18 Nov 2021, 8:45 am
Interesting list...
Barack Obama--half-white, half black. Parents met in college.. Raised by white mother. Father came from distinguished family.. Grandmother was a banker.
Condeleeza Rice--professional parents. Dreamed of being a concent pianist
Colin Powell--parents were Jamaican immigrants.
Thurgood Marshall-'His father, William Canfield Marshall, worked as a railroad porter, and his mother, Norma Arica Williams, worked as a teacher. Marshall's parents instilled in him an appreciation for the United States Constitution and the rule of law.[6][7] Marshall first learned how to debate from his father, who took Marshall and his brother to watch court cases; they would later debate what they had seen. The family also debated current events after dinner.'
Oprah--She did have a poor, impoverished background. But her talent was apparent. Did well on her speech team in high school and got a full scholarship.
Kamala--Mother was Indian, father black.
"Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a Tamil Indian biologist whose work on the progesterone receptor gene stimulated advances in breast cancer research,[11] had arrived in the United States from India in 1958 as a 19-year-old graduate student in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley."
Andrew Young--"Andrew Young was born on March 12, 1932, in New Orleans, to Daisy Young, a schoolteacher, and Andrew Jackson Young Sr., a dentist."
Maya Angelou--"When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage"[7] ended, and their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas, alone by train, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. In "an astonishing exception"[8] to the harsh economics of African Americans of the time, Angelou's grandmother prospered financially during the Great Depression and World War II because the general store she owned sold needed basic commodities and because "she made wise and honest investments."
Damon John--""
Sensing potential, John and his mother mortgaged their house for $100,000 to generate start-up capital.
Kizzmekia Corbett--Her fourth grade teacher, Myrtis Bradsher, recalls recognizing Corbett's talent at an early age and encouraging Kizzy's mother to place her in advanced classes. "I always thought she is going to do something one day. She dotted i's and crossed t's. The best in my 30 years of teaching,"
Most of the success stories are of people from backgrounds that are not the norm for a poor black family. And their parents are largely middle-class (or higher). Oprah is probably the only one that fits your narrative (if you were seeking to show poor black Americans can make it).
A COLLEGE basketball player has a 1% chance of making it to the NBA. It's practically like hitting the lottery....
Anyway, I cited you to evidence of structural impediments to black success, how they are bombarded with negative perceptions of themselves. You may think you're not affected by the outside world, but our perceptions of who we are is heavily influenced by the social world around us. White males--even poor--are not getting that social negativitiy reflected back into them, which is then internalized. It is not an accident that you chose examples of black people who had backgrounds that had largely escaoed that kind of negativity.
And a few succcess stories hardly disproves the contention that poor black Americans have high barriers to success, anyway. The vast majority of people don't make it to that level of success. Generally, success is having a good-paying job, having a nice house, raising a family. The question is what are the barriers to poor black Americans making it to thst level of success. They're high.