Good question, I have even offered you some insight as to the why…
ie, single unwed mothers …
And why are there so many single parents in that community (something I alluded to in Post #96)?
Why did black wealth lag white wealth in1800? 1850? How about 1900? 1950? The answer here seems pretty obvious to be - societal and legal oppression and discrimination.
Why are you so certain that the reason, all of a sudden, after centuries of being due to discrimination and oppression, is suddenly now unrelated to those centuries and is now caused by a brand new factor?
White racists put those obstacles in their way. Obstacles that white people never had to overcome to get where they are today, to enjoy the things they have “earned”. Just education and employment discrimination is enough to put a group of people into long term poverty. Deny them equal education, deny them good jobs, they’re destined to be poor, uneducated, unskilled, not as individuals, a single person can buck the trend, but as a group.
It takes generations to get back to par. If we look at the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the baseline, the first child who had a legally required equal education would graduate high school in year 12 post-CRA. College, year 16. Let’s say this person then gets hired, has a successful, non-discriminatory career (let’s take best case scenario, employment Utopia).
When does this person start being the decision maker? When is this person the person who makes the final call on who is or isn’t hired, maybe that’s year 25 or 35, it will take until year 50 for the entire population of white professionals who were hired or educated prior to the CRA (enjoying a discriminatory edge) to retire, and be replaced by a representative mix of minorities.
When does this first generation have children with a successful professional parental role model? Probably year 25 or so, and it will be year 45-50 when that child, the first generation with, arguably, the opportunity to be on a truly equal footing with their white peers enters the work force. A generation with an opportunity for equally privileged upbringing, education, and network of older professionals and alums.
That’s now, 2020. In Utopia, where actual racism has vanished when the Civil Rights Act was passed, it has taken 50 years just to get a generation of black children through college with the same opportunities as their white peers.
Back to real life, Republicans were shitting all over black Americans in the late '70s, blaming them for all their own problems and calling them failures because they didn’t turn around centuries of slavery and discrimination in half a generation.
Why are the incarceration rates different?
1800, racism, 1900 racism, by 1950, it was getting better, but opportunities were still a factor of racism.
TODAY? Very little racism. Why do kids born today feel ANY effects of racism? Because people like you seem to think the government owes them something for past indiscretions. They don’t, what the government owes them is the same opportunities that everyone else gets. They are getting that.
But you know what hasn’t change, the reliance on the past.
If you want to talk about fighting poverty, I am all ears as long as you don’t start with “due to the racism of today …”
Fix the poverty cycle. That requires certain communities to police themselves and the members of their society, as well as some help from the government, but the reliance on the government to do ANYTHING to fix the problems that plague certain communities is wrong.
I don’t disagree with much of that post, how do you propose to fix it today? I’d say that it is well on its way to fixing itself, except the reliance on the race card that is being used (not 50 years ago, or 20 even), TODAY.
No, that’s an effect, not a cause. Poor people have higher levels of unwed mothers. It’s also true of poor white people and Latinos.
Now why are black people, on the whole, poorer than white people?
Here’s a video that may help you figure it out.
It may be AN effect but it most certainly IS a cause. And it is almost laughable that you are saying differently.
That’s ridiculous. For one numerous studies have shown that black people without criminal records are less likely to receive interview callbacks, with the exact same resumes, than white people with criminal records. That’s racism faced today. Black people with recent college degrees have a far higher unemployment rate than white people with recent college degrees. The enforcement of the Drug War has been stunningly racist.
Not to mention that this country has made no recompense for decades upon decades of stolen wealth. And basically told black people, well we removed some official racial barriers, so now you should be able to just lift yourselves up.
If you believe there is no racism in hiring or law enforcement (or a number of other things) today which can lead to increased poverty levels, then you simply aren’t being serious about this issue.
This is the heart of the disagreement. Everything else flows from this disagreement.
If there is, and it can be proven, then sue their asses! Profit from it being illegal.
If it can’t be proven then so far we have some accusations that some people find to be the cause of all the woes of the black community. And thus create reliance on someone else to help them pout of it.
I, for one, choose to see them as entirely capable of lifting themselves up out of the past.
As I have stated many time sin the past, RACISM needs to be curb stomped into oblivion, completely eradicated from existence (and I am talking about how people get treated, not some thought crime racism of “he had it in his heart”) Actual real racism.
By already starting out leagues behind, after having wealth and opportunity stolen from them (to be overly generous to your point - at least through the 1960s), and then given hardly any leg up to make up for that monumental difference. And then black folks are blamed for the obvious consequences of that institutionalized poverty. Things like single parent households develop in certain demographics for a reason and it isn’t because those demographics up and decided that was the way to go.
I’m all ears for how to fix it that results in fair opportunities, seriously. Be specific. Without it being racism in a different way.
We as a nation have fucked up, a lot. With Indians, with the Chinese, with black folks, with Mexicans, with the deficit, with trade barriers, with wars, you name it, we’ve done it. How do we repair it unless we totally eradicate race as a choice? We are all Americans, not black ones and white ones, or yellow ones or brown ones.
We fucking suck it up and move toward a better future, learning from previous mistakes (this is the hope anyway)
It’s likely going to be a long and drawn out process, but it’s going to have to discuss reparations in some form. Unfortunately after the American Civil War there was a plan for 40 acres and mule (which would be worth $800 billion in total back then, which is $6.4trillion today) that would have gone a very long way to rectifying some of the stolen wealth from slavery, but that was squashed almost immediately. Maybe those reparations involve massively increased college grants to black Americans, or increased housing assistance (partially to make up for the process of redlining). Or even infrastructure improvements in minority majority areas.
Affirmative Action was a decent step (and no, I don’t think it’s even close to racism in a different way any more than accepting a certain amount of lower income students is classism in a different way), but when black college students have issues with unemployment after graduation that is not seen by their white peers (even in the same majors) there is a greater systemic issue that needs to be dealt with somehow. Whether that’s increased federal grants to minority businesses or federal investment in minority majority neighborhoods, I’m not sure, but it all needs to be on the table.
While your post is not entirely untrue, and I am against wholesale payment for multiple reasons, I furthermore don’t think they’re worth considering until we can nearly eliminate both structural and individual racism. Otherwise a generation later there will still be lots of inequality and the nation will be trillions of dollars more in debt.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t people who have been hurt by specific governmental policies such as unequal policing and housing, and I would not mind addressing these. They’d still cost tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars, but the precedent for them is clear from the many court cases that have awards damages for actions over the years.
I would start with the recognition that racist white America stole opportunity and economic success away from black Americans. This also means that it being “well on it’s way” to being fixed (if that is accurate at all), is just another way to say that black Americans have rebuilt some of what white Americans broke.
Your earlier posts blame black Americans for not having fully remade what white Americans stole from them. Their problems are “their failings” rather than the residue of what white America did to them.
My post suggested that it could take multiple generations to build up the kind of critical mass of educational and economic success to give this population the same ability to take advantage of opportunity that white America enjoys. Recognize that rather than blame them for being the source of their problems.
However, it’s impossible to fully remake equality via active intervention because inefficiency is a negative sum game. We’ve already irreplicably lost the full productivity of people denied equal education and jobs based on their merits, as well as billions and billions of dollars thrown at policing and the prison-industrial complex to no one’s benefit. If we somehow make it just as good for some people as if there never was any inequality, it will be unequally worse for everyone else, because they will on average be in a worse position than if the inequality, which they for a large part didn’t create or believe in, never existed.
No, no no, do not mistake me giving them credit for keeping themselves there but I don’t give them credit for being there in the first place. I expect anyone with the drive and want to get out of poverty, given the opportunities that are freely available to all, to be taken advantage of. I don’t feel they are, instead they abhor police presence, they denigrate their women, they commit more crimes. All of those things fly directly in the face of “lifting yourself up” No one is a slave, no one is going to have to deal with overt racism with no recourse in today’s world.
I expect that help is to be had, but they have got to help themselves and the communities have to identify the problems and address those problems which are helping to keep their community members down.
I know it can be done because there are a lot of educated, well employed black people who have done so.
Ahh yes. . . “they”…
CMC
Well the idea lasted what 5 posts?