Except your experience is anecdotal and studies have shown that even among college educated black families education doesn't protect wealth.
I think you place too much value and trust in the system. Coates' "negativity" is mere pragmatism. You'll always be a niggger to them. When Coates was hired by Marvel for Black Panther, people paraded around the fact that Marvel was hiring black writers, not the striking fact that they hired one of the greatest American intellectual minds of today. Which is pretty huge, black or not.
I think you place a lot of emphasis on the fact that middle and upper middle class black people exist, ignoring that has existed far before we were even born. I grew up surrounded by bougie blacks. It doesn't mean a thing, and while we aren't all "trapped in a nightmare", the harsh reality is that it could easily become a nightmare pretty quickly. Especially the aforementioned fact that wealth decreases in black households regardless of education. So it's not necessarily a nightmare, as much as it's a limbo: always stuck, always reminded, even when you think you've escaped.
You think you've escaped and that your family/future kids have escaped because your dad became a successful dentist and you got to move from Detroit to Ann Arbor? You're Black. You've never escaped. Call it "negativity", but it's real, and it's here. Reminds me of that episode of Fresh Prince where Will and Carlton are arrested and Carlton thinks his dad's money will save him.
Read PD's post and then watch this scene.
