{"id":81,"date":"2007-12-14T12:46:18","date_gmt":"2007-12-14T17:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kim.thewei.com\/20071214\/making-it-isnt-all-about-hard-work\/"},"modified":"2013-12-13T08:15:31","modified_gmt":"2013-12-13T13:15:31","slug":"making-it-isnt-all-about-hard-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/making-it-isnt-all-about-hard-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Making it isn’t all about hard work."},"content":{"rendered":"

The myth is simply this: that if an individual will work hard, follow the rules, and be patient that they can be successful. . . The truth is that in accumulating wealth hard work plays a very small role . . . no group has worked harder than the slaves that built this country, the Chinese that built the railroad, or the Mexicans that continue to do the menial labor that drives our information society.<\/p>\n

Today, as Tim Wise writes in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Mother of All Racial Preferences” white baby boomers are benefiting from the largest transfer of wealth in American history as they inherit their parents\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 estates. Some of that wealth dates back to the years of slavery, when Blacks were forced to work for free while their white owners and the American economy accumulated the benefits of their toil. Another large category of the transferred wealth is land, much of it stolen by the American government from Native Americans and Mexicans and sold for a pittance to white settlers. For the average white family, however, some of the largest sources of wealth are the result of racial preferences in government policies that were started in the 20th century.<\/p>\n

. . . it was a fact that I worked the hardest on the jobs that paid me the least . . . How can we in good conscious claim that the person[s] working for minimum wage or working two menial jobs is not working hard enough and are therefore responsible for their lack of wealth?<\/p>\n

Critics of affirmative action lean heavily on the myth that people make it on their own in the United States based on hard work and individual effort. They also maintain that government intervention in the wealth creation process is not just unprecedented, but un-American. Simply put, they ask: Why should the beneficiaries of affirmative action be the recipients of preferential governmental policies when whites acquired their wealth through hard work? The answer is simple: in reality governmental policy has played an absolutely crucial role in determining the racial character of the haves and the have nots in America.<\/p>\n

. . . The majority of personal wealth in America is based on home ownership, if governmental policies provided funds for one group and not all groups equally then that is favoritism. With the government condoning and encouraging \u00e2\u20ac\u0153red-lining\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in mortgage loans by the FHA, it allowed whites to receive low interest loans on their mortgages thus providing them with the needed equity to begin the process of wealth accumulation. This is just one of many government policies that helped to decide who was going to be well-off in America and who wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jump to full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The myth is simply this: that if an individual will work hard, follow the rules, and be patient that they can be successful. . . The truth is that in accumulating wealth hard work plays a very small role . . . no group has worked harder than the slaves that built this country, the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Making it isn’t all about hard work.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4579,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/4579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}