Nope, nope, nope. All kinds of wrong. Unless the sociology in question comes from the 1950s.
What Slacker wrote ("no one is really in charge … ") makes intuitive sense to me. I’m taking “no one is really in charge” to mean “no one individual person is really in charge” of any given human cultural group. Isn’t that kind of self-evident? Or were coming at the statement from a different angle?
Sure, no single person is in charge of any given culture. But cultures are perpetuated by the powerful. They’re never homogenous and are frequently internally contested. Even in relatively isolated indigenous cultures, for example, women contest their subordination to men.
In sociological or anthropological terms, it’s ridiculous to speak of a “black culture” distinct from the broader culture in which African Americans live.
So you reject the argument some people have made that only the individuals who commit specific racist acts are responsible for racism? You’re saying that race relations, including racism, are collectively produced by everyone in the society.
No one person is in charge of the whole thing - each individual influences either to perpetuate or discontinue any given aspect of their culture. People are both reacting to, and changing, their own culture. What I do influences everyone else, and what everyone else does influences me. The more interactions we have, the greater the influence.
That’s much of the point of the fact that most black children grow up without their fathers. They have no role model for how responsible fathers behave, at least not on the gut level. Same for if you are raised by a single mother, and your older sisters all have children out of wedlock before they reach twenty. You are not doomed, but you are more likely, to feel, whether consciously or unconsciously, that this is how things are done. Being raised by a single parent is disadvantageous. A single parent, of either sex, is going to have less time, and emotional energy to spend socializing their children. And therefore it is that much easier for a child to assume that leaving is what daddies do.
Regards,
Shodan
Okay, but cultures don’t just develop in a vacuum; they’re influenced by a variety of factors. Moreover, cultures can also change, and sometimes for the better. They can embrace ideas that are useful and discard those that aren’t. But it helps if the more powerful cultures approach these other “fucked up” cultures (your words, not mine) in the spirit of cooperation rather than exploitation.
I don’t dismiss everything you’ve written above, though I don’t think single parent households, in and of themselves, are disadvantageous. It depends on the reasons why there’s a single parent household. I knew classmates who were raised by responsible, hardworking single moms; I knew others who were raised by moms (or dads) who were dysfunctional and on meds. But that can happen in 2-parent households, too.
There is a literature on single parent families. They suffer disproportionately from a number of adverse outcomes though that doesn’t mean all of them do. They just face greater risks. Cite, first paragraph.
About half of all black families are headed by a single Mom. For whites, the share is 28%: that exceeds the share of black families with single Moms in 1965, when Senator Moynihan wrote his report on the subject, proping the meme of those bad black families. Single Parents Aren't the Problem
Anyway by this metric white culture is worse than the black culture of 1965. I agree that single parenthood should be addressed just like any other social trend. As opposed to using it as yet another excuse of why white conservatives don’t need to trouble themselves with the poverty of one race or another.
ETA: You know what a reasonable position would be? It might be something like, “We’ll give the impoverished a hand up because they are citizens too. In fact we’ll apply some of best science to the subject, including experimentation with control groups where appropriate. But there are limits. There are limits to the resources we can devote to this and quite frankly there are limits to the resources we want to devote to this. No apologies.”
Modern American conservatism is based upon emotivism and white grievance though, so I wouldn’t expect anything like that soon: I see no way of curbing their angry middle aged white male butthurt.
A woman called the cops on a black New York state legislator for handing out anti-Trump literature.
Cosigned.
What’s wrong with 1950s sociology? Erving Goffman, for my money the greatest sociologist of all time, produced his most famous work in 1956, although my personal favorite stuff from him, on role distance, came out in 1961.
Right, that’s exactly what I meant. Maybe Emiliana took me as saying there are no hegemons, when there obviously are. OTOH 1950s sociologists knew that too, so I don’t know what she is on about.
I would say it’s some of both. Society and underlying structures are powerful, but they don’t erase all personal responsibility.
I agree with all of that.
They don’t erase ANY personal responsibility. If someone commits a crime (or is in some other way disruptive to society) that’s on them. No matter who they are or what kind of oppression they live in.
But there are certain conditions that make it more likely that someone might make a bad decision. Poverty and oppression are two such conditions. And racism is a major contributing factoras to why a significant portion of our population is hopelessly mired in poverty and oppression. If society has the power to change that (and I believe we absolutely do) then it has the responsibility to do so.
Recognizing that racism in America plays a significant role in the lives of many of our fellow citizens is not the same as saying they are not responsible for their own behavior. But it does put the onus on all of us to try and do something.
mc
Fair enough. It’s not my intention to present myself as an expert in all of the problems that plague underprivileged black children; I will leave that to sociologists and psychologists who study the problem, and on the self-reporting of the at-risk kids themselves and their parents. But I’m confident that there are real (and correct) answers that can be given if/when people are willing to ask “what can we do to help prevent the potential of at-risk black children from being wasted?”.
Well, it’s just as much of a hijack in that thread as this one, so…
- I found it interesting that minority schools only get 1-2% more funding on average as others. Also, I’m guessing that variance of that gap is pretty large.
Big picture: yes, throwing money at schools doesn’t get you results. Why is that? My answer: because education in general is a difficult scientific problem, one that’s been resistant to many years of research. Paraphrase, from an Economist survey on education worldwide from many years back: “Nobody knows how to make a good school.” You can see (some of) it in performance metrics. The Economist’s take was that a sense of mission was particularly helpful; true or not, it’s nonetheless hard for me to believe there’s a strong basis for that claim in data. Too difficult to measure properly.
I understand you are focusing on black majority schools in Chicago. But honestly, the challenge of creating good schools extends to everywhere in the world. Including well-healed private schools. Everywhere.
Charter schools aren’t a panacea either, though I understand that under certain circumstances they can constructively prompt educational reform, largely by shaking up entrenched institutions and personalities. I’ve heard one expert say that restructuring a school isn’t wholly dissimilar to restructuring a business: for one thing there isn’t a fixed blueprint for either. But I didn’t see airtight evidence for that argument either.
Here’s a quote; I hope my readers can pick up on the analogy.
Moreover, there are certain conditions that might convince some individuals that playing by the rules yields little reward, and that the systems and its rules are a sham. A majority ethnic group in a racist society have more faith in police, more faith in the civil courts, more faith in criminal courts, more faith in justice, more faith in schools, more faith in people in positions of power to respect them as upstanding, law-abiding, productive members of society. That’s a little harder for the descendants of people whose great great grandparents were bought, whipped, and sold as slaves, whose great grandparents were lynched, whose grandparents had fire hoses turned on them for trying to sit at the front of the bus, and who today are clearly getting different treatment by people in positions of authority and power than their white counterparts.
Measure, I love that Krugman quote. I love my sociologist wife and sociologist mom. I know I come across as harsh toward that field of study, but it’s only because I get frustrated that they are so reflexively resistant to biological “essentialist” fields like evolutionary psychology, when I would ideally wish that each side would recognize that they both have something to offer to fill in the puzzle of reality.
This is a very good argument. In a vacuum, logically, it makes perfect sense. But how does it explain the points Coleman Hughes made, that Japanese Americans, and Asian Americans more broadly, faced severe governmental and societal discrimination, yet persevered to outpace even white Americans educationally and economically? What about the American citizens of Caribbean descent, who are black, outwardly indistinguishable from other African Americans, and whose ancestors were enslaved just as long as the descendants of American slaves, but who seem to do much better? (I don’t know quite how to explain it myself, so it’s an honest question and not a rhetorical one.)
ETA: I want to reiterate that I strongly support reparations for slavery and for Jim Crow. Coleman Hughes seems to oppose it because he feels that most black people will just piss the money away. But that is an area where I disagree with him. Even if they do (and surely not all of them will), they deserve it. If my parents get horribly screwed over by the government all their lives, their labor stolen and used to enrich others, and they sue for damages but die before the case can be adjudicated, I as their heir should be able to receive anything they would have been awarded. Same goes here.
The discrimination was entirely different both in character and vehemence. Asians did not face over a century of mass brutality, rape, and torture, along with deeply ingrained cultural attitudes of dehumanization and supposed savagery, and much more.
I’ll look for a cite when I’m able, but in my understanding 1st and 2nd generations immigrants of all types, including Carribeans, generally show high statistical aptitudes, while later generations generally revert to the mean. So it’s not anything about where black Americans descend from, but for how many generations they’ve been here. Which seems like a very clear indicator that there’s something about how black people are treated in American society that’s having an enormous affect on these outcomes. This also explains a lot of Asian statistical success – they have generally been in America for many fewer generations than black Americans.
I perceive that evolutionary psychology’s stock has been on the upswing for maybe 30 years or so, from a rather skeptical base. Justifiably so, given the errors of social Darwinism. I don’t have a good grasp of sociology quite frankly, though I perceive practitioners vary a lot in terms of methodology. Quite a few are data oriented, though given the topic that’s not the only legit approach in my view.
Education professors can be highly quantitative as well; but as noted earlier, the underlying problem is just hard.
Evolutionary psychology: here I’ll plug the author Robert Wright.
Oh, yeah, Living while black in America:
This isn’t a game changer at all, but Vox reports the following: [INDENT] Mitt Romney is calling on Americans to “categorically and consistently reject racism and discrimination” on the anniversary of racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and on the eve of a repeat of the Unite the Right rally this year in Washington, DC. The former Massachusetts governor and current US Senate candidate in Utah issued a lengthy statement on Friday defending equality, steeped in his religious upbringing and belief that “we are all children of God.” [/INDENT] Boilerplate stuff, or at least it was three years ago.
This part is more interesting, coming from Mitt: [INDENT]My understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, is that it is not intended to elevate minority lives above white lives; it is intended to draw vivid attention to the too frequent reality of deadly racial discrimination in law enforcement and in the courts. [/INDENT]
At one time this was the consensus among the American elite: [INDENT]The matter of race and racism is not tangential to the great issues of our day: it is one of them. It is impossible for America to achieve and sustain high growth, economic superiority, and global leadership if our citizenry is divided, disengaged, and angry. But more than this, we must foster equality if we are to remain a great and good nation. And we ourselves must embrace the dignity of all God’s children if we are to merit His love. [/INDENT]
The Bush administration tried to bring torture back into the mainstream. The Trump administration is trying to bring racism back into the mainstream. I’m worried that the next Republican President we elect will try to normalize cannibalism.