"Can We Rebuild Black Wall Street?"

[jabowery]

The question "Can We Rebuild Black Wall Street?", posed by the black nationalist Nation of Islam's publication "Final Call", can only be answered with a bit of background in political economy.

Black Wall Street was built on oil profits. These profits derive from property rights protections -- in this case mineral rights. If the costs of those protections are paid for out of taxes on things other than the property rights themselves, the profits are subsidized by the tax system. This is the basic con game of so-called "capitalism"*. Since some blacks in Oklahoma had acquired land prior to the discovery of oil on that land, they were in a position to reap some of the subsidized profits of this con game. The escalation of a relatively common extralegal mode of dispute processing (a 19 year old WHITE had been lynched a year earlier for shooting a cab driver in that town) into a full blown battle had a simple objective:

Make the owners of the oil rights sell cheap to some sociopaths that knew the con game forwards and backwards.

This con game is as old as civilization. The shift of tax burden off property rights, on to economic activity is a stage in the "progress", into decay, of civilization -- a stage missed, by the way, by such "luminaries" as Carroll Quigley. It is, therefore, a very highly developed art -- even genetic predisposition -- in the oldest of civilized cultures, which is why Silicon Valley is now over 2/3 "Asian" -- primarily south Asian.

The answer, therefore, to "Can We Rebuild Black Wall Street." is, "Probably not." for the simple reason that Africans are not as highly coevolved with civilization as are, for example middle eastern or south Asian cultures.

*There is another con game corresponding to so-called "capitalism" to which African cultures are more highly adapted, and that is treating society as one big tribal organization with a "big man", or tribal chief, rule. This is what we're starting to see emerge in the US in a process that started with the Civil War's abrogation of the 10th Amendment -- expressing in the imperial presidency. In this form of the con game, the subsidized profits increasingly centralize in the "public sector". Look at the concentration of blacks in Washington D.C. and the fact that the counties surrounding Washington D.C. have the highest per household median income, if not net assets, in the US.