Crap. Even previewed and still managed to screw up the coding.
Anyway…
Diogenes: what tomndebb said.
Well, shit, why don’t you just ask me for the answer to world peace and the cure for cancer while you’re at it?
The short answer is, I don’t know. I think a big part of the problem is attitudinal. I think black leadership needs to quit making the sins of the past a convenient scapegoat for modern failure. The message should be that even in difficult circumstances, the odds are not insurmountable. And I think black kids (and white kids, for that matter) need to have parents who will make them study more hours per night (Asian kids kick everyone’s asses for a reason). Even in rich Shaker Heights, black kids turned in homework assignments with less frequency than their nonblack counterparts.
But the real problem is a sense among young blacks that studying hard represents some kind of cultural betrayal. That Chris Rock sketch carries a punch for a reason – black youth culture really does elevate the thug and denigrate the intelligent. And I have no idea how to fix that.
While I applaud the efforts of tomndebb, monstro, you with the face, DtC, and pizzabrat to set the record straight, I’m afraid that it’s an exercise in futility. You can’t have an intelligent debate with someone who is thoroughly misinformed. Dewey C & H just doesn’t know enough about the subjects in question to hold up his end of the debate.
The above mentioned posters soldier bravely on, providing facts that should be obvious to anyone who purports to discuss the State of Black America (what this thread has now morphed into). Dewey, C & H maintains his position against all reason, using that favorite junior high debating tactic, argument from ignorance.
The abuse and persecution of black Americans is in no way “long past.” The last of the governmental restrictions to full citizenship rights and equal treatment before the law ended in the mid Sixties, within the lifetimes of the majority of adult Americans. As Monstro pointed out, there has only been one generation of black Americans that have grown up free (theoretically) of state sponsored abuse.
Anyone not blinded by right-wing ideology can recognize that merely changing laws doesn’t guarrantee a change in society. A society that has done things one way for almost four hundred years will not turn on a dime and do things the opposite way simply because a few laws change. Any number of studies show that discrimination against black Americans persists, in housing, employment, the justice system, and education.
As tomndebb pointed out, the overwhelming majority of black Americans are descended from slaves. Only someone grossly unfamiliar with the issues would argue otherwise. The goal here, I suppose, is to pretend that the abuse and persecution of black Americans never really took place, and can therefore not have influenced current conditions.
The numbers of African and Carribbean immigrants coming to the US have been miniscule until recently, in part because the pre 1960’s America was often heinously racist. Those that did come were barred from working, attending school, or living in white communities, so they ended up living and intermarrying with black Americans. As James Baldwin points out in one of his essays, the immigrant advantage lasts a generation or two, and then the pressures of life as a black person in America take their toll.
And what is the immigrant advantage? It’s partly superior education and job skills developed in their home countries. Black immigrants are better educated and more highly skilled than the people who stay behind.
It’s partly a psychogical advantage. These immigrants come from places where black people are in control. The authority figures, the movers and shakers, the government officials are black. Unlike black Americans, these immigrants did not spend their formative years constantly defending their self worth, constantly having to prove that they had the right to be where they were and the right to do what they were doing.
Having acknowledged the immigrant advantage, I also have to say this: black Americans are by far the best educated, wealthiest, most highly skilled,and politically and culturally infulential group of people of African descent in the world. The Nigerian Monstro mentioned was probably badmouthing black Americans out of envy. The worst slums in Newark are positively middle class by Nigerian standards.
Black Americans have made an astounding and unprecendented transition: going from an overwhelmingly illiterate slave population to the twelfth wealthiest nation in the world (in terms of per capita income) in little over a hundred years. It’s the speed of this transition, and the incredible success it demonstrates that is the source of so much envy and resentment. It’s not the black failures that threaten ** Dewey, C & H**, but the successes. It’s the successful blacks who are in a postion to compete for jobs, housing, access to education, and political power.
You arrogant, ignorant little shit! Dare I ask for your basis for this bit of armchair psychoanalysis?
This, in a word, is a load of hooey. I am not afraid of black success, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. Indeed, I deal with minority attorneys routinely; I have no problem with their successes (and the attendent wealth that equates to access to housing, education and power).
In fact, I want more blacks to be successful. I think much of the way things have gone is counterproductive to that end. That’s my whole point, goddammit.
You’re attempting to poison the well here – saying, without evidence, that I want blacks to fail and that thus my position should be ignored. What an utter load of bullshit. One would hope that racial issues could be discussed without that kind of bad faith.
And as for me being “uninformed” – what are you smoking? I’ve already cited to one scholar’s work in the field. I could cite to more, from the Moynihan report in the 60’s to the work of Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom. This is not a topic on which I am ill-read. The only thing that’s uninformed is your accusation of uninformedness.
Dewey, C uH, you claimed that the wrongs done to black Americans are long past. This is simply not true.
You created a straw man argument based on the absurd notion that the great majority of black Americans are not the descendants of slaves. Wrong.
You argued that the term “black person” has a universal, agreed upon meaning. It’s quite the opposite. The US, Brazil, South Africa, the Arab world, and Australia all have different definitions of what constitutes a “black person.”
You mentioned the poor performance of black students relative to whites when corrected for income. This at least is partially true. The problem is that correcting for income doesn’t tell the whole story. Public school teachers, for example, and city bus drivers have comparable incomes, but teachers are intimately familiar with the workings of academia and the requirements for success there, whereas bus drivers often are not.
Correcting for income also doesn’t account for differences in psychological states and social interactions. (There is probably no way to quantify these, but there’s no question that they have significant effects on mental functioning.) The performance gap is nothing to be complacent about, but fixing it will require more than just harranguing black students to do better. It’s not so much that black American culture is anti-intellectual, but that American culture as a whole is intellectual. The ethnic groups that do best academically are those who stand to some degree outside of mainstream American culture.
I would characterize the Thernstom’s work as more propagandistic than scholarly. They routinely deny the persistence of racism and its negative effects. They worry that a majority of white Americans will never support the mainstream Democratic agenda because it is too closely associated with blacks, that blacks have too much power in the party and in city governments. They want black folks to shut up and let (supposedly) well meaning white people (like the Thernstroms) tell them what to do.
Their attacks on black Americans and black leaders are a sort of “the floggings will continue til morale improves” approach that is bound to fail.
No, I said that slavery was long past, and that psychocultural harm from that particular institution is so attenuated to present day as to be meaningless in assessing cultural problems in black America. Rather than bitching about who owned whom a century and a half ago, it’s better to focus on the future. **
Please quote where I made such an assertion. I compared immigrant success to native success, but I never suggested that immigrant blacks constituted a majority of the black population. **
I simply said that “black” is not widely understood as meaning “descended from slaves,” in the US or elsewhere, and backed that assertion up with citations. I said nothing about other aspects of how “black” is defined here or abroad. You are misstating my earlier argument. **
So what? This doesn’t change the fact that socioeconomic background is an important determinant of academic success, nor does it change the fact that rich black kids do less well than rich white kids. **
If what you perceive as the anti-intellectual nature of American culture overall is to blame, then one would expect to see parity among native whites and native blacks at the same socioeconomic level; after all, they both exist within the same anti-intellectual national culture. Such parity does not exist. Your theory falls apart. **
Then you are not familiar with their work or its reception. Even their critics recognize that their work is a substantial contribution to the field.**
This is simply a lie. The Thernstroms do recognize the existence of racism; they just don’t find it to be a complete, or even the most important, explanation for black failure in the modern era. And they have some fairly impressive statistical information to back their viewpoint up. **
Cite? **
This is a crock of shit. The Thernstrom’s work is aimed toward addressing the very real problems of black America. Just because you disagree with their conclusions does not transform them into paternalistic mavens looking to patronize African Americans.
You continue to argue in bad faith. It’s not enough to disagree with your opponent: you must also insist that your opponent has pernicious motives for holding his or her position. Why can’t you accept that someone can genuinely care about the plight of black Americans while seeing a different solution to that plight from your own?
Yes, keep believing we’re one in the same. Ignore the experiences that have been shared on this thread. We all know that you know how it is to be 1)a black American, and 2)a black immigrant. So we just need to accept you know what you’re talking about, since you speak with such authority on the subject.
:rolleyes:
Just because you think we all look the same doesn’t mean everyone else does, you know?
I have not bitched, you fool. I have responded to your ignorance with truth. It is patently WRONG to say that black failure cannot in large part be attributed to past racism and discrimination. If someone spews ignorance on this board, we’re supposed to shoot them down. This is not “bitching”.
I’m not going to let you say something wrong about black people and ignore it just because you think stating the truth = being a bitch. Nosiree.
And do you realize how stupid it is to ignore Jim Crow? This conversation has NEVER been just about slavery, and you know it. I wasn’t talking about just great-great-grandfathers. I have talked about children, parents, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers on this thread. People who are still LIVING TODAY. It’s frustrating listening to someone who acts like they know everything but clearly doesn’t know ANYTHING about what they’re speaking about. Having an opinion doesn’t equal expertise.
No, you’ve been claiming that blacks aren’t succeeding because they’re paranoid and angry and resentful and won’t let go of the past. I agree that black people are pessimistic, but I don’t think this has held us back at all. I’m quite pessimistic (and cynical, too) but that’s hasn’t held me back at all. I choose to funnel my pessimism into arguments like this one.
(It would be STUPID for us not to be pessimistic. A day can’t go by without reports of discrimination or racial profiling or racist behavior. I don’t see how anyone, let alone black people, could be optimistic about race.)
It’s easy to find one thing and make that the “big problem” facing black people. Especially when you get your facts from a book or a few articles. It’s not that simple at all. You can be very optimistic, a child of the Newark slums, but if you aren’t being educated well, you aren’t going to succeed. At the university I attend as a grad student, many undergrads who grew up in Newark come to us bright-eyed and bushy-tailed but they cannot compete academically with students from East Rutherford or Nutley or Edison. They have to take remedial math classes because their alma maters didn’t go up to calculus. They have to work twice as hard in their intro-level biology courses because they didn’t have laboratories in their high schools, where you can practice looking through microscopes or dissect a frog or two. They come to us not knowing how to write because no one ever made them do term papers. Many make it through college, but many don’t. It breaks my heart to see “black failure” because it reminds me how lonely I am, the only black instructor in the whole department.
I don’t see paranoia or resentment or pessimism holding anyone back. I see lots of things, but those don’t even come close.
I have a younger cousin who grew up in Gary, IN. Bad neighborhood, right? But when he was a pre-teen his mother picked up and moved the family to Lynhurst, Il, a nice suburb outside of Chicago. The first couple of years were great for him. He was on the Little League and he had friends in the neighborhood. No drug deals or thugs to be afraid of. No vicious pit bulls named “King” chasing after you. When he was twelve or thirteen, he was so obsessed with the band “Live” that he was hilarious. And then when he got to high school, things changed. He was suddenly a “thug”. Instead of getting a normal teenage job, he started selling cigars in the schoolyard. He’s a stupid bonehead that got himself arrested last year. An embarrassment to the family and to himself, although he’s too stupid to be ashamed.
His problem isn’t paranoia or resentment towards “YT”. No, his problem is that he doesn’t want to work. He’s lazy. He wants bling bling without the sweat. He thinks he’s a thug, like on BET. He doesn’t have a beef with white people. He’s got a white girlfriend, for pete’s sake. I don’t know what she sees in him…but I’m sure they’ll both show up one day on Ricki Lake.
I see my cousin in way too many people. But funny, I’ve never seen a person who was so busy blaming Whitey that they couldn’t pick up a book or fill out a college application. Eh, but my experience is just anedoctal. I haven’t written a book or an article about it, so it doesn’t really count.
But tell me, Dewey. What’s in your experience that lends support to your hypothesis? Cuz I have a lot of “data points” that support mine.
It’s been really hard not to throw up my hands and cuss him out. I know Dewey isn’t dumb. He can hold his own on issues that he knows. This isn’t one of them, and I wish he would realize that.
The white mans world? Last I checked there were over 6 billion people in this world. I bet less than half of those are white folk. So who really is the minority here?
Ok, ok. You probably meant that white men have all the power, right? Well if you ask me, that’s an accomplishment. Probably not the best way to get all this wealth and power was to take in slaves to do all the dirty work. But don’t dare go on to tell me that Africans, Mexicans, Incas, and little purple people haven’t taken in slaves of their own for economy gain. Sure, not as largely documented as Europeans and Americans have, but never the less, still done. Societies probably didn’t last long enough through wars and poverty to keep slaves and to build a healthy economy as America did. But don’t go on to say that white people are evil because they got ahead of the game and don’t deserve a club. Because I bet given the chance, at the right time in history… Asians, Blacks, and Mexicans would’ve done the SAME EXACT THING!!! Don’t deny it. It’s called getting ahead and is a basic human instinct.
And then the white people would be moaning how they’re an oppressed and pitiable people, finding racism at every turn, fighting for their rights to assembly like everyone else.
Dewey C uH, you didn’t specify a reference to slavery. You referred to past wrongs. It’s intellectually dishonest to separate slavery from Jim Crow when assessing the current condition of black America. You’ve been caught, and now you’re backpedaling. Now that is bad faith.
I think that most nationally known Black leaders haven’t dwelt on the past in a long, long time except as a way of understanding why there is a problem with self-esteem. Jesse Jackson, for example, certainly has worked on fostering self-respect and getting young young people in touch with their own power to surmount obstacles.
The problems that I ran into as a teacher came from principles and guidance counselors who wanted their schools to look successful even if it meant setting lower standards and illegally changing grades.
For example, there is a system-wide law that a student can not miss more than ten days and still pass a class. One of my students missed forty-five days in one semester and had a numerical average of 18! The guidance counselor, who had no authority to do so, changed her grade – as was her custom.
Despite the system-wide law that said that teachers were to have access to the records of students that they were responsible for, we were not allowed to see the records of students in our classes! We were allowed to see only the records of those who were in our homerooms. If a teacher was known to set high standards in a classroom and taught seniors, for example, then she or he never had a senior homeroom. It was simply sabotage. They thought they were doing the students a favor.
After graduation, most of the college bound students went to a historically Black state university where the ACT scores required for admission were set lower than in other state schools. The President of the university at that time said that our city needed a university for the academically handicapped.
When students graduated from this university, many of them became teachers and began perpetuating a cycle of poor instruction, expectation and requirements.
The message to Black students was clear. You aren’t expected to be as intelligent as white students.
But Dewey, I disagree with you totally about the esteem with which they hold those who achieve academically. For one thing, your don’t get to play sports in high shcool unless you keep your grades up. That is a big motivator. If you can play college ball, you might get to go pro. It doesn’t happen often, but I have had a couple. But we had a lot of kids who did make it to college trying – and I don’t mean just the university that was dummied down.
I would say that 95% of our students in the inner city were just average students who wanted to do well enough to graduate. Some of them went on to do extraordinarily well. The kind of kid that Chris Rock is joking about is the 5%. Comedians are funny because they use hyperbole.
Sorry, but IMHO Jesse Jackson is one of the worst role models a black person has nowadays. The man is a political gadfly, a shame to the title of Reverend. Have you forgotten
his ‘counseling’ Willie Clinton for Oval Office indiscretions, all the while his own indiscretion was growing within the womb of a female staffer. Rabbi, heal thyself.
My Dad was a superintendent for a major East coast electric utility, in charge of methods and training. The PC people said, “There are not enough minority line foremen.” Dad said that the training classes are available to all persons with sufficient time in grade, and all they need to do is study to pass the line foreman test. The PC people said, “Lower the passing standard.” Dad said that if he was going to put someone in charge of a line crew, they’d have to know what they were doing, or someone would get killed, and fought changes in testing standards until his retirement.
At what juncture are the real or perceived sins of the Father forgiven and not passed on to the sons? I am not a slave owner, and neither was my Father, nor was his Father, and the Father before that was in Europe.
IMHO, ‘Addiction to Victim Status’ as promulgated by Jackson, Sharpton, et. al. does a tremendous disservice to the black community of this Nation.
You make no points with strawmen. I have seen no one in this thread claim that whites are evil or that only whites would have created the conditions of chattel slavery if given the chance. However, the historical reality is that only whites did establish chattel slavery and that a specific white society established control through Jim Crow and Lynch Law.
This does not put any burden of shame or guilt on me, simply because I am white. It does, however, mean that an examination of the situation that blacks have inherited (in the USA which is the focus of this discussion) a culture (in many ways self-defeating) from the society in which they lived.
Jesse Jackson, although always a self-promoting grandstander, spent over twenty years in a serious effort to get black kids to take responsibility for and control of their own lives. In the last ten years it seems to me that he has lost his message as he aspired to national recognition, but to deny his earlier efforts because one does not like his current activities is to distort history.
Jesse Jackson did not focus on victimization – to the contrary. I wish I could find what he said about the difference in the value of tears and sweat. The Rev. Jackson’s focus was on having self-esteem, working toward your goals, and helping other people. You disagree with those ideas? I guess his most famous quotation was this one, which is fairly typical of his philosophy:
Not the greatest rhetoric, but it does reflect the beliefs he instilled in others – not just Black kids either.
Jesse Jackson and Bill Cosby made the same mistake. Do you think Bill Cosby is a bad role model too? Martin Luther King, Jr. was unfaithful. Was he a bad role model? What about Ronald Reagan? Maybe he was divorced by then. Are you a good role model?
It really doesn’t pay to throw stones in a world of imperfect people who have taken it on the chin because their lives were before the public in an effort to serve rather than to snipe. It’s easier to be imperfect in a private life.
I think your Dad was right to fight the idea of lowering standards. Standards don’t have to be lowered for minorities. That was a point that I made earlier. Whoever was in charge of recruiting for the job wasn’t earning his pay.
Have you read this whole thread? This whole fork in the conversation is based on the premise, advanced by Diogenes and others, that slavery destroyed the culture of black Americans. My replies have clearly been in reference to that particular claim, whether I specifically use the word “slavery,” or whether I reference that institution more obliquely (as I do with references to “great-great grandfathers” and "ownership).
Indeed, my remarks only make sense in reference to slavery: the claim is that cultural destruction – the intentional deprivation of literacy, the forbidding of the practice of African religions, the intentional division of families – have caused black America to be culturally rootless, and that this is the source of their problems. Those ills are only traceable to slavery; Jim Crow was evil, but it did not cause those particular harms.
I’ve been quite consistent and quite clear about what I’ve been referring to. It is intellectually dishonest of you to suggest otherwise.
Yes, it is. You are complaining that black failure is inevitable due to the institution of slavery. **
Sure it is. The complaint was that blacks have suffered pyschocultural harm due to the effects of slavery. As terrible as Jim Crow was, it didn’t do what slavery did – didn’t rob blacks of their native culture.
If you want to start talking about other aspects of the black experience in America, fine – drop the psychocultural bullshit and we’ll talk about it. But don’t move the goalposts on me.
**
So what has held blacks back? Are we now back to laying the blame for black failure at ongoing discrimination?
And really: is it so hard to see how an attitude of “we can’t succeed, so why bother?” might explain a lack of success? **
So we ARE back to laying the blame for black ills at the feet of ongoing discrimination… **
This is a socioeconomic problem, not a race problem. The white kids in the Newark schools went to the same classes as the blacks, and the black residents of East Rutherford, Nutley and Edison went to the same classes as the whites. It isn’t like a white kid in Newark got a lab while the blacks didn’t. I agree that much needs to be done for poorer schools, but fail to see why that is relevant for purposes of this discussion.
I also again turn to the work of John Ogbu: even when these kinds of material issues are controlled for, a gap in performance exists. Rich blacks do less well than rich whites. Certainly they had access to all the labs and advanced calculus courses and term papers they could handle. Why then does that gap exist? **
Isn’t that precisely the problem I’ve been going on about? **
While I have my own experiences to be sure, I do not rely on them because I realize they may not be accurate. Instead, I turn to the works of folks like John Ogbu, or John McWhorter, or the Thernstroms, or even all the way back to the Moynihan report, to form my opinion.
I’ve known my fair share of athletes, both white and black (one I knew from high school now plays in the NFL), and I think this is a truism that defies color lines: most athletes don’t give a shit about grades as long as they pass. “Keeping your grades up” doesn’t mean striving for an A, it means not getting an F.
And if the kid is a talented athelete, his poor grades and low test scores will prove no barrier to college entrance. The kid I knew had something like a 700 on his SATs and barely passed his classes, yet got a full ride to college – a college that I knew several nonathletes got rejection letters from.
College coaches don’t give a shit about getting leading intellectual lights on their teams.
And as for the “esteem” with which their peers hold student athletes, ask yourself: are they held in high esteem for their grades, or because they can dunk a basketball?
Dewey, you’re the only one who is arguing that blacks are failures. Everyone else is just explaining why blacks aren’t absolutely perfect yet. Why don’t you just shutup and mind your business? I don’t know why you don’t understand this, but your continuous harping on black failure really doesn’t help. Believe it or not, the biggest critics of black people are blacks. We aren’t just laying around, wallowing in misery waiting for a white person to tell us that we suck. We’re just growing, passing on to future generations what works, and discarding what doesn’t, just like all of the older cultures did thousands of years ago. If you think blacks are so pathetic, yet want more blacks to be successful, the biggest favor you can do is to ignore blacks completely, because nobody needs your condescending attitude.
Obviously, I don’t think all blacks are failures; I don’t think any reasonable reading of my posts could possibly yield that conclusion. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with talented individuals of all colors; I certainly wouldn’t characterize the many gifted black attorneys I’ve had dealings with in the past as “failures” or as “pathetic” or as any other such thing.
You’re just taking issue with nomenclature. There exists, in the aggregate, a performance gap between blacks and whites in several areas, a performance gap that persists even when variables like socioeconomic level is controlled for. When I talk about “black failure,” I’m just referring to that gap. I think that is reasonably clear from the context in my posts.
If you’ve got a better term for me to use, fine; I’m not going to get bogged down with a semantic quibble.
NO! Your complaint was basically, “Why do black Americans suck compared to black immigrants?” People cited slavery. Others, like myself, cited slavery and subsequent discrimination. It didn’t matter to you, we were ALL WRONG.
Talk about moving the goal posts, buddy. You were the one who initiated this God-forsaken conversation, and you didn’t even read the fucking posts!
It’s YOU who want to only focus on slavery, because slavery happened almost 200 years ago, which is a long time ago in everyone’s book. Just about everyone else has mentioned the COMBINED affects of slavery and Jim Crow. You do this out of intellectual dishonesty, because you know there are no slaves still alive, but there are plenty of victims of Jim Crow. You do this out of sheer ignorance and stupidity, because you know you’re out of your league in this conversation and you don’t want to admit it. You do this because you’re a loudmouth know-it-all who thinks having an opinion equals having expertise.
Shut the hell up, Dewey.
You haven’t been reading my posts, obviously. You must have missed when I talked about my own explanations for the Problems Facing Black People That Have Nothing to Do with Whitey. No, you just want to believe that just because I acknowledge the past, that means I’m just another Blame Whitey negro. You don’t want to argue intelligently. You just want to get the last word.
First off, nothing I said above should have made you think I was only talking about black kids. The white kids from Newark who come here–the few that do, because we don’t get a lot…and most of them are Hispanic, which we know “don’t count”–are just as prepared as the black kids, and they have the same problems. So first off, you need to stop ASSuming that white kids are superior in every and all situations. They are not. No one has written a book about my situation, so I don’t have a handy cite for you. But I expect you to ignore this anyway so it doesn’t matter…
Second of all, there ARE massive differences in the performance of black kids from other places and those from Newark. I can tell immediately when a kid opens their mouth whether they are from Newark or not, black OR white.
That’s what I mean by “oversimplication”. You think you have us figured out. You’re fixated on “black people suck” and you don’t want to hear anything else. Well, fuck you for not seeing why this is “relevant”. It’s relevant because I’m trying to tell you why it’s not simple at all. Pessimism at YT isn’t what’s holding black people back!
And where in my cousin’s story do you conclude that he’s got a beef with Racist Whitey? Where in my cousin’s story do you conclude that he’s fixated on slavery and discrimination?
Yes, it’s easier to talk about this from the second, third-hand experiences of a bunch of psuedo-intellectuals. It trumps first-hand experience everytime.
I can tell you have no real experiences relevant to this discussion. People who don’t know much about a topic usually stay quiet. Usually these people are smart and try to learn something before offering their own opinion. But not you. Even when polite posters like tomndebb repeatedly correct you, you still mouth out like you know what you’re talking about. And it’s obvious that you don’t, Mr. Let’s-Just-Focus-on-Slavery-Because-Modern-Times-Don’t-Matter.
We need improvements in how our history courses are taught, and you’re proof of that Mr. Undhow.
