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“Are the reasons Blacks have been successful in the United States is because we don’t live on an Island?”

by Donald W.R. Allen, II – Editor in Chief /The Independent Business News Network

“United States and Haiti: Same colors; Identical Disparities.”

United States of America (IBNN/Editorial Opinion/June 10, 2012)…The headlines read, “U.S. Child Poverty Rate Among Worst in Developed World.” New figures show the United States has one of the highest child poverty rates in the so-called developed world. According to UNICEF, out of 35 wealthy countries, only Romania has a higher child poverty rate than the United States’ 23 percent. How can that be? This is America – not Haiti…

There are Black people, and then there are successful Black people. Black people have struggled in the United States to obtain some form of economic equality while attempting to live a lower-level version of the American Dream. Successful Black people have accumulated the goals of education, economic stability and social acceptance with the notion the bottom could drop out at anytime, which puts an overwhelming amount of pressure on successful Blacks to maintain the day-to-day balance of work, home and family.

If you could, imagine the conversations in the White House between President Obama and his wife Michelle just before bedtime. I would gather these conversations are much different than the Bush, Clinton or Carter couple conversations meaning the challenges and conversations of a Black couple, even in the White House could be much like the challenges and conversations of everyday Black couples in the United States…it’s a possibility.

The reason why it’s possible to say that if Blacks lived on an island we wouldn’t be as successful versus living in the United States, can be understood by looking at some historical facts and a current undeniable state of poverty for some 9 million people living on the island of Haiti. (Source: US World Bank)

According to Black Past.com, The Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere.  Slaves initiated the rebellion in 1791 and by 1803 they had succeeded in ending not just slavery but French control over the colony.  The Haitian Revolution, however, was much more complex, consisting of several revolutions going on simultaneously. These revolutions were influenced by the French revolution of 1789, which would come to represent a new concept of human rights, universal citizenship, and participation in government.

Haiti thus emerged as the first black republic in the world, and the second nation in the western hemisphere (after the United States) to win its independence from a European power – or did they?

The example of Blacks Haiti in comparison with Blacks United States can be used to make the argument that if Blacks in the United States were sanctioned to an island within the United States, our plight would be just like the one of Haitians. Like Haiti, would Blacks on that island in the United States be the poorest in the world? Would we have no future or even a glimpse of what success would look like? Would corruption within the Black community’s leadership create an upper tier of Blacks with the mindset, “White by definition, Black when convenient?“  If that island existed, would our own people use the poorness and inability to be successful against each other?

It’s happening today in 2012 in the United States and Haiti.

It would then be able to hypothesize the recurring disparities in Black communities across the United States that are significant to Blacks; achievement gap, unemployment, drugs, prison, hunger, crime and punishment would represent an isolation of Blacks do to race and skin color by those that seek willingly and maybe unknowingly to set us in social class structures that only a few can break out and become successful.

In the US, some successful Blacks have found a niche to control dollars meant to heal the community. These non-profit agencies, some ran by Blacks or White females have put a stranglehold on Black communities across the United States. So, if there were a cure for Prostate Cancer in the Black community, we wouldn’t know about it because of the great capital revenue it generates for those in charge of studies, research and pharmaceuticals.

Data shows that in 2012, Blacks in the United States ride the wave of some of the worst health and economic situations in history compared to the failure of Reconstruction in the 1800’s to the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

Today, in 2012 there’s a creepy disconnect between what ought to be done and what has been done.