"Climbing the White Escalator"

by Betsy Leondar-Wright

"America is a meritocracy," my father always told me. The harder he worked, the more money he got: clear cause and effect. From individuals' prosperity or poverty, he believed he could determine their effort and talent. Therefore the poor black people in a nearby city clearly hadn't applied themselves.

My father had a legacy that he couldn't see, a legacy he only got because he is white. His ancestor, John Prescott, came from England in 1638. The Massachusetts Bay Colony granted him land in Central Massachusetts something no people of color got -- and he built the first sawmill there. As far as I can tell, none of his descendants have ever been poor. Some of my ancestors moved west to Ohio in the 1800s, where they may have received land under one of the Homestead Acts government programs closed to people of color. www.commondreams.org