Shouldn't ghetto folks be given a break?

Great Debates
1

Ok. This is hard for me, because I am pretty new. I have been lurking for 2 years, and I have posted only once…(in the Las Vegas thread…to give a shout out to the Luxor, my favorite hotel.)

I am a bit nervous, because after lurking for years, I admit that I feel out of my league here. But I have been wanting to ask the dopers, a group that has won my respect, something that I have been mulling over for years. I want the answer bad enough to overcome my insecurities about my lack of formal education.

Is it possible that we should be giving ghetto folks a break? Should we actually expect them to get their shit together in the same way immigrants have been able to? I mean, Asians and Jewish people, or others who tend to do well once they get here; shouldn’t we give blacks in America more slack than them? I know it sounds silly at first blush, but hear me out.

I was born and raised in the ghetto. My mom was poor, my dad was poor, as were my grandparents. All the way back to at least Jim Crow, if not back to slavery.

It is not the lack of education alone that holds us back. I think it is more to do with the mental chains that clamp down in our psyches. We have a very hard time teaching our children that they can be doctors and lawyers and scientists, because we don’t believe it. And we don’t believe it cause our parents didn’t believe it. All the way back to our probably very smart and proud ancestors who were broken and forced to begin a legacy of a certain form of self hate.

Because I know I sure as heck suffered from it. Growing up, I had white, blue eyed blond baby dolls. In my neighborhood, (lower class black neighborhood, upstate NY) we prized our black relatives and friends who were lighter skinned, whose hair was not as kinky, etc.

Luckily, I met a guy who taught me to love myself. He taught me I was smart and he opened my mind to so much culture and art and literature. But had he not come along, would I have abandoned my gifts for a sea of self hate? Then ended up with a drug dealer, having too many babies, not doing well in school, dropping out, ending up on welfare, etc.

But I am the exception. And I am not the only exception. There are many, many other black Americans that over come the odds. Pull themselves up by their boot straps, rise to the top.

But we all can’t rise to the top, right? Every pot must have its cream. Everything else is just the average joe, trying to survive.

So I ask again. Should we be giving an extra boost to blacks in America? Should we be making sure Affirmative Action is available to them? Should we be making fun of them when they name their children “Dashanda” or some other ‘made up’ name. I mean, for goodness sake! Our original language is lost to us! Can we be blamed for making up a name?

I know this is disjointed and messy, but I assure you I will work harder to make cohesive posts. By the time my guest month is up, I hope to be tight and right!

In the mean time…anyone that can glean meaning from my post; could you share your opinion? Do we owe Blacks an extra hand up?

P.S. I know there are tons and tons of Blacks that do very well. I am very proud of them. My overall point is that we should could some extra slack to the average ghetto black person, struggling in the ghetto.

2

I don’t like the idea of “owing” ANYONE a hand up or an extra boost. No one related to me was in this country prior to 1913, and we weren’t out of the projects ourselves until the 1950s. We didn’t step on toes on our way up or climb over the backs of the less fortunate, so I don’t think we “owe” anything.

That said… I worked closely with our local school district for a number of years and was appalled when the results of the first year of NCLB testing were sorted demographically. Our immigrant Hispanic and Laotian populations scored higher on EVERYTHING than our black students who were born here. I questioned this, and the reply I was given from the district superintendent was that “THEY do not value education. It’s their culture; THEY just don’t emphasize it like others do.” My opinion there is that as long as we’re still thinking of our black students as “them” we are failing to do our jobs. Regardless of any kind of cultural background, if we set our expectations lower for black students, we are doing them a huge disservice.

Sadly, I don’t know how to fix that, except that I think a lot of people need to set higher standards. not lower ones.

3

My problem with all this is that it’s pretty vague. I mean, yes, poor people should catch a break every once in a while. Yes, people who grow up in poor black neighborhoods grow up with a different mindset. But what exactly are you proposing? America is a capitalist nation not just in economics but in ideology as well; everyone is expected to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. I don’t think it’s the best system, but poor (black, young, etc.) people don’t vote, so whatever solution we come up with will have to appeal to the people who have money. Americans with money are generally loathe to give it out. I realize I’m firing out generalizations here, but I grew up in pretty affluent neighborhoods, and there was always a strong sentiment against the idea of the state helping poor people make something of themselves with taxpayer money. And everyone I know with any significant amount of money goes to incredible lengths to pay as little of their taxes as possible.

IMO we need to first resolve the underlying issue of the upper and middle classes’ attitude towards the poor. That’s a pretty hefty task and nobody seems to be making any serious headway. It’s great to talk about giving people a break, but talk is cheap.

4

I am a believer in Affirmative Action but I think it has it’s limits.

Few are the peoples of this earth who have not, somewhere in their history, been subjugated. The sincerest best efforts to assist with the self hatred of devastated cultures usually, eventually, ends up going very, very badly.

I do not diminish the impact of the handicap you describe but I firmly believe if history teaches us anything it’s that the solution must come from within the community not from without. Witness the native population of your own location, these peoples have suffered more good intentions than anyone should have to, they have an entire department of government just to screw them over. :mad: I wouldn’t wish that kind of ‘special’ status on my worst enemy.

5

As long as you’re not using it as a preliminary to declaring that people don’t possess free will (or, more commonly, embracing the claim that free will doesn’t exist in order to be able to conclude that we should give ghetto people a break), I’m on board with you (the OP).

I have been homeless and thoroughly convinced that I would never hold a job, and that’s despite having a lot of solid pro-achievement background like coming from a college-educated family that expected me to go to college and have a professional career, etc. Just being a social misfit was sufficient to give me the experiences that made me think I was always going to be outside looking in.

And as a homeless person, I was able to get out of the situation by drawing upon the strengths and advantages that most of the folks sharing my lot did not have. Cultural familiarity with the speech patterns, body language, nuances of behavior that belong to the upper middle professional class. Fantastic language skills, adequate math skills, a high school diploma with adequate GPA, and a head full of a wide range of knowledge. Most of it stuff I was unconscious of except when I had the contrasting presence of people who didn’t have that and imagined them going to job interviews.

The question, I think, is what form should this “break” take? I agree with the conservatives that it does folks no favor to say “Oh, nothing much can be expected of you, so we’ll just give you a ‘social pass’ on the stuff you aren’t doing well”. What we want instead is to empower folks to have true success-experiences. Not phony ones but the kind that involve true challenges successfully met. And yet a nurturing and supportive environment to help encourage those who are mostly inclined to think they can’t do, can’t be, etc.

That all sounds cool and groovy, I’m sure, but I don’t have a magical formula for a successful program. I’m cynical about the social structure. Not so much that it needs to keep blacks down per se, or any specific outgroup down per se, but rather that it’s possible to not have anyone down. I’m no marxist but I think the marxists make a pretty astute analysis of our system even if they have no alternatives worth considering, and one part of their analysis is that our system seems to require there to be some “down” people.

So rushing into the ghetto with empowerment and self-improvement visions and dreams can be naive. In order for everyone (or even the majority) in the ghetto to rise to a level where they are no more “down” than the average person, a comparable number of people outside the ghetto would have to be overtaken such that they would be among the “down”. It may not be a zero-sum kind of thing (the most “down” people at the end may be significantly better off than the original “down” people who rose up from their situation), but unfortunately a lot of how people feel about their situation has to do with whether they perceive themselves to be on equal footing with others or less than equal, and only some of it with any kind of objective assessment of how bad things are overall.

So I’m open to new ideas on how to provide the “break”.

6

There is a fundamental ideological block in American culture that says that people get what they deserve- meaning both that god serves justice without need for human intervention, and people who suffer must have earned it somehow; It is a kind of faster-than-instant karma.

This idea works its way into everything here, and can be used as a justification for any act or inaction. I don’t know where it comes from, or when it started, or how it spread so far, or how to fight it, but if you investigate any american injustice deeply enough you will find it’s characteristic tendrils.

The socio-economic floundering of African Americans is just one of many products of this, and you won’t get anywhere fast just attacking the symptoms. In America, if you see a homeless person, you automatically assume they are stupid or immoral or otherwise fundamentally defective, and you keep your distance. The poverty of blacks is no different; the average non-black person just assumes they’ve earned it somehow. Until you can curb that sort of thinking in the general populace, things won’t get better.

7

unfortunately I am going to be throwing around generalizations as well, and most of this I picked up in my Sociology class a few years ago, so I might be a little fuzzy on the details.

A lot of people bring up the argument, “Well, my grandfather was an Irish immigrant who had a hard time getting someone to give him the time of day, much less a job, and we’re ok.” Or, “My parents didn’t speak English when they came to this country, and they struggled to make ends meet, but they saved everything they could and sent me to college.” Or any other number of immigrant/poverty stories. But the comparison doesn’t work.

Black people are not lazy, stupid, or somehow inferior to other races. It’s part a cultural, part a socio-economic problem. (And a lot of these arguments apply to poverty, not race specifically, but a larger percentage of blacks are poor… thus my inclusion of it in this response) Black kids start off at a disadvantage- you’ve got more single parent families and such, and a higher incidence of poverty. A single mom struggling to support her kids often has to work more than a more affluent mother, and so kids end up stuck in front of a tv or with little human contact. Studies have been done showing the lower the income, the fewer words a mother speaks to her children throughout the course of the day (partly because she might spend more time working, and partly because more affluent parents are more likely to “narrate their day” so to speak, like “Let’s load you up in your car seat, we’re going to the grocery store. Oh, look at the pretty flowers” etc). The less exposure to language, the poorer the student performs on tests and in school in general.

So they show up to school with a disadvantage. Then, unless they’re lucky, they’ll get a teacher who’s spent 20 years in the school system and formed his/her own opinions about the possibilities of minorities succeeding- and they’ve done studies that show if a teacher expects a student to fail, they often “live down” to those expectations, regardless of ability.

Then you have black pop culture, the music and movies. Most glorify violence and illegal activity, are degrading to women, etc. If that’s what kids are exposed to growing up, oftentimes that’s what they’ll emulate. And peer pressure plays a big part too. Kids who want to study and go to college are ridiculed, sometimes accused of denying their identity or trying to act “white.”

So, what about giving them breaks? It depends on what you’re talking about. Affirmative Action that lowers standards simply to fill a minority quota, no. Put more money into schools in poorer neighborhoods, afterschool programs, mentor programs, absolutely.

8

What RedRoses said. IME, it tends to be an economic problem rather than a racial one; of course, there is a higher proportion of blacks in poverty than whites (although as a percentage of the poverty-stricken, whites are higher). My husband is just about as white as you can get (he’s often mistaken for Casper’s whiter cousin) and has had a lot of crap to come up through; grew up in East LA dirt poor. His four siblings have between them the equivalent of an 8th grade education; not one has graduated from high school. He dropped out and went back later - now he’s in law school.

Funny thing is, his sibs constantly get on him about how he’s putting on airs, not being true to his roots, etc. It’s a common mindset, and it’s one that maddens me to watch.

What to do about this problem is something that vexes me. I don’t think that lowering the standard is the way to go, though - that’s like putting a bandaid on a sucking chest wound. The problem in my mind is, why are blacks (or, as I prefer, the working poor) not reaching these standards and what can we do to fix it?

9

Wow, the previous three posts are incredibly accurate and I agree for the most part. There is the Horatio Alger myth in this nation - anyone who is willing to work hard will meet with success - and to some degree this is true. The historian Diane Fass looks at Americanization programs at the turn of the century that exhorted European immigrants to assimilate into the mainstream - while abandoning, of course, any ties to their homeland and mother language. If you were willing to make such a bargain - and for those who risked everything to emigrate, they usually were - success was far more attainable than it was in some of the caste-like societies of Europe at the time.

If we discuss African Americans, for instance, we know that this is a group descended from involuntary immigrants (i.e., slaves) who experienced an overt plan by the White landowning classes to destroy the family structure, eradicate any semblance of cultural references from their homeland, and prevent them from being educated. And the idea of African Americans being considered as equal human beings to Whites is a new one in this nation’s history - remember, de jure segregation existed in this country forty years ago. It’s not as if when the Civil Rights Act passed, everything self-corrected and there was equality across the land.

I don’t want to dismiss the socioeconomic component of discrimination and low expectations. In a lot of ways, poor Whites in Appalachia, poor Blacks in Mississippi, and poor Latinos in Los Angeles have a lot in common. However, I still say that this nation’s greatest failing is our inability to confront our past and make apt restitution for the harm that has systematically been suffered by Native Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans, to name three groups - there certainly have been more. Reconstruction failed miserably and was abandoned in less than a decade. The federal support for Black education was absolutely laughable from the end of the Civil War until the 1950s, and even then, the most robust efforts to educate African Americans came from philanthropic organizations like the Rosenwald Fund - not the government.

African Americans have similar high school completion rates to Whites - only about a 5 percent gap today. This includes HS equivalency measures such as GEDs - you’ll find that the high school diploma gap is much larger. To me this says a few things: schools as they currently exist, broadly, do not serve African American youth well. It also says that many African Americans who have been let down by the schooling system have found alternate ways to earn the necessary HS equivalency credentials. But of course a GED is not as valuable as a HS diploma, and the value of a HS diploma diminishes every year - college is the passport to the middle class today.

The same can be said of most of the involuntary immigrant and/or native groups in the US. The American public school, which didn’t even take on a form remotely suggesting that learning should occur for all students regardless of race, gender, ability status, or class until the mid-20th century, was never designed to educate a workforce or develop skills. Schools were either indoctrination camps (such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools), designed to create a class of subservient, religiously-observant citizens, or waystations for the well-to-do. Most Americans learned their skills as apprentices working with laborers, or if one was lucky, under a professional. One professor of mine parallels institutional growth in asylums with public schools, and even remarks how they were often built the same way, with the same philosophy in mind: control of poor and ethnic people.

What am I saying exactly? I suppose the general point is that we should not be surprised that the educational gap exists in this country, and education is the one avenue accessible to most people for socioeconomic mobility. Couple this with the fact that African American males, for instance, are disciplined and referred to special education at rates far beyond any other racial group (though I believe Latino males are not far behind), it makes sense that there is a wide gap between life expectancy, socioeconomic status, quality of life, and so forth for a sizable percentage of members of these groups.

10

Very many, probably much more eloquent words have already been posted above, than what I can add.

I am a native (white) Mississippian. The people of our state (black, white, and Indian) are struggling with this every day.

The only other thought I can bring to this thread is this: The people of the ghetto will not be able to get better until they cease to belive in the old lies. But you know what? That’s damned hard to do. :frowning:

I can tell you that I belive that we, as people of this state, get better every day. I can’t tell you how many generations will come and go before the slate is wiped clean. I wish I could, but I can’t. All I can tell you is that the people here who give a damn are trying.

11

I think both this and the OP kind of contain the answers to the question. It’s not about “lowering the physical barrier” so much as about “giving people a hand up”, much of it in the self-confidence side.

A lot of it can (and should) be done through the media. Including people of different backgrounds in all kinds of occupations, having casts that look like a picture of a UN meeting, is a marketing gimmick, but I think it’s much more likely that someone will be motivated to become, say, a female doctor by watching series with both male and female doctors who are stronger and weaker in different areas because of their personality and training as opposed to because of what’s between their legs than by watching a series where every doctor is male and every nurse is female or one where half of humanity doesn’t even show up. (I do hope nobody tried to read that in one shot). Apply the same to colors, national origins and other classes that may or may not be protected by law wherever you live.

I remember watching Fresh Prince (what? it lasted so long because of audience figures in Europe) and remarking “don’t they know anybody white? In Bel Air?”

Willy-nilly, we get many of our notions of “how the world should be” from how it’s portrayed on TV… even when we know we’re watching fiction. It sure has a ridiculously deep impact. I know people who can’t place Texas on a map but who can still recall every single episode of Dallas by heart. Last year one of my coworkers started whistling distractedly the soundtrack to Verano Azul, the most succesful series in Spanish TV history (1981); they moved on to a rehash of the complete dialogues of several key episodes. Things they were supposed to have learned in school that same year didn’t get learned so well…

12

Ages ago there was a comedian who did a bit about a bunch of white guys from a prep school going to a street corner and meeting up with one black dude from the ghetto - the upswing was that in five minutes, all of the guys would be talking like the black dude.

And now I see white kids from wealthy, educated families who dress and act urban gangsta and are dropping out of high school and heading down an equally doomed path.

The point of the observation? I think it is not just a ghetto mentality, I think our culture is glorifying the tough, hip, fuck-it-all mind-set.

I don’t know if it is true, but one of my students told me that Oprah opened her schools in Africa only after first doing some research in the ghettos of Chicago. She asked students in Africa and students in the ghettos of the US what they wanted. In Africa, they said they wanted the opportunity to get an education - in the US they said they wanted iPods. Oprah chose to fund schools in Africa.

Bill Cosby has taken a lot of flack on this subject for suggesting that ghetto blacks have no one to blame but themselves for perpetuating this cycle of under-educated, unemployed, broken families.

I think it is a problem that is growing across racial lines. Our US educational system is a disaster, and it only follows that each successive group of kids churned out of schools without basic skills is going to fall into the same “ghetto” rut.

I teach at a college and am shocked by how poorly educated the students are - some can barely write, others have almost no knowledge of basic math, geography, history or literature - and I do mean “basic”. If this is the group that is the best, I shudder to think of the group who didn’t even get this far.

Call me an old fart, but it seems that the value of getting an education has fallen to an all-time low in this country; this cannot be a good thing in the long run.

13

In a word, “No.”

“They”, nor “we” deserve a “leg up”.

Funk dat.

14

Do you even realize that this is a very offensive racist remark?

15

I’m a current college student. I took my first semester English class (and a couple of others) for college credit during high school, so I skipped straight into English 102 in my first semester in college (at the U of Arizona). My classmates all seemed pretty articulate, and we had a lot of fascinating debates inside and outside of class. But the horrific state of California public education has really struck me since I came back to San Diego and started going to community college here. The vast majority of my classmates are completely ambivalent to their academic success; they’re used to sliding through the minimum requirements without ever lifting a pen, and they take the same attitude towards college. When the passing grades don’t come naturally, it doesn’t faze them; they drop the class or let the drop deadline whiz by and fail it, and then take it the next semester only to drop or fail again. And I’m talking about easy general-ed classes here. The science classes are a joke; even the most basic bio/chem/physics class sees half to 2/3 of its students drop the class immediately after taking the first test and before getting the test results back! I took a full-sized (for a community college) Physics general-ed class a few semesters ago that had nine students on the day of the final. The teacher was so jaded that he gave everyone A’s just for staying in the class.

And the skillset and worldview of these students are mind-boggling. My English class had a peer review for our first argumentative essay the other day, and one of the essays I read was literally unintelligible. There was no flow, no cohesion, no indentifiable thesis or claim, and there was easily a handful of spelling and grammar errors in every sentence. Not to mention that the poor girl seemed completely unaware of the concept of synonyms; she was happy to use the same nouns over and over and over again, sometimes up to three times in a sentence. As for their personal viewpoints, ignorance is widespread, apathy is king, and unconscious bigotry is well-represented. I generally have to compromise my standards to find study partners or dates.

And then they bitch and whine about having to take general eds. As if our biggest problem were a surplus of well-roundedness.

16

How do you propose we cut them slack? In my opinion, the majority of the people who are bothered by the made up names feel that way because of racist/classist reasons. The same people who look down on people named Teondre will look down on Tyrone, because they both sound like “black names.” We all ready have affirmative action, and other programs aimed at helping inner city people. It’s my opinion that part of the main breakdown of these neighborhoods started taking place when the middle class blacks left. Some kids need to see people just like them succeed before they believe that they’re capable of it too.

Racism and classism still exist, but people have to be able to look at their own behavior, and identify the problems, and figure out just what’s going wrong. I don’t really see how people on the outside can convince people of the importance of a stable environment, and of education, and how to increase your chances of getting both. Lowering the expectations does more harm than good. That’s part of the current reason why people have feelings of inadequacy. Some people will decide to defy the expectations, and others will just give up. I received several awards during my time in school. The least valuable award was the one given by the Urban League, because the minimum GPA required to receive it was incredibly low. On one hand, it is important to reward people who are trying hard, but are not able to get high marks. On the other hand, if everyone receives the award, it doesn’t say much for the organizations faith in people’s abililty to acheive, and the “honor” is cheapened.

We really need to dismantle the ghetto. Nothing good can come from having lower class people all confined in one place. We can’t expect someone to go to college, and excel after getting a sub-standard education for thirteen years. Even if a person goes to a good school, the parents must be available and and able to help him with his homework, or to get outside help if necessary, and to speak to the teachers before any problems get out of hand. Starting kids out with a good foundation will help solve part of the problem. Other problems, (things you mentioned such as looking down on people with stereotypical black features) need to be fixed from inside the black community, and don’t have much to do with the ghetto.

OT/ Can I ask why you chose your username? It really doesn’t fit with this thread.

17

[/QUOTE]
Do you even realize that this is a very offensive racist remark?

[QUOTE]

I certainly didn’t intend that to be a racist statement. I didn’t attend to stay away from posting so long either. I fell asleep.

I was genuinely asking the questions, after thinking it over for many years, and coming to no conclusion. I found it hard to have this discussion with anyone, mainly due to my lack of debating skills and lack of eloquence.

I figured the dopers would be a good place to ask. I appreciate the responses, and I am considering them, keeping an open mind, and learning a lot.

I do wish to know what makes that a racist remark, though.

18

I haven’t yet mastered the quoting features yet. Sorry. Omega, in post 16, you mention that we already have Affirmative Action and such. I know that. I am saying, to those that oppose it, why should we oppose it? Shouldn’t we offer that? And all the low income housing and such?

I don’t think it will make black people, “feel they can’t help themselves”. I think it may show some compassion if given with respect. Allowing some dignity. “We see you are in a lopsided race. We want to even the keel a bit. It is only fair.” I think that attitude may help a lot of my very talented, smart but discouraged people, get their shit together.

19

I’d like to respond to this.

You are not an exception, and I think believing this buys into the myth of black inferiority. Most black Americans are midde-class. Most of us do not live in the ghetto. Many of us don’t even live in the city. Most of us do not do drugs. Most of us are not in jail. Most of us are not having teenage pregnancies or sucking off of the welfare teet. Too many of us are doing these things, true, but these folks do not represent Black American Life. They are just the most visible.

I agree that folks in the ghetto or mired in poverty often suffer from internalized oppression. But the solution is not going to come from the outside. Except for slavery, the solutions to our problems have never come from the outside. They’ve always come from struggle within.

I don’t think the “exceptions” you talk about rose above their circumstances by their bootstraps. No one does this, despite the rhetoric. Folks with success stories had a community to support them. They grew up in church. Their parents made them go to Scouts every weekend, or the Boys and Girls club after school. They went to city day camp during the summer, or they went to visit some wise relative living out in the country, away from the dirty streets. They had a father who was active in their life and teachers would didn’t take shit from them, teachers who knew their mothers and knew she didn’t raise no fools. They had next-door neighbors who shouted at them to get off the lawn, pull up those pants, and stop hanging around those triflin’ boys because they ain’t up to no good. And the same next-door neighbors would hire them to cut their grass or clean out their garage so they wouldn’t have to hang around those triflin’ boys for spending money.

That’s what lacking in the darkest corners of the slum. A community. People who aren’t afraid to live next to each other. All the breaks in the world aren’t going to help ghetto dwellers if they don’t a community.

20

Because it implies that blacks are less capable of overcoming their cultural disadvantages than immigrants like Irish, Chinese, etc.

Affirmative action reinforces racist beliefs in a couple of ways.[ul][li]The first is what I mentioned - AA is based on the belief that blacks are different from all other disadvantaged minorities, in that they cannot be expected to overcome their cultural background. Chinese immigrants, who suffer from many of the same disadvantages as blacks (historical discrimination, physical markers of race, family break up) tend to rise. But blacks, it is assumed, can’t. Why is that?A black person admitted (for instance) to a university for which she is not as well qualified as her class mates will tend to do less well. It is difficult for her class mates to see her falling behind, and not attribute it to race. Not impossible, but difficult.[/ul][/li]
But I would like to see you address the question asked earlier - why should blacks be given special consideration over everyone else, some of whom have suffered almost equivalent disadvantage?

Regards,
Shodan