Inspiration

"Many Mansions" by Kerry James Marshall

The inspiration for my final project was from William Pope.L and Kerry James Marshall pieces. My research was based on home-ownership, which is equivalent to wealth, of African-American people since 1970s to this present day. Kerry Marshall’s work is based on “what it means to be black in America” and William Pope on the “Black Factory” Marshall’s piece on, “Many Mansions” depicted life in 1994 for a black person. The men in the piece are working as gardeners in formal clothing digging graves or planting. It’s like they are burying their dreams of ever living a wealthy life similar to white people who can even afford mansions. The distant project towers look blank, dead; the earth seems to bleed. We are in the middle of a second civil rights movement, and that the first one ever ended. In late-20th- and 21st-century America, and part of Mr. Marshall’s story, is of life in low-income housing projects. Projects that were designed by the government in the 1930s as alternatives to city slums. Once built, economic support was limited and by the 1960s the projects had worsened, becoming media symbols of poverty and crime.

"The Black Factory" by William L. Pope

Pope L. customized a van to collect donated “black objects” which was anything a person believed to represent blackness. The Black Factory runs on prejudices against black people. By collecting, recycling and peddling the ingredients for re-thinking blackness, the Black Factory transforms the tensions and contradictions of race into a field of possibility. It encourages us to take hold of the stereotypes of race and class which bind us to our lack of concern and to turn them around. It challenges us to struggle with the habitual ways in which we consume products, identities and ideologies. The Black Factory asks us to rise and collaborate in the creation of a community built not upon erasing but rather embracing our own differences and contradictions.

The large wealth gap between whites and blacks is as a result of home-ownership dating back to the period when segregation dominated and not much land was given to the black to own property. Comparing the data from 1976 to 2015, the percentage of home-ownership of blacks from the graph, “Home-ownership More Common among Whites than Other Racial and Ethnic Groups,” has not changed. If blacks were given the resources and opportunities of owning a home as a way of gaining wealth and passing it on for their generations, then home-ownership percentage would gradually increase. I will be raising awareness by creating a bank where African-Americans can be able to get loans with flexible APR rates with additional assistance in information on home-ownership according to their desired locations.