Elizabeth Wright - It is in no one's interest for blacks ever to leave the sinkhole of poverty

Elizabeth Wright, fmr. editor of Issues and Views

It is in no one's interest for blacks ever to leave the sinkhole of poverty, or to form a robust, healthy business class. It's obviously not in the interest of those who are part of the immense social service industry—the endless stream of social workers, counselors, and growing numbers of "experts."

It's not in the interest of civil rights organizations, whose administrators earn their bread off the needy masses. Nor is it in the interest of the black middle class whose members hold up the poor to demand ever more special privileges for themselves.

The end of a black underclass would not be in the interest of academics, for whom the distressed poor provide fodder for their ever-so-clever theses, monographs, doctorates, journal articles, books, and inventive, kinky courses. A strong black business class certainly is not in the interest of politicians, black or whit.

 The black politician, especially, is dismayed by the prospect of a strongly developed class of entrepreneurs as potential usurpers of his power and authority. A world devoid of poor blacks is not in the interest of the mainstream media, for whom our troubles provide the most titillating morsels for those nightly news/entertainment shows and those grim serialized features that fill the pages of newspapers and magazines. The loss of an underclass is not in the interest of the increasing numbers of black entertainers whose music, routines, characterizations and talk shows are built around the existence of black pathologies.