tax": this person is going to assume that racism is the reason his company didn't get funded. One good reason for suggesting a friends and family round is networks are a valuable ingredient of success. So a good filter for an investor faced with uncertainty is to see if you have a network and can convince someone in it to bet on you. Your network has more information about you than the VC does, so your network's judgement of you is a useful signal. Instead of taking the advice literally and trying to figure out how to build a network to signal quality to investors, he is going to assume it's just racism in which case there is no reason to do anything because nothing can be done. That is a real shame.
- sand_castles 6y ago
  Are you black ?
- andrewmd5 6y ago
  Author here. I think you missed the point of the essay; my startup at the time didn’t get funded because the idea wasn’t a good fit for venture capital. We still ended up up making close to half a million in revenue, pivoted, and have raised over $5M to date while grossing close to $10M last year in revenue. Having experienced actual racism I can infer when someone is making a comment from a place of privilege vs. being malicious. The entire point of that section was to frame things.
  - caffeine 6y ago
    Your article seemed to be about economic inequality, but was attributed as racial inequality (most of the other comments here identified this too). That misattribution is why I thought it might be an example of the "other racism tax" (which needs a better name.) I'm glad you went on to find success. Onwards and upwards.
- bellyfullofbac 6y ago
  You're the one summarizing the author's experience with "He thinks that investor [and maybe Paul Graham too] is racist". I just read this piece as the author pointing out how someone had this blind spot, I can't even tell if he concluded that that investor was racist. Of course the woke brigade might show up and throw a judgement that any white person's blind spot, like not knowing that a Black man would most likely not be able to do a "friends and family round", is racism, but IMO that's super idiotic too. And assuming Black people are poor is also... troublesome.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
And yet non-White groups (specifically Indian and Taiwanese) are the top earners in the USA by median household income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... Culture and genetics are a substantially bigger factor than skin colour. Ghanaiain-American and Nigerian-American migrant households earn more than median White households. If there is anything systematically racist against African-Americans, its a welfare system that encourages single motherhood, and a drug law system that locks up fathers for petty drug dealing, possibly in addition to a culture which glorifies thuggishness and disdain for education ('acting white').
- aminozuur 6y ago
  I’m a refugee from the Middle East and I agree with you. Though the socio-economic class people grow up in seems at least as important as “culture and genetics”.
- andrewmd5 6y ago
  Ignoring the blatant racist generalization of Black people in your comment, recent Fed data shows your assumption is categorically false. Systemic Racism has always slowed the economic progress of those whose family roots are tied back to the first generation of slaves. It’s easier to build wealth as an immigrant than it is to build wealth after generations in a system that churns and spits out Black bodies without a second thought. This essay talks specifically about the tax of being successful and Black in America: what did your comment aim to do other than try to dismiss that people with a different skin color have difficult lived experiences?
  - neilsense 6y ago
    > It’s easier to build wealth as an immigrant If you truly believe this you're too far gone to be brought back to reasoned thinking. A black person in America is born into the richest country the world has every seen, already speaking the right language, with the right accent, is surrounded by safety, welfare, libraries, schools, colleges. An immigrant has to work ten times harder to get the opportunity to even apply for a job remotely in their second or third language, leave their friends and family, entering a new country with zero credit and starting everything from scratch. Absolutely ridiculous to suggest that an immigrant has it easier just because it doesn't fit the narrative you want to set. Maybe spend some time with Black and Brown immigrants and ask what they have been through, what they have witnessed since arriving, and how they feel about things.
aminozuur 6y ago
Eminem is white, and grew up with a crack addicted single mother on welfare. I’m an Iranian refugee. I grew up in poverty and I had to help my mom with basic tasks (interpretting gov letters, making calls etc). I was isolated from all my extended family. I think this is more a class tax, than it is a black tax.
aaron695 6y ago
The person who wrote this, submitted it to HN and has said on Twitter they expected these comments. "predictably the comment section for this essay on HN is a slew of people saying " - https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1368649088292417536 https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1368649088292417536 FYI - The Black Tax - "a colloquial term for financially assisting ageing parents, siblings and other relatives" I think it is a fucked name since I've seen in so much in SE Asia and other non black countries, we are talking billions of people who are not black enough who also have to deal with this. I think that alone makes it incendiary and it also needs explaining on HN who are not all embedded in USA politics.

44 points by andrewmd5 6y ago

"For many Black people who have found success, the idea of 'personal wealth' doesn’t exist because to have wealth is to share it. Their money isn’t just theirs; it’s their mom’s rent, their sisters used car, food on the table of a struggling family member, Christmas gifts under the tree. For every dollar earned, you don’t value it based on what it can get you, but how far it can go for others." An entirely different paradigm ...

whiddershins 6y ago
This is not uncommon for poor people the world over, including poor white people in the US.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  It's pretty much the norm for most of history. Even medieval farmers did the same thing[1]. It's a very rational risk mitigation strategy. [1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/ https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
  - whiddershins 6y ago
    The only issue is that there is a nasty side effect from the freeloader problem. Through most of human history there were various mechanisms in place to punish people who weren’t ‘doing their fair share.’ It seems like it shouldn’t be such a big deal but I wonder if it can actually be crippling to have no good mechanism to address whether someone is coasting off of others.

xyzzy4 6y ago

Maybe the black tax is partly an IQ tax - black people on average have lower IQs according to every study on the matter. As unfortunate as that may be.

flyinglizard 6y ago

Isn’t the author just talking about a “poverty tax”? (I’m not an American so I’m not well versed on the cultural aspects here).

lgleason 6y ago
They are, but in recent years the wealthy have ginned up the race wars to get everybody fighting and distract from the real issue of income disparity which continues to get wider in the US.
gjm11 6y ago
I think it's slightly different. The "tax" is associated not so much with being poor oneself, as with having all one's friends and family also poor. Whether being black is a better predictor of that than being poor, I don't know, but I can imagine how it might be. (The author may also be suggesting -- it's not 100% clear -- that part of the "tax" is a cultural difference where black people are more likely than white people to feel responsible for supporting their friends and family who are poor.)
- jacknews 6y ago
  I don't see why race would affect this. If you're poor, from a poor background, it's likely your friends are also poor, regardless of race. The only race argument IMHO is 'are poor people more likely to be black'.
  - gjm11 6y ago
    Well, poor people definitely are more likely to be black, and black people are more likely to be poor. (In the US, which is the country OP is talking about, and in the UK, where I am, and in many other places, though maybe not everywhere.) Being black tends, for obvious reasons, to run in families. So race-associated poverty will do so too. Some other factors that tend to go along with poverty run in families, some not. There is some tendency for people to associate with others of the same race, and some tendency for people to associate with others of similar social class. It's not obvious to me whether being black is a better or a worse predictor of having poor friends and families than being poor is.

epx 6y ago

Not exactly a pure Black problem, being dragged down by family money problems is very common in poor and lower middle class. At least in my culture (Brazil). Family freeloaders are more difficult to spot because things are generally hard, so the support network ends up being spread thin. One must to learn to be tough, and live with the reputation, if they wants to accumulate some wealth.

simtel20 6y ago
Yes, this resonates. I am living in Brazil, but have fewer direct relatives because I am not brazilian, and my wife is. We buy a couple of dozen cestas básicas and give them away to a friend to feed families in a neighborhood nearby. We are paying for college and school for a handful of friends (father won't buy food for his kids but will drop off food for the dog in his new Jeep) and family - so many people are constantly hustling and churning through jobs. At the current exchange rate with our apartment and school, this help costs less than my rent in nyc did, and it's ridiculous how little help there is here from institutions in the midst of a pandemic.

lgleason 6y ago

What the author described is the difference between coming from a rich family and a poor one. There are many poor people of many ethnicities that face the same exact problem.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

simplecto 6y ago

That is not a uniquely black experience. You could remove race from the whole thing and the same would be true for anyone coming from the same economic starting point. This is not a black tax. All those struggles are the same regardless of race.

andrewmd5 6y ago
Author here. This comment section is almost self-aware, which is nice to see. While it’s nice to believe everyone would have the same struggles from the same economic starting point, the reality is that as a poor white person it is much easier to find your way out of poverty. You’ll have more job opportunities presented to you, more people willing to take risk. Of course it also helps not to have hundreds of years to systemic racism on your next as well which allows other members of your family to likely not be poor — thus able to support you. You can’t erase race because you don’t understand it and it makes you uncomfortable to acknowledge that being white has its benefits. That’s why the American Dream is so far out of reach to many: https://andrew.im/essays/a-journey-to-the-american-dream https://andrew.im/essays/a-journey-to-the-american-dream
- whearyou 6y ago
  “This comment section is almost self-aware” can you expand on what you mean by that?
  - caffeine 6y ago
    It is terminology from Critical Race Theory, which is an ideology whose basic premise is that all white people, irrespective of their actual behavior or beliefs, perpetrate racism against everyone else. "Self-aware" refers to white people who realize they are racist. Edit: Removed my own opinion from this to try to make it purely factual.
- 1996 6y ago
  > the reality is that as a poor white person it is much easier to find your way out of poverty. You misunderstand. The comments are not about race, but the individual decision that's always available to you, to break away from a losing game. Likewise, I was dragged down by my family who defined what I should aspire to (ex: being a doctor or a professor or a lawyer while I liked computers) and what I should do (ex: give them money to help them). I tried to do what I was told and realized it caused failure. > which allows other members of your family to likely not be poor — thus able to support you. After noticing and analyzing the pattern of failure in my family, I decided it would stop with me - by disassociating from them. From your post: > That is why it should come as no surprise that so few Black people have successfully built generational wealth: we’re always actively trying to keep the current generation alive That's your mistake. Eventually, I decided "screw them, I don't give a flying fuck even if they starve to death" -best decision of my life! Yes, it involved a lot of risk, as I knew they would never help me again in return, but being in the US it was almost a given I would never return. Now I'm a young retiree. I was asked money- more than once, especially after they knew I had made it. I told them in very clear term I'd rather burn my money and become a bum than give them a single dollar. That stopped the claims :) > That’s why the American Dream is so far out of reach to many: https://andrew.im/essays/a-journey-to-the-american-dream https://andrew.im/essays/a-journey-to-the-american-dream You're so wrong. The American Dream is out of reach because selfishness is unfortunately not taught. We give people wrong values (help your friends, support your family etc) and act all surprised they fail in life. It's a honest mistake to make- the same as having kids in the hope they will help you in the future (they might) while they will certainly cost you in the present and the future (they sure will)

theklr 6y ago

Unfortunately the author oversimplified their argument. There could be a case for the “black tax” as a form of reparations, but never even discusses the long history of the government thwarting any gains black people attempted over the years. Such a shame.

gjm11 6y ago
The author's argument doesn't say anything about (or anything about anything like) 'the "black tax" as a form of reparations'. The "black tax" of the title isn't a literal tax, but the extra costs the author finds associated with being poor and having friends and family who are also poor: it's difficult for them to support you if you need to raise money, and if you get money you need to use some of it to support them.
- theklr 6y ago
  That’s what makes me disappointed. “The Case for Reparations” from Ta-Nehisi Coates digs into this and how American government has been active in keeping that a multigenerational issue in black communities in particular.
  - gjm11 6y ago
    I tend to think that "this person wrote an article but it was about what they wanted to talk about, not what I wanted them to talk about after seeing the title" isn't a strong criticism. The things you want them to talk about are perfectly reasonable things to talk about, but they don't have much to do with the article and I don't see how their absence means that "the author oversimplified their argument". What argument do you think the author is making that would have been made better by talking about reparations, or a "black tax" in the sense (completely unrelated to that of the title) of tax imposed to finance reparations, or systemic racism on the part of the US government? I think the article is trying to do two things. One of them -- sharing some aspects of the author's experience as a black entrepreneur that many readers will likely have no inkling of -- doesn't involve any argument at all. The other is objecting to criticisms of the idea of a "wealth tax", on the basis that lots of people are already facing a "tax" that will likely stop them becoming wealthy, and it doesn't stop them working hard. The things you want the article to mention wouldn't have had any relevance to either of those.

jacknews 6y ago

I don't agree with the race argument here, it's simply a case that elevating yourself from a poor background is much harder than from a rich background. On the other hand people measure success relative to those around them. In that sense, being poor gives you a 'success dividend'. It's relatively easier to feel successful, satisfied, and enjoy other people's admiration when they are all poor, and you've achieved mediocre wealth. Whereas with a rich start, you need to become a unicorn to feel the same adulation. Perhaps this 'early satiation' also drives the statistics.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Once my SO started teaching in black neighborhoods I finally saw the systemic racism beyond the usual poverty issues common to all races. It's the subconscious racism in the culture that treats those with darker skin as different, often bucketed by negative stereotypes. Those kids faced it everyday and everywhere they lived, studied, worked. And their interconnected family-first culture was sometimes both a blessing and a curse, depending on ones birth lottery. This was different than the experience of the latinos and poor whites I have known. Human nature is tribal, and we can't know large numbers of people very well. That leads to mental shortcuts that don't work as well in our interconnected, multicultural societies. And many poor cultures are seen as havinh "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" in the US. Never mind that their light skin meant they could blend in by just dropping an accent and changing clothes. Regardless, by working closely together and keeping an open mind we can overcome unintentional assumptions.
- caffeine 6y ago
  Can you give a specific example? I always hear about this systemic racism, but I don't really know what that means.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/66151/309090-Mortgage-Lending-Discrimination.PDF https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/66151/...

jc01480 6y ago

It’s like someone just discovered life is hard and twisted it with a race factor. I honestly don’t intend for this to sound mean, but it’s probably unavoidable in modern society.

frongpik 6y ago
It's the rich trying to divide the poor along the skin color lines.

theflork 6y ago

Victim mentality on full display.

snicker7 6y ago

This post is basically an advert for the wealth tax.

jasonhansel 6y ago

The Fed's statistics show just how big this disparity is: "In the 2019 survey, White families have the highest level of both median and mean family wealth: $188,200 and $983,400, respectively (Figure 1). Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than White families. Black families' median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of White families, at $24,100 and $142,500, respectively." Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...

nicbou 6y ago
That's much more than I would have thought. Thanks for this contribution.

caffeine 6y ago

I think this article unwittingly speaks to a different "black tax": this person is going to assume that racism is the reason his company didn't get funded. One good reason for suggesting a friends and family round is networks are a valuable ingredient of success. So a good filter for an investor faced with uncertainty is to see if you have a network and can convince someone in it to bet on you. Your network has more information about you than the VC does, so your network's judgement of you is a useful signal. Instead of taking the advice literally and trying to figure out how to build a network to signal quality to investors, he is going to assume it's just racism in which case there is no reason to do anything because nothing can be done. That is a real shame.

sand_castles 6y ago
Are you black ?
andrewmd5 6y ago
Author here. I think you missed the point of the essay; my startup at the time didn’t get funded because the idea wasn’t a good fit for venture capital. We still ended up up making close to half a million in revenue, pivoted, and have raised over $5M to date while grossing close to $10M last year in revenue. Having experienced actual racism I can infer when someone is making a comment from a place of privilege vs. being malicious. The entire point of that section was to frame things.
- caffeine 6y ago
  Your article seemed to be about economic inequality, but was attributed as racial inequality (most of the other comments here identified this too). That misattribution is why I thought it might be an example of the "other racism tax" (which needs a better name.) I'm glad you went on to find success. Onwards and upwards.
bellyfullofbac 6y ago
You're the one summarizing the author's experience with "He thinks that investor [and maybe Paul Graham too] is racist". I just read this piece as the author pointing out how someone had this blind spot, I can't even tell if he concluded that that investor was racist. Of course the woke brigade might show up and throw a judgement that any white person's blind spot, like not knowing that a Black man would most likely not be able to do a "friends and family round", is racism, but IMO that's super idiotic too. And assuming Black people are poor is also... troublesome.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

And yet non-White groups (specifically Indian and Taiwanese) are the top earners in the USA by median household income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... Culture and genetics are a substantially bigger factor than skin colour. Ghanaiain-American and Nigerian-American migrant households earn more than median White households. If there is anything systematically racist against African-Americans, its a welfare system that encourages single motherhood, and a drug law system that locks up fathers for petty drug dealing, possibly in addition to a culture which glorifies thuggishness and disdain for education ('acting white').

aminozuur 6y ago
I’m a refugee from the Middle East and I agree with you. Though the socio-economic class people grow up in seems at least as important as “culture and genetics”.
andrewmd5 6y ago
Ignoring the blatant racist generalization of Black people in your comment, recent Fed data shows your assumption is categorically false. Systemic Racism has always slowed the economic progress of those whose family roots are tied back to the first generation of slaves. It’s easier to build wealth as an immigrant than it is to build wealth after generations in a system that churns and spits out Black bodies without a second thought. This essay talks specifically about the tax of being successful and Black in America: what did your comment aim to do other than try to dismiss that people with a different skin color have difficult lived experiences?
- neilsense 6y ago
  > It’s easier to build wealth as an immigrant If you truly believe this you're too far gone to be brought back to reasoned thinking. A black person in America is born into the richest country the world has every seen, already speaking the right language, with the right accent, is surrounded by safety, welfare, libraries, schools, colleges. An immigrant has to work ten times harder to get the opportunity to even apply for a job remotely in their second or third language, leave their friends and family, entering a new country with zero credit and starting everything from scratch. Absolutely ridiculous to suggest that an immigrant has it easier just because it doesn't fit the narrative you want to set. Maybe spend some time with Black and Brown immigrants and ask what they have been through, what they have witnessed since arriving, and how they feel about things.

aminozuur 6y ago

Eminem is white, and grew up with a crack addicted single mother on welfare. I’m an Iranian refugee. I grew up in poverty and I had to help my mom with basic tasks (interpretting gov letters, making calls etc). I was isolated from all my extended family. I think this is more a class tax, than it is a black tax.

aaron695 6y ago

The person who wrote this, submitted it to HN and has said on Twitter they expected these comments. "predictably the comment section for this essay on HN is a slew of people saying " - https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1368649088292417536 https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1368649088292417536 FYI - The Black Tax - "a colloquial term for financially assisting ageing parents, siblings and other relatives" I think it is a fucked name since I've seen in so much in SE Asia and other non black countries, we are talking billions of people who are not black enough who also have to deal with this. I think that alone makes it incendiary and it also needs explaining on HN who are not all embedded in USA politics.