You really don’t know what I mean by a broken culture?
A culture where young black men father children and take no responsibility. Is systemic racism forcing this result? Was absentee fatherhood more prevalent during Jim Crow when racism was worse?
A culture where young black women end up having children out of wedlock at TEN times the rate of Asians. Is systemic racism forcing this result? Was illegitimacy and teen pregnancy relatively worse under Jim Crow?
A culture where young black men kill each other at several times the rate of the general population even after you control for socioeconomic factors. Is systemic racism forcing this result? Was the intra-racial murder rate worse under Jim Crow?
There is no doubt that racism exists and presents a significant headwind for blacks but IMHO much of the ground black have lost in the face of expanding civil rights has been the result of the development of a toxic culture in the black community.
I can understand the lack of respect for and faith in education after nearly 500 years of negative reinforcement for things like reading. But these are things that can be addressed and fixed while we are combatting the racism that is left in our society. Its like you’re afraid that admitting any other possible cause of black underperformance means that we are admitting that racism is no longer a contributing cause.
Your first example isn’t a culture, it’s a stereotype. It’s not reasonable to call every statistical disparity a “culture”.
I see no point in talking about the supposed problems of “black culture” because doing so does nothing. There’s literally zero chance that non-black people talking about how to improve black culture will ever actually do anything to help black culture. It’s like Jews trying to talk about how to improve Islam, or the reverse –
any such change always has and always will come from within. Tons of black leaders talk about the importance of avoiding violence and criminal behavior, and taking family responsibility, as well as regular black folks having these conversations all the time, and those are very good and important things. Conversations from non-black people talking about black culture do nothing but make you feel better. They don’t actually have any chance at all to help any black people or change any supposed problems in “black culture”.
The article and this thread are about the problems in American society at large, which really exist and really have something to do with the plight of black people and others. That’s something that white people and other non-black people might actually be able to have an impact on.
This statistical disparity is not a disparity in the rate of sickle cell anemia or rate of victimization by police. This statistical disparity is largely the result of actions and decision mad almost entirely internally.
Wait, are you saying that no one outside the black community is doing anything unwed pregnancy in the black community or any of the other cultural problems plaguing the black community?
Fine, lets say that no external factors can help fix the broken culture in the black community. Wouldn’t it be easier to fix the toxic culture if the toxicity was more widely and freely acknowledged rather than excused?
When Shodan pointed out the disparity between the black community and the Asian/Jewish community along with the fact that blacks had exercised much more political power (in the form of black elected officials) than Asians/Jews, you seemed to chalk it up to mostly continuing legal racism that affect blacks but not Asians and Jews.
So maybe racism isn’t the primary problem. And the “supposed problems” with black culture are about as “supposed” as the “supposed” systemic and institutional racism, i.e. there is nothing supposed about it.
And part of the problems with society at large is a large minority population that is being told that virtually all of their problems are the fault of racism and that they don’t really need to be trying much harder than they already are because if the world were fair, their current efforts would get them where they need to be.
BTW, what exactly do you think white people can do? ISTM that many of the things you are asking of white people are about as reasonable as asking black people to stop having sex.
No decision by a group is made entirely or almost entirely “internally” without external factors being involved. If all black people had 100% trust that law enforcement would justly pursue and arrest criminals inside their communities, then there would be very few reprisal/revenge killings, since they could get justice from law enforcement. They don’t, very obviously.
Culture can only be changed from the inside. To the extent that any of these are “cultural” issues, rather than economic/systemic issues (like, say, lack of access to abortion or birth control), the only possible changes could come from within.
I haven’t excused anything, and I have no interest in doing so. I know that calling a culture that’s been as resilient as any in human history, and one which has contributed such an incredible amount to American culture, “toxic”, will do nothing to help that culture or the people within it.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. And I’m still not convinced that blacks have exercised more political power per capita than Asians or Jews, nor do I see its relevance.
This aspect of the discussion doesn’t interest me. There’s no possibility that external discussion of black culture could help it change for the better – it could only alienate black people, and I have no interest in alienating black people. We don’t live inside black culture – we have no chance of understanding it from within. I want to do things that could actually help America and black people – talking about black culture from the outside can only hurt it.
Any such scolding from the outside can do nothing but alienate and harm people, and I have no interest in doing that. Advantaged people telling disadvantaged people to get their shit together literally never works or does any good, and can only do harm, and I have no interest in potentially doing harm to America and black people.
Vote for candidates who acknowledge the power and extent and existence of white supremacism in society and culture; consider the possibility that maybe reparations for various forms of white supremacism aren’t totally insane and could be reasonably discussed; avoid scolding black people en masse (or other disadvantaged groups); avoid scolding black culture; recognize the existence and significance of privilege; and much more.
This doesn’t mean that a white person can’t criticize a black person. If you see a black person kill someone, by all means call them a murderer. If you see a black person rob someone, by all means call them a criminal. But don’t scold black people at large, and don’t scold black culture from the outside, since such scolding does no good whatsoever.
I am assuming you don’t think that this goes both ways, and that a black person like Coates can productively scold white culture and thereby bring about change.
Is this like the “blacks can’t be racist because they have no power” thing?
Can minorities like Jews criticize black culture, or is that also off-limits?
Wrong. I don’t believe criticizing or scolding any culture from the outside has any hope of success.
But Coates is criticizing broader American culture and society, of which he’s a part.
Anyone can criticize anyone they like, but criticizing and scolding a culture from the outside will always fail, IMO – always has and always will.
Luckily, nuanced discussion and conversation about these issues is possible, and thus we can avoid the silly kind of pitfalls like “whitey is to blame”.
This is not at all about asserting “whitey is to blame”. This is about analyzing the history and persistence of white supremacy as a culture, beyond the efforts of any individual Americans (both white and non-white) to shore up or dismantle it.
He was mocking your ignorance of the fact that Coates has indeed traveled in the US and met people and “rubbed shoulders” with them, and written about it.
Do you have a cite that murders in the black community do not get solved at significantly higher rates than communities with similar socioeconomics? You may be right but this is the second or third time you have made that assertion and I wonder whether any disparity (if there is one) isn’t the result of socioeconomics rather than race.
And how do you explain the level of illegitimacy, the absentee fathers, the lack of focus on education, etc.
Can the racism within white culture also be informed by external factors? Is it someone else’s fault that whites have a racist culture or is THAT one internal?
And we can keep pointing out a broken culture until the members of that culture recognizes that the problem exists.
Resilient? Its falling apart. Not without good reason but it is falling apart. Along almost any metric, the culture is broken.
Well the reason its relevant is because political solutions always seem to be put forward as the answer. More politics is what some people say will save the blacks. And yet Asians who have been embarrassingly apolitical have been able to avoid most of the problems that plague the black community. Now to be sure, they didn’t start in the same place but their communities have been going in opposite directions in terms of how well they are doing over time. So perhaps politics isn’t the answer or at least not without something else.
Does this apply to southern culture as well? Can criticism of southern culture do anything but alienate southerners?
Black culture is doing a great job of hurting itself. We need to address racism but its silly to even imply that racism is worse today than it was in the 1950 or even 1970s. Many of the problems in the black community are of its own device.
Maybe telling them the truth is more important than sparing their feewings.
So the actions of a small but disproportionate number of police means we can indict police culture but the actions of a small but disproportionate number of blacks means nothing about black culture because those were all individuals acting on their own?
So how much will scolding the police and kneeling at football games accomplish?
Or will it just alienate the police and make white people (still 70+%) of this country tune out.
No he is criticizing white people and saying that a lot of them are racist and that’s why Trump won. He is not criticizing the white supremacist black people or the white supremacist Asian people. He is criticizing white people and white supremacist even though he is not a white supremacist, how can he truly understand the plight of the white people if he is not white himself? Its simply not possible to criticize a group of which you are not a part, amirite?
So should we stop criticizing cops and their thin blue wall? Cuz that’ll never work.
We should stop criticizing southerners and their southern culture because that will never work.
We should stop criticizing conservative Christians because that will never work.
Shit I don’t know what I would do with my free time if I stopped criticizing groups I am not a part of. My whole weekend just opened up.
Its kind of what lot of the arguments in this genre boil down to.
These don’t have specific socio-economic statistics, but that’s a pretty damn specific cite request. You’ve already agreed that racism in law enforcement is a problem – if so, why would you be surprised if clearance rates are lower for intra-black crime?
Many of the same factors could be involved, but I don’t have all the answers about black culture. If there are problems within black culture, attacking it from the outside can only make it worse. The only thing people outside can do to help is to make conditions in the overall society such that people within it have an equal chance to succeed.
Maybe, but Coates’ article (and this discussion) are about racism/white supremacism in broader American society.
If you want to make yourself feel better, go right ahead. I’m not going to take part because I don’t want to make things worse, and that kind of scolding has no chance of helping.
This sounds like ridiculous hyperbole (or even outright falsehood) to me, considering the many, many improvements (educational achievement rates have skyrocketed among black Americans in the last 50 years or so, along with decreasing crime from the 90s until the last year or two). But again, I’m not interested in scolding a culture that I’m incapable of fully understanding since I wasn’t raised in it.
I see the two communities as utterly uncomparable for reasons already discussed.
I’m a Southerner – I criticize Southern culture from the inside. Criticism from the outside has pretty much no hope of success.
Who has said “racism is worse today than it was in the 1950 or even 1970s”? I don’t believe it is.
You’re not telling them the truth – you’re scolding on a subject you are incapable of fully understanding. Unless you’re black and grew up in black American culture, you are incapable of fully understanding black American culture, and incapable of fully understanding its problems. I am too, quite obviously.
I have no expectations or hope that scolding police culture has any chance of changing police culture (except perhaps when its done by police officers and police chiefs themselves). I and others advocate for policy changes that will mandate equal and fair treatment by law enforcement as much as possible, including things like body cameras, improved use of force doctrines, zero-tolerance policies for bigotry, requiring officers live in the communities they police, equal diversity among the force as among the community, etc., with the hope that those policy changes will lead to some police culture changes in the long term.
I’m pretty sure Coates would be the first to loudly proclaim that he has no hope that he can have any influence on white culture (if such a thing even exists) or white supremacist culture. He’s writing about broader American society, of which he’s a part, but he’s pretty damn pessimistic about it changing.
I’m more hopeful than he is, but I still don’t believe there’s any chance of outside criticism penetrating and having any positive affect on a culture. My hope is that broader American society and culture will eventually change.
Of course, racism is a problem everywhere but I agree, the effects are more profound in law enforcement. But much like the “pay gap” that narrows from 20% to about 5% when you correct for things like college major, occupation, working hours, and parental leave, I am pretty sure that if you adjust the rate of police shootings for things like poverty and education, you get a much smaller disparity. Blacks get shot about 2.5 times more frequently than whites but they are 3 times more likely to be poor and have significantly lower education levels than whites. Now, poverty and low academic achievement may have something to do with racism but its not police racism.
If? If there are problems?
Some would say that the chance for blacks to succeed in America has been dramatically improved since the 1960’s and yet things seem to be going in the other direction. Do we have to achieve a racism free society before we can point the finger at black culture? Because I don’t think there has ever been a society free of racism in the history of mankind and I don’t think there ever will be. A zillion years in the future, when we are all the same shade of caramel brown, we will still have racism.
No, no he’s not. He is an outsider criticizing white culture. And I’m fine with that but I am not fine with saying that we can criticize the flaws of white society but we cannot criticize the flaws of black society.
Don’t criticize black culture because it won’t help but we must criticize white society because THAT can accomplish things? I agree that scolding black thugs or white racists are not going to make them change their ways. But we can still discuss the problem. How will discussing the deficiencies of black culture make things worse? Will more black women have children out of wedlock? Will more black men run away from their obligation as fathers?
And I’m not scolding a bunch of black people about their culture. I am discussing the problem in black culture with a bunch of anonymous people on the internet on a board dedicated to fighting ignorance to determine whether black culture is indeed a problem. You seem to be saying we shouldn’t even discuss the topic because there is nothing our discussion can do to fix it. Well shit, there is nothing we can do to eliminate racism either.
Hasn’t crime decreased for pretty much everyone since the 1990s? Isn’t the violent crime rate for blacks STILL about double the crime rate for whites?
You excuse yourself too easily. The notion that you can’t criticize blacks because you aren’t black is a bit like saying you can’t criticize cops because you aren’t a cop.
We discussed Vietnamese refugees in an attempt to compare like to like. The Vietnamese refugee wave came at the tail end of the Civil Rights movement. Vietnamese refugees have clawed their way into the middle class in the span of a few generations. In the same time, blacks have developed a small middle class but a large part of their community is plagued with illegitimate births, single parenthood and high dropout rates.
AFAICT you are hanging your hat on the notion that somehow these refugees were not representative of Vietnamese people generally. That they were (at least at first) wealthy and educated. Perhaps but there weren’t disproportionately educated compared to blacks of 20 years ago:
The first wave of ~125K refugees that fled before the fall of Saigon might have been better educated but they came with little and settled in a country that was still salty about the Vietnam war. They were quickly followed 3 years later by ~800k refugees fleeing the political instability and collapsing Vietnamese economy.
“In contrast to Vietnamese refugees who settled in France or Germany, and similar to their counterparts who arrived in Canada, The Czech Republic, The United Kingdom and Australia, refugees arriving in the United States often had a lower socioeconomic standing in their home country and more difficulty integrating due to greater linguistic and cultural barriers.”
AFAICT your thesis seems to be that the 125K refugees were able to create enough of a community that it gave the other 800K refugees a leg up. That this 14% of first wave Vietnamese refugees made all the difference in helping their 86% later arriving poor uneducated refugees claw their way into the middle class. Right now 20% of blacks have a college degree or higher. ~14% of blacks have had college degrees since the 1990s. Why hasn’t this triggered the same sort of rise to the middle class that it triggered for the Vietnamese?
I think you’re making excuses out of a sense of liberal white guilt.
And yet we see fairly widespread criticism of “southern culture” and other cultures and I don’t recall you telling posters in those threads to stop criticizing the culture because it can’t do any good. Instead you seem to be ready to explore the deficiencies of those cultures so that we can determine what those deficiencies are
Then you can’t really blame racism for rising illegitimacy, single parenthood, etc. right?
You may be unqualified, but what makes you think I am? As a black man, how can Coates scold whites on a subject he is incapable of understanding? He’s never been white and he dismisses as racist what can easily be explained by other means.
These seem like reasonable things but then again neither of us are cops. Perhaps altering the use of force doctrines would lead to more dead cops. perhaps recruitment would suffer if we only recruited locally. Perhaps zero tolerance policies would lead to a chilling effect in policing activities. How could we possibly know, we’re not cops.
America is 75% white. You want to change American culture, you had better plan on changing white culture. Throwing in a bit of color an calling the result “the broader American culture” is really not very good cover for what is a criticism of white culture.
Scolding from the outside isn’t going to fix a broken culture but if the arguments are sound and the presentation isn’t overly offensive, you can chip away at the dogs until you get a large enough portion of the population recognizing the toxicity of the culture and a widespread rejection of the toxic elements of the culture.
I don’t even know what “white culture” could possibly be, unless you’re referring specifically to the culture of white supremacists who make a point to exclude others. In my understanding, there is a broad American culture, which consists of many smaller cultures both mixing and existing side-by-side – for example, Italian American culture (and all of these may even be subdivided into further smaller cultures: NYC Italian-American culture, Chicago Italian-American culture, etc.), Irish American culture, African American culture, Native American culture, Mexican American culture, etc. Coates’ article and arguments are about American culture as a whole, of which he’s a part (as are we).
Calling an entire culture, especially one as incredibly resilient and with the incredible accomplishments of African American culture, “toxic”, is just a form of supremacism, IMO. Further, black people (or anything about black people) have never been the problem in America, in terms of how black people are treated by others and by society at large. That’s the issue being discussed here – not how black people treat other black people, but how broader society and culture treats black people. If you want to talk about how black people treat other black people, feel free, but that’s not the topic of Coates’ article or this thread. That some black people treat other black (or white or other) people poorly does absolutely nothing to excuse any of the mistreatment and bias in broader society at large.
If you don’t think such mistreatment or bias exists, then feel free to make that argument. If you agree that they exist, but disagree about the extent and significance, then make that argument. But if you want to talk about black culture, I think that’s another topic and should go to another thread.
I don’t even know what “white culture” could possibly be, unless you’re referring specifically to the culture of white supremacists who make a point to exclude others. In my understanding, there is a broad American culture, which consists of many smaller cultures both mixing and existing side-by-side – for example, Italian American culture (and all of these may even be subdivided into further smaller cultures: NYC Italian-American culture, Chicago Italian-American culture, etc.), Irish American culture, African American culture, Native American culture, Mexican American culture, etc. Coates’ article and arguments are about American culture as a whole, of which he’s a part (as are we).
Calling an entire culture, especially one as incredibly resilient and with the incredible accomplishments of African American culture, “toxic”, is just a form of supremacism, IMO. Further, black people (or anything about black people) have never been the problem in America, in terms of how black people are treated by others and by society at large. That’s the issue being discussed here – not how black people treat other black people, but how broader society and culture treats black people. If you want to talk about how black people treat other black people, feel free, but that’s not the topic of Coates’ article or this thread. That some black people treat other black (or white or other) people poorly does absolutely nothing to excuse any of the mistreatment and bias in broader society at large.
If you don’t think such mistreatment or bias exists, then feel free to make that argument. If you agree that they exist, but disagree about the extent and significance, then make that argument. But if you want to talk about black culture, I think that’s another topic and should go to another thread.
Nope. I see no mention of Italian American Culture or Chicago Italian American culture, etc. I see an article where he casts all whites as either white supremacists or the accomplices of white supremacists. This is white culture, a culture where they don’t actually believe things are as lopsided for blacks as blacks themselves believe. You want to demand change from society, you have to get a pretty good amount of support from a sizable chunk of that 75%. So if like you say, you can’t change culture by criticizing it, why are you trying to change a culture that is 75% white by criticizing what amounts to white culture?
You are entitled to you opinion and it is not uncommon for anyone who is critical of anything about black culture to be labelled a racist (or supremacist?). Can you please give me an example of how modern black culture is incredibly resilient? AFAICT their culture is collapsing under the weight of youth violence and illegitimacy.
What accomplishments? Painfully high illegitimacy rates? Ridiculously low high school graduation rates? Shocking murder and crime rates? I suppose you can argue that none of it is their fault. When will their problems ever be their fault? Tell me which culture is less resilient and accomplished less than modern black culture? Perhaps the Vietnamese refugees?
Of course I agree that racism exists. But when you use racism as an excuse for pretty much everything (and Coates seems to link every goddam thing that goes wrong in the world to racism), it not unreasonable to point to alternative causes of the troubles that plague the black community.
Racism exists but its not enough to excuse black under-performance anymore, at least not all of it. We elected a black president. Twice. Things are better now by leaps and bounds and yet racism continues to be responsible for the increasingly sorry state of things. Coates whines about how Obama said that if black people work twice as hard, anything is possible. Well, shit son, Asian parents have been telling their kids that very same thing for generations and its gotten them somewhere. What has the attitude been in the black community and where has it gotten them? Would it be nice if white culture eliminated the headwinds that make life harder if you don’t look white? Sure, but those headwinds are not a barrier. And it is white culture not American culture (unless you think they are the same thing) that is causing those headwinds. Its not Asians that don’t see the racism in society, its not blacks that don’t see the racism in society, and its not hispanics that don’t see it. Its whites and their culture of denying their complicity in creating and maintaining a white supremacist state in this country.
But all the whining in the world isn’t going to do anyone any good. Whites will just see you as a whiny bitch and you will castrate your own ability to overcome that headwind of racism. By expending all your energy on whining.
So when the XTs of the world ask, what about the Asians and the Jews, and you sit idly by while “allies” diminish the effort and accomplishments of Vietnamese refugees because that would mean that blacks might bear some a toxic culture might be the source of some of their troubles and you deny that they might bear some responsibility for their own situation, you may not be helping them. You may be discouraging them from trying.