Thanks, but I don’t see where that article states that poor Asians are outperforming white kids. In fact, it cautions against lumping poor Cambodians, for example, with rich Chinese immigrants and using the performance of the wealthy immigrants to say that the Asian community doesn’t need any help.
Huh? I’m not sure what you’re saying here, aside from your apparent personal beef with me. What did I say that you disagree with?
Was actually just looking at this. There is a link in the article to a report. Check out the education section which starts on page 18.
Link: http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/operations/downloads/pdf/Social-Indicators-Report-April-2016.pdf
I’m in transit and that file is very big. Can you give me the gist?
Maybe, I honestly don’t know. In a world of perfectly equal opportunity would we ever see the gender gap in primary school teachers narrow substantially? And what would be narrow enough? and what we would do if it persisted?
I think in any discussion on these subjects it is quite instructive to get people to say what they think the outcome should be.
If they say they want everyone to have equal access to life choices then I’m right behind them. If they say they want perfectly equal representation (across a plethora of categories) then I’d run a mile. That way madness lies.
Why can culture not be as much of an explanatory factor, as, say, income? I fully agree that the variation within ethnic groups is probably much bigger than the variation between ethnic groups, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a difference in the average emphasis on say, academic performance, between ethnic groups.
Just like there are poor, middle class, and rich people of every race, there are people who will prioritize certain outcomes highly for each race (eg. academic performance, athletic excellence, whatever). It seems bizarre to me that people would consider that it’s ok to say “black people are disproportionately poor, which leads to negative outcomes” but not consider “black people are disproportionately less focused on academics, which leads to negative outcomes” to be a plausible statement.
I agree with you that there are all sorts of problems with generalizing into such broad groupings as black, white, asian, hispanic, etc. The average Nigerian immigrant has a vastly different culture (and also, likely vastly different socio-economic starting point) than the average African American growing up in the projects, yet they will get grouped together as black. That doesn’t mean that their cultures are irrelevant.
I agree with this and would like to know what other liberals think about this. It’s certainly not something that could be done easily though, and it’s certainly not clear to me as to how cultural changes are driven.
Yes, everything plays a part but how much of that can be remedied (or should be remedied through laws and policy).
It’s a statistic I discovered in a debate about a NYC magnet school that has historically used a single exam to determine admissions but this has led to an overwhelmingly asian population. There was an attempt to achieve racial balancing by making the admissions process more subjective and one of the claims was that the asians were all privileged and wealthy when in fact they are the poorest race group in NYC.
Maybe I am misunderstanding you. What policy or law can you pass that would make inner city black culture more like recent immigrant asian culture?
Yes, it’s mostly east asians from confucian cultures. But it seems like you agree that culture could have something to do with the disparities we seen between racial groups. But there is a more general immigrant culture that focuses on academics. You see it among eastern europeans, south asians, east asians, africans, etc.
Do the black children of those black tiger moms generally achieve better results than others?
I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s what this thread is about. I thought it was about Velocity’s view of what liberals think about equality of opportunity and results. I’m interested in discussing that. I’m not really interested in discussing solutions, because there are no clear ones and it really seems like a different thread to me.
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It’s a statistic I discovered in a debate about a NYC magnet school that has historically used a single exam to determine admissions but this has led to an overwhelmingly asian population. There was an attempt to achieve racial balancing by making the admissions process more subjective and one of the claims was that the asians were all privileged and wealthy when in fact they are the poorest race group in NYC.
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Right, but we agree these are different groups, yes? Asian immigrants in NYC are hugely diverse, from incredibly wealthy Chinese immigrants and, according to your article, dirt-poor Cambodians, Laotians (?), and other groups. I don’t understand why you would group them together. My original point, about poor people, still stands, I think. Poor people have fewer opportunities than rich people, and worse results.
To the OP: What are you trying to debate here? Do you agree that equality of results is at least a rough proxy for equality of opportunity? Do you have a better proxy? Or, do you have a way of measuring opportunity directly?
If you’re looking to discuss solutions, I’ll skip that.
As for what laws might improve opportunities for poor black Americans, here are some ideas:
Adding banking services to US Post Offices, so that poor black workers don’t have to go to predatory check-cashing businesses to cash their paychecks.
Banning that kind of predatory lending.
Providing incentives for grocery stores to locate in these “deserts” such that these folks don’t have to rely on junk food.
Universal health care.
Fair and equal law enforcement and policing, such that black people don’t go to jail for longer for the same crimes as others.
Public transportation vouchers (and better public transportation in cities with sub-par transit) for poor folks.
Allowing food stamps to be used for other necessities (i.e. toiletries, basic clothing, etc.).
Equalizing schools – which may require busing. Busing actually worked – poor black students’ test scores and achievement went way, way up. It stopped because suburban white parents didn’t like that their kids went to school with some poor black kids, and those white parents had a lot more political influence than poor black parents.
Education on African American Vernacular English (AAVE), such that kids who grow up speaking it aren’t treated worse by teachers who are unaware of the existence of this dialect and just assume these kids are speaking “poor English”. I started a thread on this a while back (with a linked article) – these kinds of assumptions, which are pretty common around the country, hold these kids back because they are getting inconsistent education between school and their home-life, and they tend to just shut up at school rather than speak up and ask questions and inevitably get shit upon by their teacher.
Actually recognizing ALL the US policies and practices that served to make black Americans second-class citizens (or worse). Lots and lots of research on this, including the ramifications today. Show that this country really actually acknowledges how terrible it was for black people for most of its history, and pledges to work against this. So many black folks don’t feel like they have a chance in this country… and when 50% of them have been mistreated by police (as they report in polling), along with other routine indignities and bigotries many black folks face daily, this is awfully hard to overcome. The country needs to demonstrate that every citizen truly is equal under the law, and in our society.
Just off the top of my head.
Sorry, I really screwed up the quoting in my previous post. Here’s another attempt:
I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s what this thread is about. I thought it was about Velocity’s view of what liberals think about equality of opportunity and results. I’m interested in discussing that. I’m not really interested in discussing solutions, because there are no clear ones and it really seems like a different thread to me.
Right, but we agree these are different groups, yes? Asian immigrants in NYC are hugely diverse, from incredibly wealthy Chinese immigrants and, according to your article, dirt-poor Cambodians, Laotians (?), and other groups. I don’t understand why you would group them together. My original point, about poor people, still stands, I think. Poor people have fewer opportunities than rich people, and worse results.
To the OP: What are you trying to debate here? Do you agree that equality of results is at least a rough proxy for equality of opportunity? Do you have a better proxy? Or, do you have a way of measuring opportunity directly?
If you’re looking to discuss solutions, I’ll skip that.
This is really really important: the average African American doesn’t grow up in the projects. The fact that you think so, that that is the common impression of what “black culture” is, is really the whole issue in a nutshell. You can’t use someone’s race to generalize about their culture. And we don’t usually use race to generalize about white people–we understand that a kid raised in rural Kansas with parents that work at a grain processing plant is going to have a different culture a kid who lives in San Francisco whose parents work in IT. But that makes sense to us because white is “neutral” and culture comes from something else.
Yes, we can talk about the impact of different types of culture on achievement, but culture doesn’t map to race any more that genes map to race. It’s vastly more nuanced and complicated than that. However, if you start to get sloppy and take that short-cut to explain differences in outcome, it easily becomes a way to ignore injustice. Right now, there are basically a bunch of people that say, in a nutshell “Black kids in poverty have only themselves to blame because black culture doesn’t value the right things”. That statement is like a fractal of wrongness, with every part being as shockingly appalling as the whole.
It’s also worth noting that it’s mainstream white culture that created the narrative that the “correct” way for a black kid to “get out of the ghetto” is through sports or entertainment–you know, entertaining us normal people, not competing with us for jobs or status. This narrative has been reinforced time after time in our society in a hundred thousand ways, and it’s disingenuous to the nth degree to blame “black culture” for that set of values. That was a set of values externally imposed and cultivated by outside forces, akin to only letting Jewish people work as bankers, then using “Evil Jewish Bankers” as a pretext for genocide.
All Asians are certainly not privileged and wealthy - but according to this, they were not the poorest ethnic group in NYC as of 2015. Additionally, the poverty rate differs between countries of origin, between citizens and non-citizens and so on. It is entirely possible that the 73%* of students at Stuyvesant who are of Asian descent are mostly second-generation Chinese or Korean students from middle-class and up families** that could afford private education until 8th grade and/or tutoring. It’s even possible that the Black/Hispanic/White peers of these students mostly attend private high schools and if those students chose to attend the specialized high schools, the percentage of Asian students would be lower. Now, I don’t know if those things are true, but the fact that they are possible are reasons why saying that the ethnic group with the highest poverty rate has the highest academic achievement *** doesn’t really say anything.
- There are about 3300 students so about 2400 are Asian.
** and there is no reliable way to tell how poor the students are - with a neighborhood school, you can at least assume the demographics are similar to the neighborhood. People have lied on free lunch forms ( since no proof was required ) since I went to high school 40 years ago, so that wouldn’t be an accurate measure- and even if it was, NYC now provides lunch to every student.
***as defined by getting admitted into one of a few high schools that base admission on a single test.
Yes, black children with highly ambitious parents often achieve at a very high rate. Of course they do. And I agree that being an immigrant can have a tremendous impact, just because of the guilt and the pressure. That’s not a matter of culture, it’s a matter of circumstance. Having a younger sibling die of cancer is a great motivator to be a doctor, but that’s not cultural.
But the cultural variation I am talking about is way, way more nuanced than you seem to recognize. Money and education play a huge role–as does the specific community someone lives in. You can’t say “Korean culture in America is like this”. An undocumented Korean kid whose mom supports the family by cutting hair in her kitchen has a very different culture than the child of a Korean doctor.
Some people consider criticism of black culture to be racist.
They insist that all other explanations must be exhausted before we can lay any of the blame on blacks or their culture. In fact some of them believe that any negative aspects of their culture may actually be manifestations of the racism they experience so even their culture is not really something they can be held responsible for addressing.
This is a hard question but until we can agree that the culture cold use a tune up, it’s going to be impossible to fix. To some extent the culture is in fact changing, at least for black women.
It’s a statistic I discovered in a debate about a NYC magnet school that has historically used a single exam to determine admissions but this has led to an overwhelmingly asian population. There was an attempt to achieve racial balancing by making the admissions process more subjective and one of the claims was that the asians were all privileged and wealthy when in fact they are the poorest race group in NYC.
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Right, but we agree these are different groups, yes? Asian immigrants in NYC are hugely diverse, from incredibly wealthy Chinese immigrants and, according to your article, dirt-poor Cambodians, Laotians (?), and other groups. I don’t understand why you would group them together. My original point, about poor people, still stands, I think. Poor people have fewer opportunities than rich people, and worse results.
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No, There’s over a million asians in NYC and I doubt there are much more than 1000 Cambodians. Probably even fewer Loatians. The vast majority of the asians in NYC either come from confucian cultures like China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam or from south asian countries like India or Pakistan/Bangladesh. The poverty rate among the asian immigrants is pretty high (30%), somebody has to wait those tables in chinatown, somebody run the cash register at the korean supermarkets.
And while NYC’s asians are not a perfectly representative sample of anything other than NYC asians, I suspect you can extrapolate the point I am making. Poor asians are outperforming rich whites academically and it’s not because they have more opportunity. It’s because of a difference in culture. Asians believe that intelligence and academic success is largely the result of effort, discipline, practice. Many whites seem to think that people are either born smart or they are not.
All of that’s a lovely explanation of why different individuals will wind up doing different things even if they come out of very similar circumstances.
It has very little, if anything, to do with results taken over large groups of people, which all contain large numbers of individuals who differ on all of those factors.
A difference in parenting is, from the point of view of the children, a difference in opportunity.
A difference in motivation may come from all sorts of factors. Some of it’s individual differences; but some of it is difference of opportunity. The unmotivated kid may be told by everyone they know that there’s no sense in bothering; or may be using all of a large amount of motivation to do something that’s not in the standard curriculum; or may simply be hungry.
Would you care to specify exactly what you mean by a “racial group”, and what circumstances you think exist which provide even opportunities?
Culture most certainly does affect choices. The culture setting the rules affects the choices of everyone else…
You’re taking a wild leap from ‘some people are better at parenting than others’ to ‘some racial groups are better at parenting than others.’ That second statement does sound racist, for sure.
I think we should provide mentors to the children of parents who for whatever reason can’t or aren’t do the job, yes.
Should I conclude that unfortunately you are not kidding, with or without euphemistic expletives, when you say that children of parents who can’t or won’t do their job should be given no assistance, but should instead be punished for the sins or inabilities of their parents?
I consider lumping together all of the wildly varying cultures engaged in by the widely varying people all over the world who have dark skin color into one undifferentiated category called ‘black culture’ to be racist, yes.
Can you provide a cite for the bolded part? Your previous cite did not show that.
Aside from the following the rest were just “how to help poor people” suggestions
Yes, blacks are more likely to be victims of police brutality than whites. This needs to stop. So what law were you proposing again?
Busing is a good way to get Trump a third term. Come up with an idea that won’t turn the white house permanently red.
I don’t know enough about this but maybe we should put the black kids in ESL so they can all learn to speak english in a manner that will set them up for success later in life… like we do with the asian immigrant kids?
What law are you suggesting here?