Upper Class White Americans

One thing that nags at me when I walk around wealthier neighbourhoods and see the same archetype of the upper/upper middle class American is the type of people that exist in this echelon compared to the poorer areas. As I started to take walks around the city, around the shopping centers with Nordstrom and Saint Laurent, I noticed that the demographic of people is starkly different from the downtown areas, the areas scattered with homeless people, people on drugs, the bus drivers and the street cleaners. Before coming to the United States, while I knew that racism still existed, I had settled in a way of thinking that was self-proclaimed to be less simplistic than the typical 'America makes black people poor and makes white people rich'. And to some degree, I still don't believe it is that simple. But noticing the sparseness of people of my own race when exploring the part of the city I lived in versus how I became one of the many black people in the area of the public university I went to, got me thinking about race again. The people in the rich areas where mostly white. White people who wore pristine clothes and diamond earrings and shopped at Tom Ford on a regular Saturday afternoon.

One thing I sensed was the discomfort I felt in the white areas. Now, I wouldn't say I am one of those black people who genuinely feel discomfort around white people. But I am one of those black people who feel discomfort when I am around majority white people, which is usually in these areas. But it's not because they are white. I think my soul can feel the energy of the disingenuous, fake nice, snobby rich people. This is not to say that these are the natural traits of white people, obviously. The few coloured people who live in these neighbourhoods exude these same traits. I assume some of them are are like this because they are privileged (some, because not all privileged people are snobby narcissists). But when this privileged lifestyle starts to have a consistent association to people of a certain race, I imagine that it mentally conditions them (and myself, though logic fights back), to subconsciously regard the two things as naturally linked. Key word is naturally; while it is true that in the United States the case is more often than not that white person = privilege, white person = prestige, and so on, it's hardly an inevitable phenomenon.

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These types of people are ostentatiously warm and kind when they are around their fellow (white) upper/upper middle class friends, family, or acquaintances, the ones they see at the country club, the ones they meet up with for dinner at an overpriced Italian restaurant after they finish getting facials at a nearby spa. However, their warm, tenderhearted demeanor seems to vanish into thin air the moment they come across an individual who does not exude comfort and upper middle class whiteness. The smiles turn stiff, the eyes avert, the familiarity fades away. They're not blatantly racist, no, but they do prefer to smile at another white person over a black one. Much less one in a hijab, oh no. When I walk around these areas, I cringe at how much of a difference there is between the demographic of the people there versus the poorer, dirtier ones. Then I get sad. It all makes sense now; this is why America has so much of those Trump-loving rednecks still chanting racist dogmas left and right; this reality reinforces their deep-rooted racism. They don't want to understand that the reason why black people are still more economically disadvantaged stems from those few decades ago, when white people had all the rights to own property, to a good education, to opportunities to build generational wealth and an educated bloodline, black people didn't. They want to believe it is a natural phenomenon. All hail the Whites! America has a lot of work to do.