It Does Get Easier

Eddie C. Brown, founder, chairman, chief executive and senior portfolio manager of Brown Capital writes in the Washington Post:

I’m a black CEO. I’ve been discounted on Wall Street because of my skin color.

Discrimination leads to lowered expectations. Lower expectations lead to discrimination.  

It's not fair, but it's going to take a lot of Frederick Douglasses and Eddie Browns, outperforming their complacent white peers, to break down the stereotypes and level the playing field. Again, not fair; but reality.

The good news is that the ruling class always gets complacent and therefore steadily easier to beat. Watch Monty Python's "Upper Class Twit Of The Year" skit showing elites outdoing each other in acts of stupidity.

Mr. Brown notes that "America does not breed talent, it prefers to breed generational elitism, where very few minorities get to compete on a level playing field."

If that's newsworthy, that's a consequence of our failure to learn from history - because it always works that way. "Successful" societies always breed generational elitism. Generational elites inbreed mental laziness, which devolves into outright stupidity. The implication is that the lean and hungry upstarts, if they keep at it, will find it steadily easier to break through.