# Living while black in America **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [July 9, 2018, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611 "2018-07-09T21:17:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 33
**Author:** ![Huey\_Freeman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/huey_freeman/32/251_2.png) [@Huey\_Freeman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huey_Freeman)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2018, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/643 "2018-08-09T20:42:19Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > You’re repeating yourself over and over without listening or understanding what people are telling you. **You don’t appear to be substantively engaging with anyone, you just want to repeatedly and ignorantly denigrate an entire race of people.** > > When I first joined this board you would occasionally say witty things. Maybe not as witty as **Elucidator** , but still relatively witty. You haven’t said anything clever in a long time–you’ve degenerated into an angry old racist man. > > I hope you improve, but you probably won’t. Cognitive decline is a one-way street. (emphasis mine) This is because Grand Dragon Shodan is low level. But wait, let me back up and give you my scale: **Level 0** : This white doesn’t see “race” except in people of color. Believes white people are genetically, morally, and/or intellectually superior to people of color; this white may categorize people of color as an existential threat to their way of life (e.g. Laura Ingham remarked yesterday because of immigrants “America We Know and Love Doesn’t Exist Anymore”). Unlike most whites who prefer to utilize coded language when referencing people of color, this level 0 white tends to use explicit language to debase people of color (and anyone – including other whites - who supports people of color). The behavior of this white may be unconscious or conscious. This white cannot be engaged. **Level 1** : Imagine having a doctorate in physics and being drawn into an hours-long argument with a layman about the intricacies of atomic orbitals. The layman insists he knows as much as you or more than you. That’s the story of a level 1. Unlike level 0, whites at level 1 are more socially aware/averse to shame and therefore more likely to use coded language and dog whistles over direct racial epithets. This white genuinely believes he or she knows more about race and racism than people who have spent their whole life studying (or experiencing) it. Consequently, this white dismisses facts, evidence, and truth for whataboutery and equivocation; this particular white chronically confuses “not understanding” with “disagreeing”. The smart level 1 whites tend to cultivate, associate, marry, or adopt people of color as a means to deflect accusations of racism or to appear more cosmopolitan. This white cannot be engaged. **Level 2** : This white has a limited understanding of racism and the impact of that racism on people of color. This white understands that white privilege exists but rejects the premise that he or she has personally benefited from that privilege. This white naively believes that the trajectory of his or her life would’ve been the same even if their skin was darker. While this white may engage and associate with people of color, he or she doesn’t possess the racial stamina to challenge white supremacy. While level 2 whites insist that racism can exist against white folks, level 2 whites (are consistent and) do admit racism also a deleterious impact on people of color but believes it is the individuals should be shunned, not the ideology of white supremacy. This white cannot be engaged. **Level 3** : This white has a remarkable ability to “zoom out” from the individual. While he or she may not engage in overt prejudice or bias, the level 3 white is acutely aware he or she is a beneficiary of white privilege. When this white is exposed to anti-black sentiment by fellow whites, the white may (seldomly) speak up but will (most) often disengage or cut off contact with the racist. This white struggle with intrusive racist thoughts in contact with people of color but understands that these thoughts are due to being brought up in a culture that worships at the altar of white supremacy. When these moments occur, the white takes a step back, reflects, and attempts to be a better person. The level 3 struggles with the question (paraphrased): “I accept racism exist and I accept white privilege but WTF am I supposed to do about it?” This white may (or not) have authentic relationships of color but nonetheless has the ability talk to people of color about racism without reflexively leaning upon anger, argumentation, defensiveness, or other dictums of white fragility. **Level 4** : This white is similar to level 3 except that this white has a broad understanding of history and its context; this white is able to acknowledge that this country’s framework was built on white supremacy. This white may or may not have friends or associates who are of color but nonetheless has a desire to foster authentic relationships with them. This white does not tolerate anti-black or other racist sentiments by fellow whites and will immediately call it out. This white doesn’t give a fuck. This white has the intellectual stamina to understand that the slavery, torture, and incarceration of black fathers, the slavery, torture, and rape of black mothers, selling of black children and the deliberate dissolution of the black family, Black Codes, redlining, Jim Crow, a culture of white supremacy that denigrates people of color as stupid, shiftless, or less-deserving, housing and employment discrimination, lynching, human experimentation, etc. has deleterious and long-lasting effects on people of color that continue to this day. While other whites scratch their head in puzzlement or make excuses, this white understands, for example, why the U.S never passed an anti-lynching law or why the U.S never apologized for slavery until the late 1990’s. These whites roll their eyes or walk away when a fellow white says “white lives matter”, “all lives matter”, or “blue lives matter” because these the level 4 white has the intellectual ability to understand exactly what is meant by the slogan “black lives matter”; further, the level 4 white knows and that this phrase has nothing to do with denigrating or cheapening the lives of whites or others. **Level 5** : This white is similar to level 4 except that this white has achieved a kind of awakened transcendence. We colloquially call this “zenyatta ult” or “being woke”. When this transformation occurs, he or she understands that whiteness isn’t an ethnicity or a skin tone but an ideology of hate onto itself. He or she is freely able to zoom in-and-out from his or her individual actions and behavior, to their respective demographic groups, to ultimately society as a collective; he or she understands that racism is institutional and pervasive while bias and prejudice emanate from the individual. He or she understands how one can individually not overtly engage in bias or prejudice but still be complicit in a system that was built on the ideology of white supremacy. While this white may still struggle with intrusive racist thoughts, he or she earnestly, empathetically, and authentically engages with people of color; this white insists (and demands others who are around) on treating people of color with the dignity and humanity. Whew! I could be convinced that Grand Dragon Shodan provides biting commentary in subjects that are non-race related, that he is very knowledgeable in his field of study/occupation, and that he is a mastered coded language to an impressive art form. But even with all of those accomplishments, on my scale, Grand Dragon Shodan stuck between a 0 and 1. He doesn’t get what you’re saying because he’s a racist and incapable of engaging in a serious discussion on race. You shining light the truth is only going to make the racist cling tighter to their beliefs. Sound familiar? It should because his thinking is a microcosm of what’s playing out in the United States now - Trump enjoys the [second highest Republican approval ratings in recorded history](https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-bbc3e431-5a97-439e-b1aa-93fda4e01796.html) and this is _after_ he had separated children from their families. Listen, I know I’m the last person you’ll listen to but mark my words: you can’t change the hearts and minds of these people and what they represent. For people like Grand Dragon Shodan, it’s about the debasement of people of color and the truth. Does. Not. Matter. ---
**Author:** ![k9bfriender](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/k9bfriender/32/3283_2.png) [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2018, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/644 "2018-08-09T21:18:12Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > . Other people perpetuating a different and less adaptive culture don’t affect my success, or the success of those who share that culture, except to serve as examples of how a toxic culture can screw up your life.If it is shitty to say “don’t try to blame the fact that you abandoned your family or had two children before you were twenty by two different men or fucked up in high school or robbed the neighborhood liquor store”, then unless and until you can point out how it was my fault, you will have to live with it. Okay, so you have a black kid who grows up in a black neighborhood. He works hard to get as good a grades as he can, with the resources that he can. He avoid the gangs and the drugs. He doesn’t get anyone pregnant. Yet, he is harassed by police anytime he is on the street. He is turned down for jobs that you would have gotten with his qualifications. He doesn’t have money for college, and in fact, barely is able to complete high school before having to get a full time job to support himself. So, he stays in the neighborhood, gets married, has a couple kids, and hopes that they do better than he did. You would say that he is toxic, because he didn’t do as well as you did. > [@](#): > > As mentioned, no, no I did not. As mentioned, you just claim that you didn’t, but I am watching you as you are shitting in their front yard right this second. > [@](#): > > Their toxic culture, which perpetuates their situation instead of encouraging them to overcome it. And why is this “culture” unique to black people? Is it due to historical and current social structures that have created this environment, or is it something inherent to the color of their skin? If the former, then why would those who perpetuated and benefited from those structures not have any responsibility for helping to improve their environment, and if the later, you’re a racist. > [@](#): > > Try reading for comprehension, you preposterous buffoon. That I don’t agree with your assessment that there is something inherent to the quantity of melanin in one’s skin that creates a toxic culture does not mean that I did not read and comprehend your words, you preposterous racist. ---
**Author:** ![k9bfriender](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/k9bfriender/32/3283_2.png) [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2018, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/645 "2018-08-09T21:27:39Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > I don’t know your family. I live next to black people and their culture is just fine. I’ve lived next to different sets of black people and their culture was atrocious. I’ve lived with black people and their culture was frankly better than mine. Sound like you just said that there isn’t a culture, but simply individuals. > [@](#): > > But that’s not what people who refer to toxic black culture are referring to and you know it. Just like white trash culture isn’t directed at all whites. These terms are mainly aimed at the lower classes of a group whose behavior and/or value system are counterproductive Right, when they are talking about toxic black culture they are just talking about groups of people, but not the groups of people that you would be offended about if they were talking about them. ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2018, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/646 "2018-08-09T22:42:16Z")
> [@k9bfriender](#): > > Sound like you just said that there isn’t a culture, but simply individuals. > Right, when they are talking about toxic black culture they are just talking about groups of people, but not the groups of people that you would be offended about if they were talking about them. I think it’s very difficult to precisely and accurately describe people with broad labels. Even stuff like liberal and conservative is hard to define. Look at so-called white trash. We can identify certain properties of so-called white trash and we can identify certain people as having some or many of those properties but few would be an exact match. However, that still doesn’t make the label useless. We just recognize that such a label is inherently fuzzy. We also know, if we are being honest, that the usage of such label doesn’t imply that all so-called white folk are white trash. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2018, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/647 "2018-08-09T23:27:46Z")
Coleman Hughes, writing in Quillette: > **[Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap](https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-and-the-racial-wealth-gap/)** > > In the public debate on racial inequality, the wealth gap is among the sharpest arrows in the progressive quiver. > [@](#): > > Starting with the California Alien Land Law of 1913, fourteen states passed laws preventing Japanese-American peasant farmers from owning land and property. These laws existed until 1952, when the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. Add to this the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II, and it’s fair to say that the Japanese were given no bootstraps in America. Nevertheless, by 1970 census data showed Japanese-Americans out-earning Anglo-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish-Americans.14For Asian-Americans on the whole, an analysis of wealth data from 1989 to 2013 predicted that their “median wealth soon will surpass the white median level.” If wealth differences were largely explained by America’s history of favoring certain groups over others, then it would be hard to explain why Asian-Americans, who were never favored, are on track to become wealthier than whites. > > Nor can historical racism explain wealth disparities between groups of the same race. A 2015 survey of wealth in Boston found that the median black household had only 8 dollars of wealth. Newsweek reported this fact under the heading “Racism in Boston.” But the 8 dollar figure only pertained to black Bostonians of American ancestry; black Bostonians of Caribbean ancestry had 12,000 dollars of wealth, despite having identical rates of college graduation, only slightly higher incomes, and being equally black in the same city. > > Similar disparities emerge when people are grouped by religion. A 2003 study found that Jewish households had a 7-to-1 wealth advantage over Conservative Protestant households, despite the fact that Protestants have been favored over Jews for most of American history.[…] > > A 2017 Nielsen report found that, compared to white women, black women were 14 percent more likely to own a luxury vehicle, 16 percent more likely to purchase costume jewelry, and 9 percent more likely to purchase fine jewelry.[…] > Moreover, all of these spending differences were unconditional on wealth and income. > > To what extent do poor spending habits explain the persistence of the wealth gap? Economists at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania asked this question after analyzing 16 years of nationally representative data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Consistent with the Nielsen data, they found that blacks with comparable incomes to whites spent 17 percent less on education, and 32 percent more (an extra $2300 per year in 2005 dollars) on ‘visible goods’—defined as cars, jewelry, and clothes. What’s more, “after controlling for visible spending,” they concluded that the “wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, conditional on permanent income, declines by 50 percent.”[…] > > Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis followed over 40,000 families from 1989 to 2013, tracking their wealth accumulation and financial decisions. They developed a financial health scale, ranging from 0 to 5, that measured the degree to which families made “routine financial health choices that contribute to wealth accumulation”—e.g., saving any amount of money, paying credit card bills on time, having a low debt-to-income ratio, etc. At 3.12, Asian families scored the highest, followed by whites at 3.11, Hispanics at 2.71, and blacks at 2.63. > Next, they asked if education accounted for the differences in financial habits by limiting the comparison to middle-aged families with advanced degrees. Surprisingly, they found that the racial gap in financial health-scores didn’t shrink; it widened. Highly-educated Asian families scored 3.49, comparable whites scored 3.38, comparable Hispanics scored 2.94, and comparable blacks remained far behind at 2.66. Thus, the study authors concluded, neither “periodic shortages of time or money” nor “lower educational attainment” were the driving forces behind the differences in financial decision-making.[…] > > Is it racist to observe that whites are more likely to drive drunk than blacks are? Is it racist to assert that black immigrants in the UK outscore comparable white Britons on standardized tests? Is it racist to observe that black American culture has produced a higher number of musical icons than Asian-American culture has?[…] > > [T]hose who believe they are helping black Americans—or any demographic group—succeed by encouraging them to blame society are mistaken. Talking honestly about harmful behavioral patterns is the only way to reliably correct them. ---
**Author:** ![Huey\_Freeman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/huey_freeman/32/251_2.png) [@Huey\_Freeman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huey_Freeman)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/648 "2018-08-10T00:10:41Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Coleman Hughes, writing in Quillette: > > [Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap](https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-and-the-racial-wealth-gap/) You’re level 0 trying to perform the Kuchiyose No Jutsu? That simply will not do. Get off my lawn (and take that sunken place trash with you). ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/649 "2018-08-10T00:50:20Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Coleman Hughes, writing in Quillette Is Coleman Hughes the one doing your thinking for you now? Charles Murray will be so jealous. ---
**Author:** ![Sunny\_Daze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunny_daze/32/438_2.png) [@Sunny\_Daze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunny_Daze)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/650 "2018-08-10T01:15:22Z")
**SlackerInc** Please condense that wall of text into whatever the hell your point is. They way you’ve snipped it is incomprehensible. > [@Huey\_Freeman](#): > > You’re level 0 trying to perform the Kuchiyose No Jutsu? That simply will not do. Get off my lawn (and take that sunken place trash with you). Seriously - shut up with the autism swipes. I’ll happily make you a Level chart if you need one. Right now you’re on Level 0. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/651 "2018-08-10T01:21:59Z")
Wow, using autism as an insult while styling onesself as a finger-wagging “woke” scold? As the father of two kids with autism, I’d be offended if I weren’t so bemused. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/652 "2018-08-10T01:26:18Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > Is Coleman Hughes the one doing your thinking for you now? Charles Murray will be so jealous. He’ll take anyone who provides rhetorical cover for his belief that black people have inherently inferior intellect. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/653 "2018-08-10T01:35:55Z")
> [@Sunny\_Daze](#): > > **SlackerInc** Please condense that wall of text into whatever the hell your point is. They way you’ve snipped it is incomprehensible. You’re asking him to read and comprehend text? Hold on, I need to get some popcorn… ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/654 "2018-08-10T02:22:36Z")
Maybe we could just have **Huey Freeman** and **SlackerInc** in a room together and see what happens? ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/655 "2018-08-10T02:27:39Z")
> [@Huey\_Freeman](#): > > (emphasis mine) > > This is because Grand Dragon Shodan is low level. But wait, let me back up and give you my scale: Personally, I’m mostly stuck at level 3, though I spotted the insincerity of white lives matter pretty much immediately. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/656 "2018-08-10T03:10:19Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > No, _their_ culture. > > If their culture adapted, they wouldn’t be poor. Asians and Jews are better examples of adaptation, because their cultures are successful rather than dysfunctional. > > No, and that’s the point. I grew up in a culture where people were expected to pay attention in school, obey the law, support their own children, and earn their own livings. I am perpetuating that culture to the best of my ability. Other people perpetuating a different and less adaptive culture don’t affect my success, or the success of those who share that culture, except to serve as examples of how a toxic culture can screw up your life.If it is shitty to say “don’t try to blame the fact that you abandoned your family or had two children before you were twenty by two different men or fucked up in high school or robbed the neighborhood liquor store”, then unless and until you can point out how it was my fault, you will have to live with it. > > Their toxic culture, which perpetuates their situation instead of encouraging them to overcome it. Evil Economist already posted the obvious next question: > [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > Why do these people behave this way. Forget the “culture” shit, that’s not an explanation. Why are there these cultural problems. What’s causing the culture differences? Why do you think black people have the culture you describe? It’s obviously not a situation anyone would want to live in. So why do they? If the option of living in a culture that doesn’t include crime, imprisonment, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drugs, bad education, and broken homes is freely available to black people, why aren’t they taking it? ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/657 "2018-08-10T04:02:22Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Wow, using autism as an insult while styling onesself as a finger-wagging “woke” scold? As the father of two kids with autism, I’d be offended if I weren’t so bemused. I understand that the go-to insult for adolescents is now “Autistic”, as opposed to the 1970s-1980s epithet “Gay”. Judging from 4chan. Probably an improvement I say, though not by much. (Pre-empt: Q: Why is it an improvement mfm? A: I dunno, I guess I’m claiming that today’s anti-autistic sentiments are less toxic than the homophobia of the past.) ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/658 "2018-08-10T04:04:36Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Why do you think black people have the culture you describe? It’s obviously not a situation anyone would want to live in. So why do they? If the option of living in a culture that doesn’t include crime, imprisonment, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drugs, bad education, and broken homes is freely available to black people, why aren’t they taking it? That’s like asking why rural Afghans cling to a culture that involves women walking around in bags. Some cultures are fucked up and do not contribute to human flourishing, but people don’t necessarily change even when they could and should. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 4:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/659 "2018-08-10T04:48:17Z")
> [@Machine\_Elf](#): > > Better funding for inner-city schools so they aren’t such shitholes. This is a trope that was once very much true but is no longer so. We discussed it in great detail in the Sam Harris thread, so I’m not going to relitigate it here; but the upshot is that the range of debate is from “the average black kid in public schools gets more funding than the average student overall” (my read of the data) to “they get one or two percent less” (a real stretch IMO). A massive infusion of money into certain schools (like Newark) has not increased test scores. Conservatives are likely to say this is because bureaucrats wasted the money and teachers are incompetent. I believe the money has created good schools with compassionate, involved teachers, and has resulted in schools parents are by and large happy to send their kids to. But among some people, the racial test score disparity is a priori proof that urban public schools are “shitholes” that are to blame for all social ills befalling African American kids. Anyway, here’s a post from the other thread with some evidence for what I’m talking about: [https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20909022&postcount=1282](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20909022&postcount=1282) > [@Machine\_Elf](#): > > Imagine for a moment that you _wanted_ to change that culture of yours from within. How much pushback do you think you’d get? Do you think inner-city black people get pushback when they try to change their culture? This is certainly true. Coleman Hughes (who, BTW, is not a “black conservative”: he voted for Hillary and labels the GOP as the home of far-right Nazi types) has gotten intense heat for his editorials. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 4:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/660 "2018-08-10T04:59:17Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > That’s like asking why rural Afghans cling to a culture that involves women walking around in bags. Some cultures are fucked up and do not contribute to human flourishing, but people don’t necessarily change even when they could and should. That’s an interesting analogy. I think most people would say that Afghan women aren’t in charge of this system. They’re walking around in “bags” because Afghan men make them do so. Afghan men enforce this system because it allows them the satisfaction of knowing that however bad their lives are, they have somebody who’s lower than them that they can push around. The superior group makes the inferior group live in worst conditions than they do. As I said, it’s an interesting analogy to offer in a discussion of American race relations. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/661 "2018-08-10T05:16:27Z")
A sociologist (like my wife, or mother) would say no one is really in charge of the structures underlying culture, even though they are part of the collective ongoing project to create and maintain them. I have issues with many aspects of social science, but this part is spot on IMO. That’s not to say it’s always futile to try to change culture, but it’s hard—and a big part of that is because of the game theory barriers to bucking social norms. It’s quite often worse for an individual to try to change things, even if everyone, or most people, in the culture would be better off if they were changed. ---
**Author:** ![Sunny\_Daze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunny_daze/32/438_2.png) [@Sunny\_Daze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunny_Daze)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2018, 5:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/662 "2018-08-10T05:59:36Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Wow, using autism as an insult while styling onesself as a finger-wagging “woke” scold? As the father of two kids with autism, I’d be offended if I weren’t so bemused. Look, dipshit, the autism remark wasn’t directed at you. It was directed at the person who made it, **Huey**. That’s why I quoted him before I told him cut it out. I’m not “woke”. My son is autistic, so fuck you, and fuck the horse you rode in on. People who call others “autistic” just for shits and giggles can strap themselves to a rocket and go volunteer for Trump’s new space force. For that matter, so can all of those dung buckets, like yourself, who think that using “woke” means they’ve done something more than reveal their utter vapidity. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611.md?page=32) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611.md?page=34)