For centuries, beginning roughly with the European Renaissance, people with white skin color in the world experienced a period of rapid domination, over people with other skin colors from other geographies.  Domination included – but was not limited to - conquest of people, taking of land, forced religious conversion, cultural hegemony, enslavement of men, women, and children, and political, legal, and economic disenfranchisement.  This period in history is generally referred to as the colonial era, in which white “settlers” moved from their European homes to the homes of others with the sanction, support, and encouragement of church and state.

In attempting to explain their capabilities to dominate others with different skin colors, those with white skin put forward a variety of explanations including divine blessings, racial superiority, and the “savage” inferiority of the dominated.  Modern science (see, for example, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond), however, has explained to us the root causes of how those with white skin have been able to so thoroughly dominate those with other skin colors: geographic luck.

Europe, given its location in the vast Eurasian mega-continent, was endowed with native domesticable horses, cows, sheep, pigs, goats, oxen, wheat, and barley, and had access via trade routes to domesticable chickens and rice from Asia.  Taken together, this bountiful agricultural “package” allowed European farmers to create food surpluses, which led to larger populations, divisions of labor, denser urban environments, and advanced societies with craftsmen, universities, technologies, advanced weapons, and political orders.  In contrast, the native people of the Americas possessed only domesticable dogs and llamas, and corn, beans, and squash; the native people of Africa possessed only domesticable sorghum and virtually no domesticable animals despite the vast fauna of the continent. So too the native people of Australia possessed little in the way of domesticable animals and crops.  Finally, European agricultural and urban settings produced viral diseases against which other populations had no immunity, and which killed tens of millions, destroying their societies and leaving them completely vulnerable to conquest.

In the time since Columbus set sail westward to try to reach Asia, and instead beached in the Caribbean, the world as it was has been utterly transformed into the world it is now: a world where white-skinned people often maintain economic, political, cultural, legal, and other advantages over those with other skin colors, a legacy of luck handed down generation after generation.

This ongoing domination imposes enormous, incalculable costs on global society.  In the United States, people of color, descended from those who were enslaved or whose land was taken, are often deprived of the economic, political, and legal capital that they need to maximize their skills and talents, and this, in turn, deprives the entire nation of economic growth, hurting all of us.

This capital deprivation can no longer be accounted for in the disparities between access to horses, cows, wheat, and the other native animals and crops that originally produced domination, but to one reason only: structural inequalities resulting from legacy racism, a refusal to share the benefits of all forms of capital with others who may on the surface look different, but who share the same species DNA as all of us.

There are no good reasons, but many bad ones, for the United States and the world to continue to choose racism.  It is a self-inflicted illness, an affliction that holds all of us back individually and collectively.  The largely peaceful demonstrations that have materialized in the wake of Houston native George Floyd’s death, including one on the Graustark bridge during rush hour by my daughter Abby (age 15) and her friend Joy, are yet another uprising across the centuries by those eager and impatient to move the world beyond its costly and baseless affliction, for the good of all.

As such, New Capital supports them now, and forever.

Leonard Golub, CFA
Fiduciary Financial Advisor

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