'Blacks need to get their act together' vs 'AA social troubles are an American problem'

Great Debates
61

I wonder if the people who fear or distrust people of different skin color or etc. never grew up knowing anyone of that difference.

I feel fortunate to have grown up in a rural area where there was one Black family, they were very nice people and were liked by all the neighbors. My experiences in my years have been very good with black people. We were taught to accept them for who they were not what color or other differences they had. In all my later years I have had good experiences with black people. And I have had experiences living in a bad white area where some of those people hated blacks because only their skin color.

In my beliefs there is only one race, that is the human race and people have different colored skin, different eyes, ears etc. I would hope that some day soon people will begin to see people as people, not worry about their color, sexual preferences,size, or if they have a handicap. Treat them as they would want to be treated. It is like looking at a black spot on a white paper and seeing just the speck, not the whole picture.

It is sad to read of the young blacks killing so many of their own color;it is something I wonder about, and hope they will someday see that they are also harming themselves and the other people like themselves.

62

That post consisted in a series of anti-racism pieties, followed by a closing statement chock full of racist presuppositions.

Very strange.

63

Yeah, I think he has a reputation for rambling on and on about what black communities do wrong in a way that makes him sound like a sheltered old white man from kansas.

64

I don’t want to side track too much, but my experience with poor white people living in ghettos/slums is that they, too, will have priorities that don’t put education first. Some of the problems of poor blacks are problems of poverty, not race, and they have them in common with other poor people regardless of color. But, due to stereotyping, and the fact that poor white people can sometimes blend into the scenery better than black people of any income level, that connection is often missed.

65

That reminds me of any incident with a black co-worker of mine from, oh, about 15 years ago. He was a very erudite black man - the sort who would use a word like “erudite” in casual conversation. Very smart, highly educated, dressed well, absolutely impeccable manners, talked like an Ivy League graduate (which, if I recall, he was). A major part of his job was being the representative of a conservative, predominantly white corporation in circumstances requiring negotiations.

So, one day, I was quite surprised to hear him on the phone in his office speaking in the most ghetto “blaccent” and vocabulary. Of course, he knew that dialect, but it was so out of character to hear him speak like that.

He was addressing his high school age son who, apparently, was quite enamored of “gangsta” style and culture. My co-worker was, apparently, making it clear to his son that he was just as familar with black culture as white, and that if the young man wanted the money, the cars, the vacations, the mini-mansion is the upscale suburbs, the summer home, and all the other accoutrements of the wealthy upbringing he had enjoyed he would do well to emulate his father and learn to “talk white”, “dress white”, and “act white” on the job, because that’s how you got ahead in the business world. And then you could go home at night and be as ghetto as you wanted to be. It was a much more certain method of achieving financial success than trying to be the next big rap star.

One of the key routes to success is speaking the language of the dominant culture fluently, regardless of what you speak at home. That’s true everywhere.

66

I gotta agree with this. Maybe not “the smartest”, but all of the really popular kids were all A or B students. The dumbest kids mostly tended to be the burnouts and the bullies that were just as hated by the popular students as they were by the nerds. And because the popular kids and the nerds often shared a lot of classes, it was unheard of to see one of them make fun of a nerd for being smart. Maybe for being a little clueless, but that’s to be expected.

67

If you watch white teen sitcoms, especially the older ones, the main characters are rarely brainiacs: Mike Seaver (idiot- Kirk didn’t have to stretch for that one), Zack Morris & Slater (Zack was always scheming how to steal grades or put a roofie in Kelly’s slushy and Slater was a wrestling jock but neither were Honor Society), Wesley from Mr. Belvedere, Fonzie, all of the guys from Boy Meets World, Joey Lawrence from Blossom (whoa!), etc… In Breakfast Club where Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwold are the cool kids. There are lots of other examples.

The ones who were bright included Screech, Urkel (yeah I know he’s black but… mainly he’s Urkel), Mike’s anorexic sister on Growing Pains, Malcolm from Malcolm in the Middle (brilliant but completely neurotic and self absorbed), Marcia’s insectuous boyfriend on The Brady Bunch, Anthony Michael Hall in… well, every Anthony Michael Hall role. I think Richie was bright on Happy Days but who wouldn’t be after his parents killed his brothers for dribbling the basketball in the house? And besides, Ron Howard wasn’t what you’d call a teen heart throb.

Granted there were more bright good looking girls than there were bright guys on these series, but only to a point. The real brainiac girls were more like Screech’s girlfriend than Kelly.

There’s a definite anti-intellectual trend in American pop culture and I have seen it in college students, but it’s not a race issue. A lot of the brightest kids are so very clearly used to hiding their lamps under a bushel that in freshmen year many struggle with the issue of coming out as intellectual almost as if it were gay (and of course they’re surrounded by a lot of kids who were C high school students and will be C college students).

I was involved with College Bowl as an undergrad and as a faculty member for a while; for those not familiar it started out as a TV show and is still played by a lot of colleges- essentially academic team meats. Now while I would never expect College Bowl to have it’s own stadiums, it’s infuriating that this is 100% knowledge based and we had to have fundraisers to get a new $300 buzzer system. When my team from a small public Alabama college beat Harvard at an invitational- repeat, we beat Harvard’s team- we sent it to the school paper and it got a blip on the back page while the basketball team got a huge story on the front page and the school soccer team you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who gave a damn about got a big write up on the inside. Also frustrating: we only had money to go to regionals because of a grant from a private foundation (some schools didn’t even have that) and the only reward we got was a $200 bookstore stipend; the soccer team members, not one of them American born, got full ride (tuition, board, books) scholarships. Deemphasis of education is definitely subject to socioeconomic factors, but it’s very definitely an American rather than an African American problem.

I do agree with Cosby on things like illegitimacy rates and buying $250 sneakers you can’t afford, and with many other things for that matter including proper grammar, but again that’s not just a black issue.

68

Black culture comes from racism. Without racism there would be no such thing as black culture. All blacks really have nothing in common except a long history of racism.

Unless you want to believe that blacks are born different, then the only way they can become different is by getting treated differently. A black child growing up in the same community as a white child should have the same culture, unless there is something happening to black children that isn’t to white children. The only thing that explains the difference is racism. That’s the only thing that affects all black people regardless of money, nationality, religion, sex, or personality.

How does racism create black culture? One way is that if you think white people are racist, you’ll want to avoid everything associated with them. That includes the culture of power and success that you need to adopt to become powerful and successful.

Another way is that school teachers can expect less from minority students than from white students, and give up on them more easily. When that happens, the student will believe she isn’t worth the effort and start to place less value on her education.

Next the police might target minorities more than white people because they believe minorities commit more crimes. This leads to more minorities being arrested and perpetuates the stereotype when in reality it’s just the police who target them more. If police enforced drug laws in suburban neighborhoods the same way they do in inner city neighborhoods, then we’d see more white people get arrested.

It’s a self perpetuating cycle. Racism makes people different, and those differences are then used to justify the racism. If our institutions really treated black people the same way they treat whites then we’d all have the same culture.

69

And sexism is responsible for men having higher imprisonment rates? Is racism to blame for East Asians having lower rates of imprisonment than whites? These differences are seen globally.

See page 151 of chapter 7 ’ Biosocial criminology: new directions in theory and research’ by Walsh & Beaver. Evolution provides a powerful mechanism for understanding the distribution of traits and behaviours within and across groups.

70

East Asians are from another country. Differences between sexes can be explained by biology.

How do you explain a black and white child of the same sex and nationality growing up to be different?

71

A child is born. He is the son of an out-of-work factory worker who has not seen the Valium-addicted, chronic depressive mother since he told her to “abort the bastard”.

And in the very next delivery room at the exact same minute another child is born. He is the son of a nuclear physicist who is CEO of his own company married for 10 years to a former beauty queen who is now the owner of her veterinary practice.

How do you explain these two children of the same race and nationality growing up to be different?

Are you also going to ascribe that to racism, dispute the fact that they are the same race? Or do you think perhaps that culture and upbringing might be playing some role?

Anyone who really expects the two children in the above example to grow up the same is living in fairyland. Both children will have very different life stories, and race will play no part in them whatsoever.

So why assume that, if the first child is statistically more likely to be black and the second white, the differences in that case must be primarily attributable to racism?

72

I’m assuming everything about the kids are the same except race.

73

If everything about them is the same then they have, by definition, *not *grown up different.

If you can find me say, 10 examples example of where a Black child and a White child have been the same in every way except race, and evidence that the Black children grows up different despite that, then you might have a point. As it is you are asking us to explain why the Venusians have scales rather than fur. My response is “What damn Venusians”.

On average Black children perform more poorly than white and grow up to be less successful. On average of course they also have poorer, less educated parents with a higher incidents of single parent families. We also know that, on average, White children born to less educated parents and single parent families do less well at school and grow up to be less successful. So suggesting that only racism is to blame for the lowered performance of Blacks is an extremely hasty induction.

Doens’t it make a teensy bit more sense to blame on factors that have been proven to reduce performance?

74

I thought so too, but I can’t find any data to back that up. Whenever studies are done with controls for economic, national, and gender factors, blacks still perform worse than whites in schools. Blacks do even worse with out the controls of course, because many of them are poor and have single parents like you’ve mentioned.

75

I would be interested in seeing these multiple studies that control for all the economic, cultural, gender, family, nutritional and historical factors.

Can you please point these out to me? My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that a sample size of approximately 400, 000 children of each race, each with detailed information on family history, diet etc, over 18 years would be needed to produce a meaningful result. With such major studies I am surprised that I never heard of them.

I look forward to seeing your references.

76

Did you read the chapter that I referred to above?

Are you aware that there are East Asians born & living in the US?

What biological differences explain the difference between the genders? Testosterone? You realise that also varies between ethnic groups?

77

All those factors aren’t controlled all at once. One study is done controlling for income levels only. Then another might be done controlling for nationality or number of parents. Pick any factor known to produce lower school performance; if you do a study controlling for that factor, blacks will still do worse than whites.

I’m not going to run out and get a copy of the book.

As I’m sure you’re aware that they’re called East Asians because someone from their lineage was from East Asia.

Women have lower upper body strength and the ability to make babies.

78

Right, so what was the point of your comment above that “they are from another country”? In the US they have lower crime rates even adjusting for poverty. See p32 and 33 of Walsh ‘Crime: A Biosocial Analysis’:

And the major factor underlying the gender difference in criminal behaviour is testosterone (p 90 Handbook on Crime and Deviance By Marvin D. Krohn, Alan J. Lizotte, Gina Penly Hall)

Serum testosterone levels in healthy young black and white men - PubMed

Senior Sex: How to Maintain or Improve Intimacy

79

Right, and what does that tell you?

Can I ask, have you done any sort of statisttics or analysis studies at all? Because this seems like a really simple problem, yet you are jumping to the hastiest conclusion possible. To simplify:

  1. We know that, on average Blacks perform worse at school than Whites.

  2. We know that numerous factors have adverse effects on school performance, such as home life stability,parental involvement, nutrition etc.

  3. We know that, on average, Black children are more exposed to **all **of those adverse factors than whites.

  4. When we do a study that eliminates only **one **of those factors, Blacks still perform worse.

The obvious conclusion: Because Blacks are simultaneously exposed to **multiple **conditions that have proven to have an adverse effect on performance, we would expect that removing just **one **factor would not equalise performance. This conclusion is borne out by our results.

Your hasty conclusion: Despite Blacks being simultaneously exposed to multiple conditions that have proven to have an adverse effect on performance, removing just one factor should still equalise performance. Because it doesn’t, racism must be the cause of the inequality.

Do I really need to explain to you why your conclusion is a textbook example of a hasty induction, and hence completely logically invalid.

80

I think the root of black problems is that a long, long history of (quite literally) dis-empowering and dehumanizing blacks, and most specifically black males and making it very difficult for them to be able to form effective households, has led to a largely matriarchal centric, single mother black culture, with black males having little to attach themselves to, and few effective cultural role models for how to succeed in a modern industrialized society. A male+female household black family is the exception, not the norm in American society.

Single mother households are considerably more economically and resource deprived (on average) than mother+father households and have considerably less “social capital” to work with. The boys have no effective onsite male role model and are often left to fend for themselves in that regard. IMO this is the genesis of 90% of the dysfunction that effects blacks in American society.

It took over 300 years to destroy male + female black families. Expecting that the damage is going to be erased if only those shiftless Negroes would pull up their socks and get on with it is kind of insane. How do you “fix” black male disenfranchisement and virtual social emasculation that’s so socially and culturally ingrained at this point it’s practically organic? Waving their arms and saying “get over it” is about as much as white people are willing to contribute to that fix.