Black Voices: News, Culture & Community from Across the Nation
- Economic illusion seduces with aesthetics while quiet, compound-building ownership creates lasting agency and wealth.
- Performance and social media flexes reward appearances over deeds, replacing financial fluency with disposable status.
- Black people face structural barriers like predatory lending, appraisal bias, and student debt that block ownership.
- Reimagine education in kitchens, barbershops, and boardrooms to teach property transfer, LLC formation, refinancing strategy, and legacy.
- Ownership is political and generational; embrace the movement Property is Power! to convert renters into owners and creators.
By: Dr. Anthony O. Kellum – CEO of Kellum Mortgage, LLC
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” — Hosea 4:6
This scripture isn’t simply a lament. It’s a verdict. One that has echoed across time and space, from the Middle Passage to mortgage denials, from sharecropping to subprime lending, from redlined blocks to gentrified neighborhoods. And still, in 2025, it rings with painful clarity: a lack of knowledge is costing us our inheritance.
When Hosea speaks of destruction, he is not only referencing physical ruin. He speaks of spiritual collapse, cultural erosion, and the slow suffocation of potential. Today, that collapse often takes the form of economic illusion a carefully crafted narrative that distracts us from substance and seduces us with spectacle. Our people are not just uninformed. We have been deliberately misinformed fed fictions in place of facts, status symbols in place of assets, and distractions in place of direction.
We live in a world where performance is rewarded more than possession. Where social media flexes have replaced deed recordings. Where the aesthetics of wealth are celebrated while the architecture of wealth remains largely out of reach. And in that environment, illusion becomes currency, and the truth becomes an afterthought.
It is not by accident that we are more familiar with luxury brands than land trusts, more fluent in influencer culture than interest rates, and more likely to pursue “likes” than legacy. This is not simply a matter of personal failure. It is a structural condition. But it is our responsibility to dismantle it.
Let’s be clear: illusion is expensive. You can lease the lifestyle, but you cannot borrow your way to freedom. Faking it until you make it is a poor substitute for financial fluency.
Ownership, in contrast, is quiet. It doesn’t always photograph well. But it builds. It compounds. It roots you in agency. To own is to resist disposability. It is to take up space in systems that were not designed for your survival, let alone your success.
For Black people in America, ownership has always been political. From the moment emancipation created the question, “What does freedom actually look like?” land has been the answer. Not because land is magic, but because land gives leverage. Leverage to negotiate, to build, to belong. Our ancestors understood this. It’s why, within a generation of slavery, Black people owned millions of acres of land. And it’s why systemic forces conspired through violence, fraud, taxes, and law to take it back.
Today, those tools have simply become more subtle. Predatory lending. Appraisal bias. Wealth-stripping student debt. Urban renewal without urban inclusion. And a financial system that often denies us access to ownership even as it sells us the illusion of prosperity.
The truth is: we are not behind because we don’t dream big. We’re behind because we’ve been locked out of the infrastructure of ownership and taught to chase symbols instead of systems.
But this can change. If we want it to.
It starts with reimagining education not just in classrooms, but in kitchens, barbershops, and boardrooms. We need a cultural curriculum that teaches how to:
- Pass down property not just pearls of wisdom.
- Build LLCs as fast as we build followers.
- View homeownership not as an endpoint, but as an entry point into generational strategy.
Our children are watching. If all they see is us chasing aesthetics, they will inherit the same illusions. But if they see us anchoring in ownership if they see us walking through houses we bought, refinancing with strategy, leveraging equity to fund businesses then they will not just inherit wealth. They will inherit a blueprint.
Hosea’s warning is not just about ignorance, it’s about accountability. Knowledge is not something we wait for. It’s something we seek. It’s something we protect. And it’s something we pass on.
Because ownership is not a lifestyle it’s a lifeline. The generation that stops chasing illusions and starts investing in truth. The generation that turns renters into homeowners, consumers into creators, and survivors into strategists. Property is Power!
Dr. Anthony O. Kellum – CEO of Kellum Mortgage, LLC
Homeownership Advocate, Speaker, Author
NMLS # 1267030 NMLS #1567030
O: 313-263-6388 W: www.KelluMortgage.com.
Property is Power! is a movement to promote home and community ownership. Studies indicate
homeownership leads to higher graduation rates, family wealth, and community involvement.
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