I second this. Same reason why rockstars & actors also predominently come from poor backgrounds. If you have access to education, you become a doctor, or an engineer, or god forbid a lawyer and get lots of money for sure. If you don’t, you either go for low wage chump work, crime which is as I understand frowned upon 
or you gamble yourself on a sport or an art, hoping to make it big. But very few people will make that gamble when they have a more reasonable and safer alternative.
An issue came up with a friend of mine. Her teenage son has a girl friend that calls often. The name on the caller ID is of a former NFL player who is white. Her son has been friends at school with this girl for quite some time. She happened across a client who said he was the same NFL players son. She doubted him since the client was white. She called her son and asked what color the girl was, her son said she was black. My friend had no idea. She asked if her dad was the NFL guy, he said he was, there were tons of trophies and stuff at their house.
It is a different world, dramatically than it was when I was in school. Color would have come up, my mother most certainly would have known. My friend and I even discussed that you would have thought that it would have been news or noteworthy if he had married a black woman or adopted black kids. I googled him every way I could find, and could not find one mention of it.
When I was in high school, we tried to adopt a kid, he was black, they wouldn’t let us, he ended up being placed with a “more appropriate” black family.
I’m not sure what all has to be done, but the more professional, more educated the population as a whole becomes, the less likely it will be an issue.
If anyone had told me that in my lifetime a black guy would be president, I would have told them they were flat out insane. Hell, I recall the first time I saw a white waiter at Morrison’s.
Hopefully, we will all get a handle on this nonsense before I die. It would be nice. Really.
Of course they do. That is why the quote about the only thing holding blacks down applies.
It really does seem that the folks here want to get rid of racism by applying racism, well reverse racism in a way. Except it would also be against races other than white. You want there to be a portionate amount of black professional degree holders, etc just like that? Without them actually earning it? Oh, and let’s tax the middle class some more to improve the education opportunities of the black race - it’s not like they are using their money for anything worthwhile, right?
A good benchmark for blacks to overcome is expecting someone else to help them.
Especially when the cultural condition is unfair treatment in housing, jobs, water fountains. You can still send to equaly qualified candidates on a job interview one black the other white and the white one will be favored. An applicant with a black sounding name won’t even get an opportunity for an interview and a white applicant with a criminal record is more likely to receive a job offer than a black applicant with no criminal record. Why have so many black home buyers with good credit scores been only able to recieve sub-prime loans?
How many people of any color are going to rise to the postions held by Condoleeza Rice or Barack Obama? Since the creation of this country how many Secretaries of state have their been? How many Presidents?
White people have been beneficiaries of affirmative action for a very long time.
How does that apply to the desire for reverse racism that always seems to crop up in these sorts of discussions?
Thank god it’s all their fault! I started wondering if maybe there were any other factors and almost caught liberal guilt.
Water fountains? You’ve got to be kidding. Please tell me where there are segregated water fountains! Unfair treatment in housing sounds like someone is begging for a lawsuit. You should see my neighborhood!
mswas, you are saying that a full representation by percentage of African Americans benefits only African Americans. It benefits all of us to have reasonably fair balances whether they be Indian Americans, African Americans, whites, Asians, or Middle Easterners. Fair is good!
SpoilerVirgin, you do just fine in Great Debates. Hope to see more of you here!
Charles Blow has a tangentially relevant article today. He makes the point that there are some issues affecting black children beyond simple anti-academic culture.
I see that in the classroom. When a kid’s mom doesn’t show up for conferences until we threaten to call social services, when a kid’s idea of breakfast is Diet Dr. Pepper, when a kid is so excited to talk about her 15-year-old sister’s new baby, when a kid is only slightly less illiterate than his mom, when a kid was kept awake all night by a shooting followed by dozens of sirens in his housing project neighborhood–these are all things out of the kid’s control, things that affect his or her chances of success more, IMO, than a peer culture of anti-intellectualism.
In primary grades anyway, that culture doesn’t exist. Primary kids want to please the teacher, even primary kids from really rough backgrounds. But the ones with lousy circumstances after school are gonna have more trouble succeeding during school hours.
It’s not coincidence that those kids are disproportionately black. Their parents had similar disadvantages, because THEIR parents had similar disadvantages. And unless something breaks the cycle, these kids, when they grow up, will have kids with similar disadvantages.
This pattern continues across our country. It’ll take more than a scolding by Cosby to get these kids safe neighborhoods, adequate nutrition, and adequate nurturing during after-school (and school) hours.
Daniel
Reverse racism? This is a misconception, no ones advocating the systemic and methodical marginalization of white people for 300 years to level the playing field. Some white people go into a panic whenever there’s some talk of righting past wrongs since some thing the world began 5 minutes ago.
I’m describing things that happened in the not so distant past and things that are happening today built upon the same premise.
We want to get rid of racism by getting rid of racism. You don’t think it exists that’s fine but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist because you don’t see it, experience it or know anyone that does.
Your comments are like those of a person that gives advice and analysis on driving a car and has never driven a car.
I think proportionate representation within all the categories of society–income; education; performance against standardized benchmarks; political leaders; economic leaders…etc–is a reasonable “benchmark” by which to measure any cohort’s success in achieving full equality.
I don’t think the real debate is about what the benchmark should be. It’s over whether failure to achieve that benchmark is caused by the failure of the cohort or the failure of society.
And at a deeper level, it’s about whether or not it makes any sense to apply such an equality benchmark when we are obviously not all equal, and any two cohorts are not likely to be equal in all things.
A benchmark for the cohort of women being fully equal to men might be, for example, proportionate representation on the PGA Tour, which is open to all comers. Women are not represented on the PGA Tour. This failure to achieve proportionate representation is not the fault of the PGA Tour; it’s a failure of women to compete at the required performance level.
Society tends not to obsess over that too much, and for good reason: who cares? What is important is that a just society demand equal opportunity for all, and a helping hand to all who need it.
We should get rid of the idea of creating (or promoting past) cohorts and evaluating some sort of group success against benchmarks, and simply work toward equal opportunity for all.
Except this is complete false. rockstars & actors DO NOT predominantly come from poor backgrounds. In fact I think it’s the opposite to the truth. I think they predominantly come from middle-class and wealthy backgrounds.
I am saying that demographic balances are inherently unfair. If you are going with merit purely the demographic balance will be skewed in certain ways. Maybe in a certain area that has fewer black people there will just be more competent black politicians who get elected than is representative of the population as a whole. Like what if a white suburb had a couple black city councilmen? The problem here is that when I made the example of overrepresentation of blacks in politics it was considered a sign that discrimination is gone, but under representation is considered a sign of discrimination. The point is that to me, lack of demographic measures will be the true sign that racism has been, ‘overcome’.
The very notion of measuring racial representation is racist in and of itself. I also think that it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to be perfectly deracinated. Sometimes the guy who is from your group just represents you better. It’s ok for Irish in an Irish neighborhood to vote for the Irish guy, just as it is ok for the Black people in the black neighborhood to vote for a black guy. What if a predominantly black area elects a white guy? What if a predominantly white area elects a black guy? There is no such thing as perfect demographic balance, nor is it desirable.
By what definition of racism is this true? It makes no sense according to the definition I work with (i.e., that racism involves looking at people with certain physical and cultural characteristics recognized as “race” and making unwarranted assumptions about members of that group based on their membership in the group).
That’ll work. It is judging based on racial characteristics, regardless of merit. It is just assuming that merit and demography will match perfectly.
Measuring != judging
It is if you think that some arbitrary adherence to some kind of statistical ideal in some way will give us the final say on what is equal and what is not.
How do we ensure that the right number of mulattoes are represented?
We don’t, of course. What we do is we look at the information gathered, and then analyze it. If we discover that black children at a given school are on average performing 50 points lower on a 100-point standardized test than white students, we try to figure out why this is true. Are the black students inherently stupid compared to the white students? Are the teachers teaching the black students less rigorously than they’re teaching the white students? Are the black students on average getting less sleep at night, or less nutritious food in the morning, or less attention from parents in the afternoon? Is it just an amazing coincidence?
What’s going on?
We can’t possibly figure out what accounts for the disparity if we don’t make the measurement. Making the measurement does not necessitate any conclusion, warranted or unwarranted, about the cause of the disparity.
You can’t figure out whether the folks in charge are racist until you find out what conclusions they draw, and then figure out whether those conclusions are warranted.