In Antonio Moore’s the Decadent Veil, he “undertook the daunting task task of clarifying the new veil of economics that has covered the struggles of a generation,” where the Black celebrity became a mechanism of propaganda that allowed representation and recognition to serve as a psychological salve for centuries of domestic terrorism and injustice.
There is a coming realization that while symbols are substantive, they lack real substance. They are socially meaningful but cannot replace intrinsic reality which demonstrates that Black Americans, collectively, are a wealthless group.
As Moore writes, “the decadent veil not only warps the Black community’s vision outward to a larger economic world, but it also distorts the outside community’s view of Black America's actual financial reality.” There is a growing need to assess the true dimensions of inequity and offer a clearer picture of the Black American socioeconomic position. In his article, “The Decadent Veil: Black America’s Wealth Illusion” Moore says, “Federal Reserve numbers show the median net worth for all white households is 112,000 while the median Black household was 6,000 in total. Not including the top 1 percent which is 8.3 million and 1.2 million respectively. This article, written in 2017, discussed the truth of a wealth gap before the pandemic and wars in Europe and the Middle East which has undoubtedly added to the increase of this evergrowing chasm since it was written, almost 10 years ago.
The decadent veil that began as a way to mask the growing inequities that have eclipsed the Black community and assures that it will remain tied to the bottom of America’s racial caste system, has become an albatross around its neck, reinforcing social and economic stagnation. As Marable writes in his book, Beyond Black and White, “the dire economic condition of the African American cannot be addressed by liberal reforms, tinkering at the margins of a system in the midst of a structural crisis.” He goes on to write that, “poverty in the Black community will not be reduced significantly by minority set asides, urban enterprise zones, or by neo-Booker T. Washington-style Black capitalism.”
The success of the Black American elite has become a mask that hides the greater failure and lack of provisions within the larger portion of Black America. It has become a form of social engineering that quells the internal and external dialogue that leads to a radical reconditioning of the mind and reconstruction of society that includes a redistribution of wealth and efforts at meaningful redress and reparative justice.
The truths that representation cannot replace actual policy initiatives and laws that move the Black American out of the throngs of centuries of abuse and victimhood. The socially engineered victories of a few cannot account for the economic reality of an entire group of people whose labor has been exploited to build a country they are forced to live in as second class citizens. The Decadent Veil demonstrates an unacknowledged truth that requires not just attention but action.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-decadent-veil-black-income-inequality_b_5646472
Marable, M. (1995). Beyond black and white: Transforming African-American Politics. Verso.
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