A great read and you're right, we have never lived in a meritocracy in this country, and the odds are we never will. White people live in a bubble of denial. Throughout my life, I've seen White people slide into positions in corporate, Hollywood, the media, etc., who were infinitely unqualified, but there they were being trained and mentored by Black people who had the education, experience and training, but were told they didn't have what was necessary to do the job they were training the White person for.
In Hollywood, a well-connected White nepo baby can walk right into an acting, directing, writer's room or studio position without talent, experience, an agent, a SAG card, or be a member of the writer's guild or director's guild...all of that will be handled later. You think a ordinary Black person can just pull up and land those types of opportunities? HELL NO! In modeling, rich White nepo babies walk runways and land big contracts without paying any dues, and the models who've worked their a**es off have to just watch it happen because if they say anything they'll be blacklisted. Black models are already in a tenuous position in the fashion industry, this middle finger salute only makes it worse for them.
Working in the media is also another area where this meritocracy myth goes down in flames. The well-connected end up hopping over seasoned journalists, especially Black ones, and end up anchoring their own shows and given the "big gets," Black journalists are still pulling up the rear in the media. Have you noticed that there are very few Black anchors in the primetime spots? The weekend news is where most Black journalists are placed and that's by design.
And corporate America is full of this this type of in-your-face let's promote so and so's son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, niece, nephew, god-daughter, godson, sorority or fraternity friend's children...no experience is needed, just be White. The corporate structure has NEVER been based on meritocracy and look at how quickly the powers-that-be dismantled the DEI divisions and told the Black people, especially the Black women who were heading those programs, to hit the bricks.
White people, and their mouthpieces for White Supremacy (Asians...how is that dismantling of affirmative action working for them, self-hating Blacks and pro-White Latinos) always like to brag about how they made it on their own and you need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps (which is a joke in itself), yet when you dig deeper, sometimes you find that their lie couldn't be further from the truth. They had help...a lot of it. But when Black people achieve success, you know immediately that they had to run a medieval gauntlet to get to where they wanted to be. Yet on cue, a lot of White people and even some POCS, will try to negate and minimize a Black person's achievements and intelligence, then say they were a diversity hire. It's a decades-long pattern of behavior with them.
The lack of self-awareness with some White people is infuriating. If education and working hard was all Black people needed to succeed in life, then why are so many well-educated, hard-working Black people still hitting brick walls in their lives and professions? Why aren't there more Oprah's, Robert Smith's, Rihanna's, Jay-Z's, et al? Hell, why as the article says, the wealth of a White household is 7.8 times that of a typical Black household? White people absolutely do love maintaining their superiority with these racial disparities because they don't want to accept that racism exists, and that they're helping racism and the consequences of it, to remain alive and well. It simply helps them to maintain their power and place on the upward mobility food chain.
