This year I got a pretty good promotion at work and I now make a decent salary. I was born in Brooklyn, NY but raised in the Bronx, where the African American community is almost completely in shambles in terms of employment options (Average individual income as of 2019 was $20,000, criminally low especially with the expensive NY rents). I grew up in a rough area and it's heartbreaking to see the kids from high school who were hard workers, intelligent and strong willed be so stagnant in their careers. Most earning maybe just a little above minimum wage, living in apartments with a bunch of roommates, or living generations in the housing projects. All working back breaking and demeaning jobs in the service industry. To everyone else I know that they're just some racist stereotype but I know that these people aren't lazy, stupid, criminals and it bothers me that I was lucky enough to get a 'good paying' job essentially sitting at a desk all day on reddit. It doesn't help that when I travel to work in the mornings the homeless population (from my observation) is almost entirely African Americans, who I know in the back of my head, weren't ever really given a fair chance at life. I'm sure they were relegated to high schools that were underfunded w/ mental detectors, criminalized even when we were in high school by police, low paying job after low paying job until an eventual mental breakdown or they turned to drugs to avoid that reality. Then I get to midtown, NYC and the realities are like night and day, it's as if what's going on where I'm from doesn't even exist.