Your Money Doesn’t Make You Special
By: Rocco Pendola
Tags: Race, Inequality, Money, Personal Finance, Saving

Consider Karen Cherry’s response to my recent Making of a Millionaire article, The Easiest Path to $1,000,000 in 20 Years:

Here’s the full context surrounding that statement:

So when I say it’s easier than you think to amass $1 million in 20 years, I say it from a position of privilege to an audience largely comprised of people on the same perch. This isn’t to say hard work doesn’t get you anywhere. It does. But, speaking for myself, I’m aware I have a head start. And it has little to do with anything other than my place in life. Hard work didn’t get me here. Luck and where and when my parents decided to have sex mainly did. If you’re one of the lucky ones to earn, say, $50,000 a year or more, you have a better than fighting chance to amass $1,000,000 (or more) within 20 or so years.

And here’s the funny thing. I come from a working-class background. My dad worked in a carbon plant for like 30 years and took a forced early retirement before doing maintenance for the local housing authority and painting houses on the side. My mom stayed at home. We weren’t poor. But we certainly weren’t rich.

My parents rented one unit in a duplex until I was in like first grade or something. Then we moved into our first house. A decade or so later, my parents bought the house they still live in today. It cost about $80,000. It’s long paid off and worth, if they’re lucky, $110,000 today.

My parents live comfortably on the aforementioned pension and Social Security. From time to time, they’ll drop a check in the mail, addressed to me for $1,000, even if I don’t need it. On holidays and my birthday, they send $100. They do likewise for my daughter.

To the best of my knowledge, we started out relatively poor. But my dad worked his ass off. When I was a kid, he left for work at 5 in the morning and sometimes didn’t get home until 6, 7, or 8 at night. He cemented us as comfortably middle class. This is how my parents live today.

Not taking anything away from my dad — because his work ethic deserves my and your respect — but it’s much easier to pull off what he pulled off for himself and his family in the small city we’re from than it is in more populous places, such as my adopted home — California. It’s not simply that he worked hard. It’s that he was positioned — even if not perfectly — for his super hard work to actually pay off in our society.

I see people every single day who probably work every bit as hard as my dad did — doing far more menial work — yet they don’t own a house outright or send a thousand bucks of discretionary income (that’s the key) to their kid for the heck of it.

People like my dad are a rare and special breed. They’re also beneficiaries of circumstance. I’m pretty sure my dad grew up poor, but it’s not the same type of poor other people grow up in and have to deal with. It’s way “easier” for a working-class white man in a small city, comprised primarily of other working-class white people, to break into the middle class and stay there.

Here’s why. And I fucking cringe as I admit these realities of my childhood. The move we made to the home my parents still live in today was a classic case of “white flight.” I still remember the front porch conversations among neighbors:

Are you thinking about putting the house up for sale? The blacks are moving in.

It’s true. As African Americans encroached on my predominantly white neighborhood, a vast majority of my white neighbors — including my family — got the hell out.

When I worked summers with my dad at the housing authority, there was a sense that black co-workers were lazy. For the record and to be clear, my dad never perpetuated this type of bull shit. There never was a person he didn’t like or respect, regardless of how they looked or what others thought of them. But, generally, if you were white, you instantly held higher status than your Black co-workers.

It’s quite remarkable when you think about it. My working-class father, who grew up some flavor of poor and worked his way out of it, operated and definitely operates from a position of privilege, particularly because he has never had to deal with the systemic racism and resultant inequality that directly and indirectly stigmatizes and thwarts the middle class dreams of so many People of Color.

I’m better off than my father was. He and my mother helped set me on the path to doing better than they did (depending on how you measure these things — I mean, I don’t own a home at all, let alone free and clear). But he was able to do what he did — for himself and his family — because of chance. The same goes for me.

It comes down to little more than luck, of being born a certain color in a particular place where the odds stack in a way that hard work absolutely can and often does prevail.