Oxfam published a report on Monday saying the wealthiest 1% have more money than the rest of the world combined. Initially, I felt defeated, both by the lack of conventional media coverage of this groundbreaking (if damning) data, and by social media’s lack of sustained pressure to discuss this inequity in the subsequent week.
Sixty two people have a combined worth of 1.67 trillion dollars, the same amount of money that the poorest 3.6 billion people in the world share. The report goes on to list statistics on carbon emissions versus impact that had me throwing up a little in my mouth. As my horror mounted, I tried to put this gross amount of money into a context that my fifth quintile mind could comprehend.
Sixty two people have 28 billion dollars each. How much is a billion? One hundred millions? Nope, google says it’s 1000 millions. Twenty Eight Thousand Millions still seems like an inconceivable sum. I try again.
Sixty two people can spend 1 million dollars a day for eighty years.
Sixty two individuals could take up a collection and pay the U.S. deficit-- and still spend 1 million dollars a day for fifty four years.
This isn’t make-it-rain money. It’s make-it-Katrina-money.
My first reaction was to get angry. The 1% are running our world, and they’re doing a piss poor job of it. It’s not even sixty two families! There are four Waltons, three Mars, and two Kochs on the list. These players and pimps are getting it in on elections, media, holidays, pharmaceuticals, banking, gambling, makeup, the internet, and television.
There is literally no way to avoid putting your money in one of their pockets.
Like the mythological Hydra of old (that’s Greek, not Marvel for you millennials), this monstrous inequality has many heads and seems impossible to best.
Yes, I was frustrated and angry. As a black woman, the release of the report on the thirtieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Day served to underscore his sentiment (related by Harry Belafonte on the #MLKNow Livestream) that we were ‘integrating into a burning house’.
Martin Luther King’s solution was for us to become firemen. Instead of fighting fire with fire, he encouraged black America-- the downtrodden, the oppressed-- to extend the branch of kinship, take on the burdens of others-- to find a way to put the fire out! He encouraged us to use the power of economic withdrawal to force a government that was known as an agent of peace in the world and an economy that worked for everyone, not just a privileged few.
Critics might point out that during the time period Dr. King made those suggestions, the black/white wealth gap ranged from 1.8 to 1.6%, not the staggering 15-20% margin we read about today. They’re right. This is the largest margin of income inequality by race the United States has experienced since the eighteen hundreds.
Despite these bleak realities, black America still has the ability to realize Martin’s dream by following his plan. According to Nielsen’s market reports, African Americans possess 1.1 trillion dollars worth of buying power, and significantly influence market trends across all races and segments.
In other words, We Lit, and what we pick is Lit.
The sixty two richest people in the world are getting richer because we keep putting OUR money into THEIR pockets. It should make us angry-- at ourselves.
Forbes publishes this list every year. The same people are on it every year. All Oxfam really did was connect the dots for us that we could have connected for ourselves a few decades ago. Black America’s buying power keeps growing, while our wealth keeps shrinking. The solution is straightforward: stop making them rich.
If we are serious about economic justice, we have to stop shopping at Walmart.
We have to stop buying Mars candy.
We have to stop voting for any politician who gets money from the Koch brothers.
We have to give up Nikes, give up L'oreal, give up BMW, brands that we like. We have to remember that a brown face in the ad doesn’t mean it’s for us. But it won’t be enough to just give things up that we don’t need.
We have to invest in the creation of things we do need. We can’t escape Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Cox, Disney, Dell, and Apple without widening the digital divide. But we can invest in people like Kimberly Bryant of BlackGirlsCode. We can download free apps by black developers like Five-0 (a user submitted police interaction rating site) and Around The Way (a black business locator).
We cannot replicate the white supremacist and exclusionary structure that landed us in this mess by replacing it with a black supremacist system. We have to seek out diverse allies as equal partners in the fight to extinguish the fires of injustice. This is their house too, and it is burning.
We have to begin the move, as Dr. King stated, “from a thing based society to a people based society”. We have to adjust our view of integration from a melting pot of indistinguishable slop to a spicy paella of varied yet complementary ingredients. In 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. stood in a church in Memphis and asked black America to set a new standard for the world. Forty eight years later, Oxfam showed us the cost of saying no.
The way out is straightforward. It’s just not simple.
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