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My parents were working in 1957 and were poor - one blue collar job and the other the equivalent of working in a sandwich shop. Four children and could not afford to buy a house.
The fact you write this is proof of why your life will almost certainly never change. I'm sorry.
??? Where do you come up with this stuff? I just hacked myself a cost reduction which is allowing me work toward accumulating a sum sufficient to get me living space adequate to centralizing my selling inventory and working from home.
??? Where do you come up with this stuff? I just hacked myself a cost reduction which is allowing me work toward accumulating a sum sufficient to get me living space adequate to centralizing my selling inventory and working from home.
If I was 18 in 1957, I would be dead today. I just barely survived with 1973 medical technology, when the survival rate was only 30%. In 1957 they would have just cremated me and stored me on a shelf.
You have 100 dollars in the bank now, no college degree, and make 10 dollars an hour in Sunnyvale.
Which would you chose? What would you do in said positions?
Hmm... I'm not sure that I would prefer to go back to a time when brown-skinned people were still widely considered to be savages. lol
Yep. its obvious OP isn't a minority. No minority in their right mind- black, brown, or otherwise would opt to turn the clock back to 1957 no matter how much money was in the bank.
If you were a minority in 1957 with a lot of money, you'd be okay. You'd just avoid most of the south. There were actually some middle class & rich black people in the past... they were just not that numerous and had their own social circles. Duke Ellington came from an middle class black family. There were limits - he could not achieve the ease of success that his white counterparts did, but he could still succeed. It was just hard to boot-strap if you were black because the best jobs were off-limits to you OR you had to work twice as hard.
But if you had pre-existing money or property, it helped a lot. For example, Jeremiah G. Hamilton was a black man and a millionaire when he died in 1876 (equivalent to 275 million now). He was black and from Haiti (never a slave, though). He made millions buying up fire-damaged properties in New York City then speculating in real estate & wall street. Yeah, people called him the "n****r of Wall Street" but then he'd buy your property out from under you.
I don't really understand the OP, because he's basically asking, "would you rather be rich or poor." Of course, most people are going to answer rich. I would rather be white and rich BOTH in 1957 or 2016. The fact that being white and poor is about the same as in 1957 and being black and poor is somewhat less bad in 2016 does not change my mind.
Last edited by redguard57; 03-31-2016 at 12:24 PM..
But wealth is not going to get you to the standard of living enjoyed today. A sandwich shop worker has a higher standard of living than a rich person in 57. AC, color TV, etc etc.
Specious argument.
Standards of living are relative to the era and geographical location.
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