[QUOTE=Hippy Hollow]
Jeez, the raindog, if you’re not going to answer the question asked to you four times now, why don’t you just say so?
Since you won’t answer that question, I’ve got a couple of new ones I’d like to ask you to respond to.
Are you at all familiar with the term “intergenerational transfer?”
Did you attend college? If so, what was the demographic breakdown of the student body at your school? Among your African-American peers, how many of them were first-generation college students? How did that number compare to your White peers?
[/QUOTE]
Latest post discusses… something else. Let me tell you why these questions directly address the OP.
Intergenerational transfer refers to the exchange of forms of capital - social, economic, intellectual, and so on - from one generation to the next. Now, no one’s claiming that Whites got tons of good stuff like property and business while African Americans got nothing. I know plenty of African Americans that have property passed down from generations past, as well as White people that inherited debt from their forebears. However… in the aggregate, it’s likely that those benefits, no matter how small, were likely to advantage Whites more than African Americans, until very recently. Desegregation in higher education did not ensue until after Sweatt v. Painter in 1949, and most state universities did not integrate until well into the 1960s or even later. Only a handful of historically Black colleges had the reputation and resources even remotely close to state colleges and universities. My generation are the first to have parents who may have been educated at these schools. (In 1975, something like 75 percent of all African-Americans who attended college went to an HBCU. Today it’s about the opposite.) Also, notice that Black colleges are concentrated in the South. African American students now have more college options available, whereas their parents may not have. So let’s be honest and admit that we are one generation into the possibility of legal access to all of higher education.
I think many Whites are in denial of that fact. Having a college-educated parent means that your income is likely higher, their working conditions are better, that they will likely have a better health plan… and perhaps most importantly, the parents are somewhat versed in the process of applying to college. They know about applying for financial aid, different schools, and so on. They might not know much but they know more than parents who did not attend college. They also can give advice about what to study, where to live, classes to take (and not take)… you get the idea. There are historically a lot more of those parents in White families than there are in Black families. Of course there are exceptions; W.E.B. Du Bois earned a doctorate at Harvard in 1899.
My undergraduate campus, the University of Texas - one of the largest state universities in the nation - had about 1800, or 3% of its student population who were African American. Demographically the state is right around the national average of 12%. Among my peer group, most of us were first generation college students. There were a good number of students who had parents educated at HBCUs, and even some educated at large state universities, but they were in the minority. Most of us had parents with high school diplomas, some trade school or community college. I found that many of my White peers had parents who attended four year colleges - in fact, a good number attended the University of Texas.
Now, do I think that having three generations of college going is a huge advantage? Yes and no. Yes in the respect that college is now an ingrained expectation in such a family, and it’s likely that all of the offspring have had college beaten into their psyche from day one. No, in the respect that I think that one generation can probably influence their kids to do the same. Not talking absolutes here, obviously. But I think this is one example of how many Whites are in denial about the effects of structural and institutional racism. Even if we submit that the institutional structures that supported Jim Crow and favored Whites have been completely dismantled (I don’t but for the sake of argument let’s say it has), there’s still the issue of intergenerational transfer.