This idea that there is no social mobility in the United States, and that you can only get by if you are of a certain skin color or from a certain socioeconomic class is just BS. Yes, it is certainly easier to be prosperous if you were born into certain socioeconomic classes, but the idea that it is IMPOSSIBLE to get by if you weren't born white and rich is just an agenda that is easy to push because it makes many, many people feel good about themselves and feel like they don't have to work hard or make sacrifices in their lives to get ahead.
I grew up in a small town in the Midwest (99.2% white in the 2000 census with the 0.8% being comprised of my family that lived in town). A lot of my friends from high school who never studied hard and took six years to get a useless degree from some college no one has heard of and have no discernible skills work at the local Wal-Mart or some other similar type of job, and make next to nothing. I have other friends I went to high school with who are now on food stamps (yet still somehow have discretionary income for weed), and wouldn't you know it they grew up with more money than I did. Why anyone thinks those people deserve more than they get is beyond me. You choose to stack shelves for a living, then you have to deal with the consequences.
Here was my formula for going from a non-white household with $25k in household income in which I lived with a single mother who worked three jobs to support myself and my elderly grandparents who lived in the same house as me to me hitting the top tax bracket this year as a 28-year old. My mother was not sexually irresponsible and did not have additional children she couldn't afford to support. If she had had one more kid, our family would have been flat-out broke on the $25k per year my mother made. Instead, she sacrificed for me, wearing worn out clothes and shoes with holes in them, worked seven days a week, and never had any more children. I repaid this by working hard, never drinking in high school, being valedictorian of my class, going to an Ivy League school, and now as a 28-year old I hit the top tax bracket this year.
Note that there is no welfare, no governmental aid, and no "white privilege" in the aforementioned story. It was comprised entirely of self-sacrifice, sacrifice for one's child, focus, and hard work. How many generations did this social mobility take? It took one, and it didn't even involve being a professional entertainer or athlete. One generation of a family committed to hard work, education, not blaming others, and not playing the race card as an excuse for one's lack of success.
In fact, I once wrote a college application essay talking about overcoming constant, malicious, racism at my high school, and when my mother read it, she was extremely upset. She was upset because she said that she thought that she had taught me better than to ever use the race card. I remember being taken aback by her response at the time, but now 10 year later and having joined the real world as an adult, I realized how right she was in terms of trying to teach how to have a useful, constructive perspective on the world.
Separately, have you all seen in person what destitute people actually look like in China and India or elsewhere in the third world? Their quality of life is literally (and by literally I don't mean that figuratively) the same as feral, flea-infested dogs. It is jarring to your soul to see in person. That's not what your average family on food stamps looks like in America. It's not even close.
