Month: May 2023

When I look in the mirror, I see more than my milk chocolate skin color. I see the joys and traumas, the victories and defeats, and the pride and challenges of my life and the lives of generations that preceded me. I also see a woman with an easy smile, a heart full of love and compassion, empathy, creativity, and far too many worries. I see a woman who struggles with weight, hypertension, bad eyesight, and kidney disease. I see a mother and grandmother who is passionate about making the lives of the next generation better than her own. I see a human being who is concerned that mankind continues to fail black people and worse, that black people too often continue to fail ourselves. I see a woman who is tired but determined.

I learned early on that people and governments will disappoint me and that the only person I can rely on is myself. But at times, even I disappoint myself. I know as well as anyone that emotions often get in the way of doing what is good, right, and best for myself. For example, how many times have I sought comfort inside a bowl of potato chips? Too many times. However, I still consider myself one of the lucky ones.

Despite my shortcomings, I managed to get a good education, survive childbirth, retire from a good career, be happily married, be financially well off, and to live long enough to see my grandchildren. I didn’t need to be perfect to achieve this, just good enough and lucky enough to escape a few traps, dodge a few bullets, and circumvent a few pitfalls strategically laid to ensnare African Americans.

It’s disheartening to know that seventy percent of African Americans households are making less than $75,000 per year and are therefore not living as well as most Americans. According to Pew, 40% of African American households earn less than $30,000 per year. And having a household net worth over 1 million dollars puts me in the top 2% of black families while 20% of us live below the poverty level lets me know outside forces are actively at work. I fully recognize that a large part of my success can be attributed to pure luck (since God is no respecter of persons), but another part can be attributed to an alternative mindset I adopted, abandoning some aspects of black culture. I weaved together these desperate cultural attributes from my multicultural experience growing up and formed new habits that served me well. That’s what I want to talk about first.

I learned from my church friends to love God, to love others, to forgive, to walk humbly, to do justice, to be generous, and that faith without works is dead. From my alcoholic father, I learned to avoid alcohol and mind-altering substances, but I also learned the virtues of hard work, entrepreneurial endeavors, and to only buy property where the property values will rise. I learned from my mother that the pursuit of personal interests and talents was a worthwhile financial investment and to insist upon opportunities to prove the naysayers wrong. I learned from my Asian friends that competition can drive personal achievement upwards, and that competence has real world value. I learned from white people to value time and the efficient use of it and to watch my back. I learned from my Jewish friends to be frugal and to invest money and that investing is far better than spending. I learned from my Latino friends to value family relationships. I learned from my AKA sorority sisters that Black Girl Magic is real and that I’m not alone in wanting to improve black communities. I learned from my black friends and family to lean into color, creativity, and confidence. I learned from my international students that culture is a powerful driving force in human behavior, but that aspects of a culture can be rejected, revised, and eventually changed. Watching their transformation gave me hope.

As I was introduced to attributes from other cultures, I questioned some of the black cultural cues I absorbed growing up. For example, prior to attending school with a lot of Asians, high grades were easy to achieve because expectations were low, and the academic rigor was even lower. It was at the Asian elementary school that I came to understand that too much time spent playing sports, dancing, and listening to music jeopardized my academic achievement. Admittedly, my favorite past time before going to that school was watching television, listening to music, singing in the church choir, learning the newest dances, and playing sports. But I didn’t want to look stupid among my new classmates, so I had to change how I was spending my time. I wanted to compete academically, so I eventually spent less time singing, dancing, watching television and playing sports and a lot more time reading and studying. Surprisingly, I found that I enjoyed the acquisition of knowledge. I loved learning and the reward of high grades. I never abandoned the fun things, but they were no longer my biggest priority. However, among black family and friends, I became a lot less hip. I was known for (and not really appreciated) for my school smarts.

I learned from my father that home values increase more rapidly in white neighborhoods and that the free public schools are as good as the private schools in poor neighborhoods, so that is where we purchased homes. Since the fourth grade, I’ve only lived in white neighborhoods, and I think experiencing white culture (including being banned from the white neighborhood school) has helped me appreciate the vibrancy of black creativity and cuisine while also learning to navigate white spaces while fully understanding my “outsider” status.

Other encounters eventually shaped other aspects of my life as well. Spending time with my Jewish friends taught me that building wealth came from spending as little as possible on worthwhile products and investing as much as possible. Eventually, my investment growth outpaced my monthly income from my job. Latino encounters taught me to accept and enjoy the diversity of personalities within my family, to invest in family members, and not to cut ties with family members so easily. Growing up, I saw how easily ties were cut among black family and friends for offenses that went unforgiven. I saw jealously instead of financial investment in each other’s ideas. Beyond my family’s unique culture of investing in each other’s endeavors, I saw that pooling resources was like pulling teeth because there was too little trust in each other. I often asked my black college students if they could ask extended family to help them study abroad or pay for books and they said, “no”. The first time I studied abroad, the funds came from multiple extended family members. My mother helped me start a business and purchase my first house. I in turn helped my children with their endeavors and they in turn are willing and able to invest in each other without hesitation.

My point is that although African Americans in this country face very real problems with systemic racism, a few aspects of our culture work against our progress as a people. For example, our emphasis on sports and entertainment above academics, especially among our young males limits our educational and job prospects. Our obsession with fancy hair, fancy cars and expensive trendy clothes hampers our ability to purchase property and invest in the market. And finally, our lack of trust and loyalty to each other and the insane willingness to step on each other and even kill each other to preserve face or to get ahead is destroying us from within and ruining our collective reputation. I can say from the experience of my extended family that living in a black neighborhood is more dangerous, more expensive, less healthy, and more oppressive than living as a black family among whites. These are aspects of our culture that are within our power to change. However, other issues are harder to address.

For example, we are more prone to hypertension because of our genetics. Slave traders licked the faces of potential slaves to select the saltiest prospects because they were more likely to survive the middle passage. Those are the ancestors of most African Americans and account for our higher incidence of hypertension. However, our limited access to healthy foods, exposure to toxins, and inadequate healthcare have a lot to do with our poor health outcomes as well.

I have little faith in the government to improve our situation. In fact, Republican leaders are moving towards making things worse for us across the spectrum, including the removal of our historic contributions to this nation. In red states in the South where most of us reside (56%) the rollback of abortion rights will most negatively affect black women. We already have the highest abortion rates, but we also have the highest maternal mortality rates. Black women are three times more likely to die from complications in pregnancy and childbirth than white women. And of those born, the challenges they will face are enormous. But we are not helpless against these forces.

I advise my African American brothers and sisters to do the following: 1) Value, support and maintain relationships with each other by quickly forgiving forgivable trespasses; 2) Support leaders who uplift us by contributing to their campaigns and voting; 3) Stop wasting money and start saving and investing; 4) Move, eat better, avoid substances, and exercise; 5) Prioritize education in academic or trades; 6) Use birth control; 7) Work hard and seek promotion and better pay; 8) Know and understand your detractors; 9) Contribute to the community; 10) Keep the faith while doing the work.

People without boots have a difficult time pulling themselves up by them. I suggest we start putting on the boots we can find in our schools, among successful family members, and inside the few social programs remaining. And with a little luck and a few cultural tweaks, we can then start pulling ourselves up.

When it comes down to it, any able-bodied human in their right mind would choose to leave home if the living conditions were unbearable. The migrants at our Southern border made a choice that we ourselves would likely make if our circumstances at home were as dire as theirs. We all need a safe place to live. We all need shelter and enough to eat. We all want an opportunity to work and advance in this life.

Humans have been migrating since the beginning of mankind for a variety of reasons. First, there are survival reasons like the need to flee 1) the violence of war or gangs, 2) starvation from draught, famine or inflation, 3) natural disasters, 4) a lack of jobs or opportunity, 5) racial, religious, or political persecution. Then there are those, like my ancestors, who were forced to migrate for the exploitation of their labor. And finally, there are a few fortunate people who migrate by choice. These adventurous folks usually have enough wealth, social status, education, or talent that puts them ahead of the line for immigration in most countries. They aren’t the subject of our current immigration debate and in truth, borders mean very little to them because they are welcomed everywhere.

The romantic narrative of the U.S. is that we are a nation of immigrants. But in reality, we are a nation that tries hard to ignore the land theft and genocide of the indigenous people who already lived here, the enslavement of black people, and the exclusion of non-white and non-Christian people from fair immigration policies. We have never been a welcoming nation to immigrants from everywhere, despite the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”.

It’s inaccurate to say that our immigration system is broken. Certainly, it is under-funded. However, the disfunction is working as it was intended. Our system has always been designed to severely limit the legal entry of poor people of color. Lawmakers keep illegal immigration in place so that cheap labor remains available because taxes are being collected from them, labor complaints are few, and most social benefits can be denied. One could argue that the need for cheap labor drives the continuous under-funding public schools in poor areas.

Let’s face it, the U.S. economy has always thrived on cheap labor. Post-slavery and post-civil rights, our government leaders silently welcomed the able-bodied and highly ambitious people of color who illegally crossed our borders. They wrestled jobs away from poor blacks with their cheaper labor and fewer complaints about working conditions. Our government allowed drug trafficking because the drugs were primarily limited to poor black and brown communities while boosting the economy of our Southern neighbors and providing a reason to imprison a large population of poor people of color, ensuring they couldn’t vote and would be forever doomed as cheap labor. The situation was manageable and suited its intended purposes just fine.

But things changed when white folks started demanding greater quantities of drugs and started dying from them. Interesting, but not at all surprising how drug addiction stopped being criminal and became a public health issue as soon as a growing number of whites were affected. With money to be made, other countries entered the drug supply chain and conditions South of the border deteriorated to the extent that people started doing what desperate people do. They leave their homes in order to survive.

The Statue of Liberty seems like an open invitation, and they are coming. However, the white nationalists don’t want them here in numbers beyond their ability to exploit their cheap labor. They fail to see all humans as fully human with value and so their empathy level is as low as ever. To their core, they believe the lie that white skin is somehow superior and more deserving of life and opportunity in this nation. They forgot that their ancestors were migrants, too, who fled all kinds of disasters or came seeking opportunity. What makes them better than the migrants showing up at our Southern border any different from those who showed up at Ellis Island? Nothing except the color of their skin. And Republican leaders rely on their bigotry to force their true agenda.

Remember when they convinced their constituents to be afraid of Muslim terrorists and their “Sharia Law” taking over our government? Then they introduced fear of Asians whom they blame for bringing Covid-19. These days, they stoke fears of being overrun by brown immigrants, fleeing violence and poverty. Trump and his MAGA news outlets successfully convinced his followers that those southern migrants were to be feared as rapists and drug traffickers coming to kill them and take over the nation. He later said the quiet part out loud when he said he preferred people from white nations to immigrate and not those from “shit hole” countries. Funny, but that has always been the case. Think of how easily this country turned on a dime on behalf of Ukraine migrants.

I spent my career in higher education working in the segment of our immigration system that deals with foreign students coming to the U.S. and sometimes staying beyond their degree to work, marry, and become U.S. permanent residents and then citizens. Those with a lot of money would literally buy themselves a green card by setting up a business. Those with coveted degrees in science and technology would work themselves into eventual citizenship. Those who married a U.S. citizen for actual love got to stay provided they married a citizen with enough money. The students who came here from around the world are generally among the wealthiest and most privileged in their home country. The poorest rarely find their way here to study but when they do come, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to sustain them. Preference was always given to the wealthy.

I look at our immigration system and I realize that Congress has little to no will to improve upon a system that lets in just enough poor desperate people to provide cheap labor to industries that need it. A small amount will be legally admitted, but most will be undocumented and that is by design. Congress has the authority to drastically increase the number of guest workers allowed into the country, but it refuses because wages and working conditions will have to improve and prices will increase. These improvements will impact industries like agriculture, meat processing, hospitality, construction, and garment making. These are jobs Americans typically no longer want to do. And DeSantis in Florida is finding that out.

That said, what’s happening in Florida scares me. DeSantis knows that certain industries need cheap labor and forcing undocumented immigrants to leave his state has created a crisis that he will need to address. My fear is that he has just opened the door for him to exploit the labor of prisoners as the 13th Amendment allows. Most of the prison population in this country are black and brown people. Sound familiar? I’m curious to see if he goes the route of legalized slavery. It would not surprise me as crops rot in the fields and construction halts.

Other red states who are anti-immigrant are lowering the child labor standards to fill their need for cheap labor. Their obvious targets are the children from poor areas with failing schools and few opportunities. Without an education, these children will become part of the permanent cheap labor force and so will the children they will be forced to give birth to.

You see, lawmakers know that the anti-abortion laws don’t affect wealthy women who can afford contraception and easily obtain an abortion by traveling. But it does force the poorest women among us to give birth. The white children can be adopted, but we all know that black and brown babies are far less desirable among those who can afford to adopt. They will be raised by poor mothers or become wards of the state. Pro-life Republican leaders are really about providing industry with homegrown cheap labor to exploit while simultaneously closing our borders to drugs and brown people.

As long as white people keep thinking they are superior and Americans keep demanding illicit drugs and the rest of us insist on buying cheap goods and services provided by exploited cheap labor whether from undocumented immigrants, homegrown cheap labor, or perhaps a return to slave labor, absolutely nothing will change in our economic system that thrives on human labor exploitation.

Before I continue with my family’s story, I’ll take a moment to wish all the mothers, mother’s to be, and grandmothers a very happy Mother’s Day. I hope your family expresses their love and appreciation for all you do. And if they don’t, I encourage you to give yourself a pat on the back and treat yourself to time off or a special treat. You deserve the recognition.

Now I’ll continue our journey as blacks in America.

Our family had moved from Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley foothills to escape the growing dangers from multiple directions. My brothers transferred from the affluent, primarily Jewish high school they attended in Los Angeles to the less affluent, but overwhelmingly white high school available in the area. I, on the other hand was given a choice between the white junior high (middle school) in the same neighborhood as my brothers’ high school or the predominately black junior high in a different neighbor. My mother left the decision to me and was considerate enough to allow me to tour both schools.

So, after walking around both schools during a quiet summer afternoon when no one was around except for a few administrators, I chose the predominately black middle school (grades to 7th-9th) back in those days. I didn’t choose it because the campus was nicer; it was decidedly inferior, but because I had never been to a school where most of the kids looked like me. Up to this point in my life, I had been one of the only black girls among Mexican, white, Asian, and Jewish children. The only time I got to interact with black kids was on rare play dates with my few black classmates and at church or family gatherings, so I thought this was going to be a great experience.

I was in the eighth grade. Had I been paying attention, I would have realized something was amiss when the counselor said that they would place me in the highest academic track, considering the school I was transferring from. I distinctly remember asking myself why they had an academic track at the junior high level? They didn’t have that kind of thing at my previous junior high. My previous school was filled with wealthy white, primarily Jewish kids and only a small handful of my Asian friends from elementary school. I loved the beautiful brick buildings and the academic rigor as well as the exposure to yet another culture that valued academic challenge as much as I did. That was my mindset.

In fact, as far as I could tell, all of our black family and friends valued education and so I assumed it was part of our culture as well. I soon learned that other players had somehow stripped education from our grasp and poisoned our collective academic aspirations. We valued education, but it was often denied to us.

When school started that fall, I was shocked to see that each of my classes were filled with the only white kids in the school and small handful of other black kids. I didn’t know enough to question why only a small number of black kids were receiving the best education they had to offer. Looking back, it didn’t seem to be a lack of desire among the kids for academic rigor, but rather a lack of expectation on the part of the white teachers and administrators in charge to provide it. My black friends were creative, intelligent, and ambitious. And sadly, I came to realize much later that black children and often their parents were not even aware that they were being offered a below standard K-12 education. I was a lucky kid who slipped through the cracks of a prescribed oppression scheme.

Interestingly, it was at this middle school that I, along with the other black kids in my class were tested for the gifted program. Were we such an anomaly? I didn’t think so. Or were we an experiment? Only two of us passed the test and we were given the distinction as being a “state-identified gifted student”, a designation that would later become the weapon my mother needed to fight for my academic placement at the white high school I would attend the following year.

I was proud of my mother’s boldness when she marched over to the high school and demanded that administrators enroll me in honors courses as well as the German language class that I had requested but was flatly told was probably too difficult for me. Armed with my straight A report card and a certification that I was state identified as “gifted” she also reminded them that they were being paid extra to have me at their school. I got my classes.

However, the message was clear to me that as a black person, I had to be more qualified than my white peers to gain access to white spaces and to gain any sort of recognition for my work. Thankfully, I thrived academically and made my family proud. And I earned an “A” in German for the entire six semesters. You’d think that with my stellar grades and extracurricular activities and awards that I’d have an easy time selecting among the best colleges and universities in the country, but that wasn’t the case. I was Ivy League material, but never even heard of the Ivy Leagues.

My one and only visit to the college guidance counselor proved futile. The counselor hardly looked at me and offered me zero guidance on my college choices. I only really knew of the local universities our gifted program toured, and so I ultimately ended up following the footsteps of my older brother who attended the University of Southern California. It was the only school I applied to, and I was accepted with a full tuition scholarship. Affirmative Action was in place to provide people of my skin color the opportunity to attend top schools if qualified and I was definitely qualified. Some still think Affirmative Action takes spaces away from qualified white students when legacy admissions have long been a form of Affirmative Action for white students, and no one bats an eye.

I understood that a few turns of luck and my mother’s advocacy made it possible for me to be qualified. The K-12 educational system was designed to track black children out of higher education at every stage with inferior schools, substandard curriculum, and low expectations. For most black children, especially if they are poor, the system was not set up to provide them with adequate college preparation. Affirmative Action was of no use to most of them. However, it cracked open the doors for the exceptionally lucky few like me, but literally opened the flood gates of higher education and job opportunities for the academically prepared Asian students and white females.

As black people finally realize just how rigged the system has been against us, we are finally taking steps to increase our numbers in higher education, corporate America, and politics. The diversity, equity and inclusion policies found in medicine, education, and corporate America, designed to mitigate the actual harms of racism and white supremacy are under attack before their full benefits can be realized. The pre-Civil Rights racism and white supremacy that severely limited black opportunity, ravaged black communities, introduced drugs, denied access to the building blocks of generational wealth, underfunded schools, and destroyed black families with police brutality and incarceration were neither benign nor unfortunate policies of our historical pass. We are just digging out from their effects but there are some who want to drag us back.

It’s very clear to me that people need context for understanding that programs like Affirmative Action, and laws like the Voting Rights Act and fair housing and police reform and educational equity and the push for sentencing reform are not a form of reverse discrimination. Nor do they pretend that racism and discrimination never existed, and that the U.S. has always lived up to its ideal of a colorblind society as some would have us believe. The lingering white supremacists among us want to erase this context along with the history of discrimination in America as they work to pass policies that stop black and brown economic and social progress. They seek to introduce a false narrative that America is now and forever has been a fair country where hard work and ingenuity will make anyone rich.

I’ll conclude my family story here. Of course, I continued the challenge of being black in America as I raised my own children. I had to be just as bold of as my mother and on this Mother’s Day, I want to express my sincere love and gratitude to my late mother, Juanita Joni Ball, for raising me and being my biggest source of inspiration and my greatest advocate.

I’ll pick up where I left off last Sunday.

Our reunited family eventually moved into an even bigger house in a predominately white and Asian neighborhood. We were the first black family on the street. Interestingly, my two brothers and I had no problems fitting in with the neighborhood kids whether they were Asian or white. We had a lot of fun together. However, our acceptance ended at the school gates that fall. I never questioned why all the Asian kids on our street attended private schools. In retrospect, I now understand why. After the first week of school at the all-white elementary school, we were asked to leave and to attend the integrated school in a nearby neighborhood. This wasn’t the South; this was Los Angeles in the late-1960’s.

Although the Asian kids on our block didn’t attend the integrated school where we were sent, the students at the new school were predominately Asian. I was one of four black girls in the entire school but that wasn’t a new situation for me. From pre-school through 3rd grade, there was only one other black girl (Sheila) attending the predominately Mexican-American elementary school close to L.A. County Hospital where our mother worked. I adjusted fine.

It turned out that the Asian school was more academically competitive than the white school, but it was also much more poorly resourced than the ascetically beautiful whites only school. There were only bungalows for buildings, no gymnasium, no fancy playground, and no daily hot meals served in a nice cafeteria. Instead, we had a covered patio and a hot dog day every Thursday (plain or mustard). Despite the obvious economic disparities between the two schools, I thought school was great. I was challenged academically, and I developed wonderful friendships with children from different cultures, primarily first-generation children of Japanese immigrants. Much like my experiences with the Mexican-American children, I sampled their food and visited their homes after school to play. My multicultural upbringing taught me that beneath the cultural differences, we are essentially the same as human beings. While I was thriving at school, our home was descending into mayhem.

I never asked about the pressures that lead my father to drink heavily. But I suspect that the 1965 Los Angeles riots must have been difficult for him since he had worked so hard helping to establish a thriving business community there. My dad gradually descended into darkness and anger as he drank his Vodka and orange juice into the evening. Some days he brought home candy bars and games; other days, he brought home frustration and violence. I recall lying in bed some nights, waiting to see which father would enter our home. Sometimes, my mother knew he had been drinking and she would sneak us out the back door as he entered. We would spend time at a drive-in movie theater sleeping until she was certain he had fallen asleep, and it was then safe to return to our beds.

The backdrop of our family troubles was a turbulent in society where black frustration with discrimination in education, employment, housing, banking, and over-policing lead to unrest. It felt as though we were prohibited from prospering at every turn and that angered me too. But I didn’t understand why we were burning down our own stuff. In our outrage against injustice, we were destroying our own communities and our own futures. I realize now that my elders understood how ruthless and violent whites were towards us given little provocation, so destroying white neighborhoods was off limits. We had endured the Watts Riot in 1965. The same summer I was staying to Detroit, the 1967 Detroit riot broke out. I recall sitting in the living room with the lights off during part of that riot. My grandfather sat with his gun in his lap, determined to kill anyone who threatened his home and family. I wondered then whom he was afraid of. Was he afraid of other black people or the police? The answer was both. And that turned out to be the reality of black people like me for years to come. I’m afraid of desperate black people and fearful of insecure and entitled white people. Both are dangerous.

My overly-pressured, hardworking, but unpredictable alcoholic father was also threat. And so was the overtly friendly and wealthy white television producer who lived next door. This horrible man knew he could get away with sexually assaulting a ten-year-old black girl with impunity because he knew that my dad would be the one to go to prison for defending me. So, I said nothing and refused further entry with my brothers into his “fun” home. The deprived and depraved black gang members who stole leather coats from my two brothers were a threat. And the police who viewed all young black males as criminals were a threat. I was in middle school and my brothers were in high school when my grandparents decided to help my mother separate from my father for the second time. They provided her with a means to escape him and the now dangerous city.

We moved to the foothills of the San Fernando Valley, away from everything since the old neighborhood was changing and violence at the nearby high school was becoming a problem. Many of our neighbors had moved away (white flight). The black neighborhoods where we attended church and where our close friends and family all lived had become especially dangerous as desperation and lack of opportunity turned to criminality. Selling drugs, using drugs, and stealing from each other along with the pressure to join a gang for personal protection, economic opportunity, and excitement had become prevalent. My mother was right to move us out of Los Angeles so that we could be safe, build equity in a home, and obtain a decent public education. But getting the education we deserved turned out to be a battle of its own.

There was no question that my brothers would attend the all-white high school in our school district because it was the only high school. But I was given a choice between an all-white or a primarily black middle school. Having never attended a school where almost everyone looked like me, I chose the black middle school. That was an eye-opener on a variety of levels and deserves more attention that I can devote right now. So, I will continue the story in my next blog post.

My hope is that reading my story will help readers see the effects of systemic racism. The decisions lawmakers made to exclude black veterans from the G.I. Bill, to allow red-lining of neighborhoods, to allow the infusion of drugs into black neighborhoods, to ignore the reluctance of banks to loan money to black people, to permit the unfair hiring practices of businesses, the underwriting of targeted efforts within the criminal justice system to incarcerate black people while the media vigorously reported on it, and the blatant suppression of the vote, made it all the more difficult for black Americans to climb the social economic ladder. And now, just as we are beginning to climb up, there are those who want to push us back down.

People need context for understanding Affirmative Action and the Voting Rights Act and fair housing and police reform and educational equity and the push for sentencing reform. The formation of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs didn’t suddenly materialize as a means to harm white people. The agenda of DEI is to disrupt a system designed to make white people winners at the expense of others. The lingering white supremacists among us want to erase the context under which DEI was formed along with the history of discrimination in America so they can pass policies that stop black and brown economic and social progress. The goal is a permanent underclass to provide cheap (if not free) labor. The Republican Party in particular seeks to introduce a false narrative that America is now and has forever been a fair country where hard work and ingenuity will make anyone rich and those who fail, have done so because of a personal character flaw.