Originally Posted by Kocolicious:
I remember many, many years ago watching some show on tv/pbs/whatever, and not really paying any attention to it [to lazy to find the remote], but then I heard the guest say, blah, blah, blah, "nothing more than a vulgar display of wealth", and I thought to myself, "how can wealth be vulgar"? "what the could 'a vulgar display of wealth' possibly mean"? Some years later I can remember hearing the phrase, "obscene wealth" or "obscene display of wealth". Meanwhile as time passed, I just dismissed the statements as maybe resentful 'rhetoric' of someone that may be bitter because they were not wealthy. But, then, [years later again] I began to watch a PBS documentary of "The Seven Wonders of the World" that was on, and I said to myself, "Wow, maybe I will watch because I've always wanted to see what was so special about the "Taj Mahal", how it came to be thought of as one of the "seven wonders of the world" in the first place.
But, to my grave disappointment, I learn that first, that it was really only a mausoleum.
Then I learned that "Shah Jahan had his minions "cut off the hands of the Taj Mahal's architect and his workers after the structure was completed, ensuring they would never build another of its kind", and that it took 20,000 men over 22 years to build it, that it was built with many 'precious stones', and the cost to build it would be equivalent to a billion dollars today. All the while, there was war and famine and poverty and destitution all over India. Then, after watching this documentary and listening to the 'tidbits' mentioned about the social conditions of India's 'pheasant' population(s), then I fully understood what "vulgar display of wealth" and "obscene wealth/riches" really meant.
This is what we have with America's wealthy and rich African Americans.
This is what we have with the vast majority of the wealthy and the rich throughout the entire Black Race globally.
Wealthy and rich African Americans [and Blacks throughout the entire diaspora] vulgarly display their wealth and riches as poverty, need, even famine, and the struggle of Black people [the very people who's patronage, purchases, and support built them up in the first place in the case of African Americans] are all around them, with as much concern as Shah Jahan for Taj Mahal's architect and his workers after the Taj Mahal was built or the impoverished and famined people that were all around him.
While to do or not do whatever they please with their fortune is their right, what the rich and wealthy African Americans and Black people throughout the entire Black diaspora globally have chosen to do is also amounts to no more than a morally obscene, disappointing, vulgar display of wealth.