If Hispanics are too stupid to learn a second language, does that apply to black people, too?
Except that much of Africa is at least bilingual (speaking their local language and the national language) and it’s not at all unusual for your given village trader or whatever to add a smattering of English and a couple of extra trade languages. Only old women could possibly get away with being monoglots.
Americans, on the other hand, are famous for their lack of language skills…maybe you are on to something…
Erm…immigrants of all sorts have traditionally been balkanized in America, particularly where they have come over in great numbers in a relatively short span of time (Irish, Chinese, etc). It’s only when they’ve been here long enough for the “natives” to get used to them, and they have children born in the US who have never known the home country, that true assimilation happens. It takes a while to melt in the melting pot.
Is it possible that people have lower IQs because of less opportunities?
“IQ” is a measure of a particular type of skill. Are there any “successful” careers that don’t require a high IQ, but instead require different types of skills? Say, for example, artistic, emotional, or communication skills?
How about instead of “They are stupid” or “They are oppressed by the evul white men” the reason by Hispanics and Blacks score less on educational tests is due to a lack of a strong mandate among their families and communities for people to get a good education? Half of the black children of American are illegitimate.
You don’t suppose that the level of prejudice and oppression (or more likely the dearth of education and opportunity) that are around today contribute to the amount of single parent homes?
I think it’s reasonable to say that African-American culture has a weakness when it comes to encouraging and supporting good education for their children. I don’t think there’s much of a debate here, am I correct?
This cultural behavioural property is probably influenced by outside forces, such as prejudice, oppression, and lack of opportunity. These things have greatly declined over the years, but I don’t believe that A-A cultural views have been adequately updated to represent the current reality.
Of course this defeatist attitude is self-reinforcing. And so while reality might be improving, actual results are slow to come.
Can we all agree on this? If so, then what’s the best way to procede? How do you break an entire culture out of this cycle?
African-American culture is going through a change. Far more women than men are going to college and developing higher earning power, for several reasons. (One, too many of the men have been convicted on drug charges, which makes it much harder to qualify for federal financial aid). The same is becoming true of Hispanics populations.
It would also help if states stopped screwing inner-city and rural schools and gave them the funding to compete, and stop threatening them with receiverships which makes long term planning and bond issues difficult, and to stop threatening the teachers who work there by slashing their pay and benefits.
Considering that the substantial portion of the public seems to have a dim view of their educational prospects, given the above attacks, it does not seem outrageous that they also have a similar dim view.
Our statistics also do a poor job of capturing the nature of ‘single-parent’ households. Only one biological parent may be in the picture full-time, but single moms receive a lot of support from grandparents and other extended family. Allowing more child care stipends to be paid to that extended family would help.
Regarding Hispanic assimilation to ‘American’ culture- why should they? They have a strong culture that has existed within this country since the beginning. The Southwest was ruled by Spain for longer than it has been part of the US.
Who cares if they don’t ‘strive as hard’ to succeed. They reach the level of success they are comfortable with. Mexican and Central American populations do have more a ‘peasant’ culture, but as long as they can reach success within their communities, that is all most of them want.
It would be nice if more went on to college and professional degrees, but many (most?) of them still work in blue collar occupations and rural areas where a higher degree would mean leaving their family behind to pursue the jobs those degrees enable. And family is not the nuclear family - but the myriad primos, tios y tias. The success of la familia is more important that personal success.
Do you think of people who have a lower iq than yourself as sub-human? Interesting.
Emotional appeals aside, the reality is that socio-economic outcomes and particularly educational outcomes are robustly linked to iq whether you like it or not. And on those measures, there is a significant disparity between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics (Philip L Roth’s meta-analysis pegged it at 10.8 points in 2001).
So you are inevitably going to have an achievement gap and demands for ongoing affirmative action to achieve proportional representation in positions demanding a certain level of academic ability.
Except that IQ is poor identifier of potential social or economic success.
And any disparity among populations is no indication of disparity among individuals.
Affirmative action policies are designed to enable those that do not lack that level of disparity have an equal playing field with those of the dominant population where certain individuals that are below the norm receive unfair advantages because they belong to that dominant population. It is designed so that the best candidates who qualify for a position can have a fair chance at attaining it. (Theory and practice suffer the same results as most areas.)
Plus, that whole past performance is no guarantee of future success. Demonstrations of historical or current disparity is not an indicator that such disparities will continue.
Let’s have an experiment. All minorities and majorities switch high schools for four years, leaving everything intact except for the student populations - same family support, same nutrition levels, students still live in the same communities, everything. And start a longitudinal study on which cadre performs better over their lifetime. It would be interesting to see the results.
Surely you jest. Why are the Japanese not rioting because of the tsunami? If Japan had a large black population no one would be safe from those blacks.
That experiment happens whenever blacks take over a neighborhood along with the schools. Whenever that happens academic performance in those schools takes a nose dive. Washington, DC has the third most expensive school system in the country, and scores below all of the states in academic performance. The reason is that 85 percent of the school body is black.
As an US expat, living in France for the last 30yrs, I’ve seen both the US “laisser faire” attitude, and the French attempts at “intégration”. Over the years, I have come to believe that both are just politician gesticulating.
It may be possible to integrate a population by will in a very small country, comporting a very small minority, but many examples seem to prove the contrary (offhand: Yemen Jews, Coptes in Egypt, Gipsies all over Europe)
Cultural ghettos seem to create themselves, whatever the population origins, those (few) brilliant youngsters break out of the mental blocks that keep people in those “enclaves”, but even the nearly free education system here has not changed the basics, and the costly US college system has not proven to be more of a brake. My strictly personal view is that whatever pressure the state brings to bear will have no effect at all, and may be detrimental to the tacit harmonies that do exist. This seems to apply to both positive and negative incentives.
Of course non of the above excuses either side from their responsabilities. Immigrants do not bring their law with them, they are subject to local law like anybody else, and I would add that their individual engagement should always be a requisite for becoming national. State must supply the same opportunity to these poulations as the rest of their cits, no less, no more.
Emmigration/immigration is always distressing, if not simply difficult, whatever the cause. An American arriving in France will be lost in the differences, human exchange is different, business is conducted differently, people receive you differently into their homes, first name use is different…, and these are nearly identical cultures. The desire to seek THE store that stocks what YOU call saurkrout, or curry, or whatever, is natural, apply that to language, religion, even a haircut.
This is certainly not a claim for “multiculturalism”, I do think that bettering the fate of the general public will eventually help everyone, be it transportation infrastructure or education.
Here in France, anti racist law prohibits gathering information on the ethnic origins of just about anybody. This simple law, that drives at eliminating discrimination, eliminates any possibility of knowing if minorities are proportionaly represented in any body, either at work or anywhere else. Practical for some I suppose.
As a postulate I would incite the following pricipal. If an immigrant decides to take nationality, he is subject to common law in that country (his desire to become a citizen implies his personal acceptance of the local legislation). If an immigrant prefers to maintain his immigrant status, he is subject to expulsion if he transgresses the law, due process as defined locally is of course prevalent.
I really believe that. They are plenty of people with high IQs at the bottom of the totem pole, and plenty of people with low IQs at the top. Plus the test itself is still filled with cultural baggage that prevents it from gathering relevant data.
GPAs, SATs, and other measures do a better job capturing not so much levels of intelligence, but how one’s intelligence is actually applied, which is what matters more in scheme of life.
Sorry, doesn’t qualify. First, it is only half of the groups I stated, and second, if they took over the neighborhood, then they did not switch schools. Have those kids transfer schools with Senators children and then we might have something.
Minority students tend to do rather well when given scholarships to private schools, perhaps not as well as their classmates, but far better than their peers in their community they reside in. But of course those scholarships are picking cherries they expect to blossom.
I live private schools. I think they do a far better job of educating students than equivalent public schools. But that is mostly do to cherry picking of both the staff and the students. Require them to have open enrollment (through a lottery or however), and do not allow them to expel underachievers (or suggest they might do better in a different environment - wink, wink, nudge, nudge, get your kid back into public schools,) and that performance differential might drop a bit.
If proponents of assimilation want those kids to actually do so, then fund education so that they have a chance of competing on their own merits. Otherwise, they will just fall back to their own culture where they have more support.
Of course education should still have high funding even in a multicultural society. Education is funny that way. It don’t care who it teaches, so much as having the resources to teach. (And supporting families goes a long way in helping students focus on school also. Another one of those issues that is colorblind.)
Any society that is liberal will have a pluralistic society - whether it is foreign cultures, or homegrown subcultures. How should an immigrant assimilate into a new country such as the US? Listen to country music, jazz, rap, punk, or rock? Should they shop at Wal-mart, Target, Bloomingdale, Brook Brothers or Soho tailors? Should they live in a Spanish Colonial, American Craftsmen, ranch-style house or Cape Cod cottage? Should they vote for the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Green Party or the Constitution Party? Dare they wear white after Labor Day?
Someone help me! I can’t tell all these damn Americans apart! They all look so white to me!