ORLANDO, Fla. – What makes you feel at home here in the U.S.? Does the motivation of the American Dream wear off as soon as you get your hands on that blue passport, or does it last until you’ve found a way to accrue generational wealth for your family and others?
This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Kelali Dogbe, an Information Technology (IT) consultant who believes technology is key to inclusivity by way of easing access to information.
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As Dogbe sees it, access to information means access to wealth, and helping others network — especially immigrants, people with disabilities, and minority groups — should be our obligation.
“Every country got a different passport, the American passport is blue. When you pull out that blue passport, you are an American, it don’t matter what color you are and that comes with certain privileges. You get certain privileges, you get treated a certain way, you get treated like you’re upper class, you get treated like you’re rich, and so a lot of people get intoxicated by that, but what I would challenge people to do is also understand the social and economic situations of the people who actually live (in other countries) and see if there’s some opportunities where we can network and help, you know? Because we have access to wealth over here that they don’t have, that we can help to pull the diaspora up,” Dogbe said.
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Dogbe described how his background as a first-generation American pushed him to gain generational wealth.
“My parents are from Ghana and West Africa. You know, they came over here, both of them immigrated to America to get a better life and to bring a better life for their children, so that’s the first point is that it was always a mission of improvement. Like, there were better opportunities in America than there were in Ghana and so there was always that mission that our parents instilled in us, like, ‘We came over here to get y’all opportunities that we wouldn’t have otherwise had, and so you all need to make the best of that and try to try to pass that on,’ and so that’s where we’ve been,” Dogbe said. “That’s the one point about generational wealth. With the immigrant mindset, it’s a little bit different because that’s kind of what the mission is, is like, ‘Look, we’re coming from somewhere else to get better opportunities, now what you need to do as a next generation, as the kid, is take advantage of those opportunities and push it forward along to your kids.”
He told Murray that one of his purposes in life is to bridge the gap between groups such as Africans and Black Americans for their mutual benefit.
“By design, by systemic design, we’ve been taught to be divided from each other, and so because of that, we’ve been weak on both sides, we’ve been fed negative information about each other. So on the one hand, if you’re a Black American, you’ve been taught that Africa is a poor place, but you’ve not been taught the history as to why maybe since the 1950s that certain countries in Africa haven’t developed economically. It’s a whole deep history of what they’re doing in terms of global trade, in terms of resources and different things like that. On the other hand, what we don’t know living in America is that Africans also get negative images of Black Americans. So they they get the quote unquote hip-hop images, because you got to understand like, America, to everybody else in the world, America seems like paradise. Other people, other places in the world, you see this as you travel more, other people other places in the world look at America like everybody in America is rich. Everybody is rich. Like, that’s the idea. So, imagine trade,” Dogbe said.
Hear the full interview and more in Season 2, Episode 34 of “Black Men Sundays.”
Black Men Sundays talks about building generational wealth. Check out every episode in the media player below.