HOW TO SURVIVE IN AMERICA

HOW TO SURVIVE IN AMERICA

Step One –COMING TO AMERICA

Ships coming from a distance carry everyone’s dreams

ashore. For some they slip in with the eddies of the

      tides. For others, they crash against the rocks of poor          fortune. Each brings their new song of freedom,    

      Coming to America.                                          -     Zora Neale Hurston

 When I first visited New York and stumbled over the stacks of garbage on the corner of Fifth Avenue, I was amazed by such poverty side-by-side with such wealth. I later discovered that the city was going broke; and that New Yorkers were betting on the city’s demise. Years later, when I flew into San Francisco, I was greeted by quite the opposite spectacle. My wife’s sister picked us up in her 500 SL Mercedes and ferried us through a kaleidoscope of dazzling billboards advertising everything from gambling in sunbaked Reno, to giving humanitarian aid to Darfur. I was deposited, after a ride across the elegant Bay Bridge, at Lake Merritt, the pride of Oakland’s American-African bourgeoisie. I had to pinch myself to believe the opulence was real.

It was real. The American-African community of Oakland, California, is probably one of the richest Black communities in the world. The skyline houses that look down from the redwood hills of the East Bay are not the exclusive preserve of whites, as is often the case in many neo-colonial lands. The sun-drenched Mediterranean climate is host to one of the most diverse communities in America. Yet beyond the mortar and bricks of their homes, American-Africans own very little of the wealth of this fertile region.