Thanks for not abandoning the conversation and bringing the subject around to the fore. Well worth the hijack. 
thickpancreas, I find it disheartening that most of your advice boils down to “parents need to spend a significant amount of time and effort parenting” while you’re aware that lots of black households are single-parent affairs working long, tiring, low-wage jobs.
Were I a parent worked to the bone to support my family, regardless of my skin color, I might not be amenable to such advice - and if I were in a position to be amenable to such advice, I probably wouldn’t need it.
Obviously advice like “be a good parent, dammit” is good advice, but I question whether it, alone, will make a dent in the communities that you think actually need help.
That really is not a fair summary of my comments. That said, I know a lot of people would take a conversation like this the way you describe, and I understand why it would seem frustrating or dismissive to them.
Taking the money quotes from each of your points:
The first four not only require active parents, but reasonably wealthy parents. The latter two are just calling the members of these communities irresponsible whiners who need to internalize that whatever their problems, white society is utterly innocent - or at least the black people should assume that they, themselves are personally responsible for all aspects of the problems in their life. (I assume you expect the parents to be the ones to instill this belief system into their young.)
It seems pretty clear to me that this ‘fireside chat’ is directed squarely at the parents in question, and that it’s lambasting them for their parenting failures. Which is going to fall entirely flat whenever the parent can give a solid reason for these failures - at that point it will be far more easy for them to think that the person telling them to spend money on expensive music lessons and afterschool programs and to plan, execute, and pay for regular camping trips and road trips is entirely out of touch and has no idea of the time and resources they have available to them.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be great if all the kids in poor black communities could live the life of the upper middle class. But before I yell at them for failing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, I think we should give them bootstraps.
And that is why I said that he was missing what I said. Just saying again, a lot of the side discussion here does miss that the system does ignore that a lot of the ones that are causing harm and are irresponsible are not dealt with like the minorities do, it happens that now whites usually avoid being pull over or taken to justice, the point here is that a lot of the ways poverty comes to families (and that does affect grades) comes from the poor (that includes minorities) that is railroaded a lot by having piss poor access to legal aid.
But that is only the background, what I do think is that a lot of progress in dealing with the ugly rates of incarceration happens because a lot of the ones that deserve it get off thanks to privilege or having more money, so things remain the same. What I’m trying to say here is that it is very likely that a lot of the injustices are not taken into account by many conservatives because they are not confronted constantly by the system they set up.
It is clear to me that as soon as the rates of incarceration increase for the ones that are privileged, that a lot of the ideas that are seen in other nations about making jails or prisons more humane or the ideas that see drug use as a disease and not a crime will be used or considered by conservatives faster than Usain Bolt doing the 100 meters.
I never said white people are completely innocent.
I do believe parents should be financially stable and prepared to take an active role in their children’s lives. Shocking, I know.
I understand entirely how thickpancreas feels on this subject. I went to a very diverse private high school where they intentionally brought bright black kids in on scholarship. It was very easy to tell which of them had at least middle-class-seeking families and which were being raised by a more stereotypical black family. In my time since school I have known of many people, both personally and professionally, who were very clearly black, but any amount of interaction with them would tell you that they were not raised by stereotypical black parents. So there are plenty of plenty of black parents out there who are doing a very good job, and they hopefully will instill in their kids the same sort of thing.
However, that’s not something that’s particularly exclusive to the stereotypical black culture; the same sort of lack of values being instilled by parents can be found in “white trash” culture. The advantage of someone from “white trash” background has is their skin color. To suggest that there is absolutely no effect of skin color on people’s experience is entirely disingenuous given the evidence presented. The biased society creating these effects is something that can be worked on by society as a whole, and is thus relevant to everyone, not just those affected. Additionally, more efforts should be made to help pull children out of the cycle of poverty, but those efforts should be entirely orthogonal to efforts to encourage racial harmony.
All families stuck in generational poverty because of a lack of access to learned middle-class behavior patterns need a good talking-to, not just black ones. The fact that thickpancreas’ parents, along with many of the black families I went to high school with, had access to those patterns to teach them to their children, suggests there is nothing inherent about being black that is causing the problem with learning the patterns. Those things are more related to socio-economic status than skin color. The problem the black community faces on top of generational poverty is an society that is biased against them. That bias is what needs to be fixed.
Lecturing parents is not going to change their behavior. And if there were “fireside chats” with Obama targeted for such people, what makes you think that they’d watch them? They probably feel they don’t need the lecture and that they’re doing fine. They might not even know they would exist. They might have to work. They might prefer to watch sports. Regardless of what sort of help you offer, it’s not going to take because their behavior patterns are already learned. You need programs that help children understand how to become productive adults and how to pass those skills on to their children. You probably won’t get the adults to learn how to become good parents if they didn’t pick it up themselves.
A former co-worker of mine adopted a black newborn baby from a local mother, although I don’t know the whole story. This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to happen in my mind to get people out of generational poverty. It’s impossible to do by force though.
One of the big problems I have seen is that very often the type of kids we’re talking about are so far behind by the time they reach the public education system that many of them can’t catch up. I’m not saying a kid is who they are going to be by the time they’re 7, but kids who haven’t had an active parent reading to them, and socializing them for the education system are so far behind that there simply aren’t the resources for the public education system to fill in the gaps.
I really don’t see anything that can replace the role of good parents here. And I know for a good deal of “poor” parents, they will see it as a lecture, a judgment of their own job as parents. I said that already.
I do agree it probably would take something like adopting kids from poor mothers at this point, though as you said that certainly can’t and shouldn’t be forced.
Also, my parents definitely were not wealthy.
And I already posted evidence later that shows that there are indeed ways to help single parent families to get out of the cycle of poverty. In essence, stabilizing the economical lives of the parents (or single parent) does help a lot. The students then get the benefits.
You posted a link to a story of a town of 3,000.
Also: The students then get the benefits of a better school environment, that is not cheap alright; but as they say, if you think knowledge is expensive, try ignorance.
Enough data points to show what needs to be done, incidentally I still think some of the talk you propose is still needed, just that it is not credible to think that that would be the main solution.
Uh, correction, that should say: a lot of progress in dealing with the ugly rates of incarceration does not happen…
Here in deep rural Trump country, social safety nets are called ‘welfare’, and getting welfare is shameful. So while they struggle to get by, they see welfare recipients living it up with the government renting them nice houses, buying them cellphones, etc. They genuinely believe that liberals/Democrats support bums over hard-working citizens and they don’t consider that ‘morally superior’, but an insult.
Another big item here is coal – libs/Dems hate coal (and Obama openly and actively tried to get rid of it), endlessly going on about how filthy and awful coal is. But coal is a huge part of our regional history and a major source of pride – coal miners are brave, hard-working, and (not insignificantly) well-paid, so criticizing coal isn’t about economics or the environment, it’s a personal attack on our heritage and most respected workers. In other words, they feel as if they are the target of prejudice and resent that libs/Dems care more about, say, immigrants, than their well-being.
So yeah, Trump supporters think that progressives really don’t believe in those ideals.
You mentioned black teen pregnancy, but that actually fell during Obama’s term IIRC.
I’m not sure what lectures or other forms of “tough love” from Obama or any else can do to help solve social problems that were caused by wholesale community segregation and degradation. I don’t think many here would dispute that there is dysfunction in chronically urban poor Black neighborhoods, but what can we actually propose to solve the problem beyond just calling out bad behavior?
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the data seem to show that policies like investing more on education and providing economic opportunities do more to deal with these social problems than lectures and threatening to withhold resources. Telling people to “Pull their pants up” and threatening to take away entitlements or other “scared straight” approaches might make us feel like we’re finally addressing ‘the problem,’ but there’s not a lot of evidence that these tactics actually help improve communities of color or even communities of poor whites for that matter.
That doesn’t mean that they don’t take it. Just that they don’t admit it.
Coal jobs are going away. That is simply a fact. The demand for coal is decreasing, and the labor required to mine a unit of coal is also decreasing.
These are things that cannot and will not be reversed, and anyone who says that they are going to bring coal mining jobs back is lying.
When a lib/dem says that coal jobs are going away, that is not because they hate coal miner, or because they are making personal attacks, it is because they are acknowledging reality.
That they offer plans to help these displaced workers find jobs in more lucrative and safe industries is not an attack, it is not saying that they care more about immigrants, it is specifically because they care about the well-being of these displaced workers.
That doesn’t mean that a coal miner may not feel as though it is a personal attack, or that the libs/Dems care more about immigrants, but that is because the media they choose to consume tells them these things, not because it is actually reflective of reality.
They would rather believe the pandering lie than to accept the hard truth.
It’s funny, in this thread, one poster is saying that there needs to be a hard conversation to the black community about how they need to be responsible for their own actions and take initiative and not expect society to fix their problems. And then in this same thread, we have coal miners who have explicitly rejected that very message, and are being called brave and hard working to stick to their heritage. That asking them to take responsibility for their own futures is a personal attack, and that they are the target of prejudice.
So yeah, I agree that Trump supporters think that progressives really don’t believe in those ideals.
What conversation would you have with this kid?
“Shoulda had better parents?”
As I said before, I see the problems in the black community as a generational trauma from historical blatant racism, with the scar being refreshed regularly by less blatant but still harmful contemporary racism.
To call it part of their culture would be like calling someone’s PTSD part of their personality.
It’s not an easy fix, and I certainly don’t have the exact solution, and anything that is done is going to need to be dynamic in order to accommodate the changing needs as we try to heal the wound that society has inflicted.
Part of that is the conversation you think should happen, but it also needs support to make it happen.
I think it was @QuickSilver who said that if they went home with an F, their parents would not accept the excuse that many of their classmates also failed. But, if you come home with an F, and your parents berate you for it, but still do not provide you with a safe place to sleep and study, nutritious food to fuel your growing body and mind, help with your homework and studies, rides to the library or to study groups, and in fact threaten to take away what little you do have as the only incentive to improve, then it is the parents that are refusing responsibility, not the kid.
The kid still has agency, still needs to be responsible, and ultimately will have to live with the consequences of his decisions, but if not given the resources to achieve what is expected, then it should be expected that they will fail. To then blame that on the child is simple abuse, IMHO.
Same with society and the communities within it. We can tell them to shape up, but if we deny them the tools to do so, then expectation of success is unreasonable.
There will be those who manage to excel in spite of the hardships. There are always exceptional individuals. But if you only allow the exceptional to make it out of the cycle of poverty, then you are not working to alleviate it, but instead working to exploit it.
I think we are all sufficiently familiar with the cyclical nature of poor education and poverty and the knock-on effect it has on communities. It affects whites and blacks to a similar extent. Racism and classism is an additional strike against those who are trapped in this cycle. I think we are all in agreement on this point.
What thickpancreas is saying, I believe, is that he sees that his community can and must do better to break this cycle and that they don’t have to wait for the benevolence of white folks to change their hearts and minds in order for black individuals, families and community to improve their own outcomes. He is saying that to a large extent it is within their own power to make meaningful changes in their own lives now. Yes, many of these problems are a result of centuries of racism and injustice. Yes, we need to continue to strive to improve as a society to remove the vestiges of racism. But also, yes, blacks, individually and collectively, have agency and responsibility to fix that which only they can fix for themselves.
Now, where I have disagreement with thickpancreas is whether a fireside chat from Obama while he was president would serve those ends. While president, Obama was president of the entire country. It would have been politically difficult, if not impossible, to pull aside just the Black Americans for ‘that talk’. I think it would have sent the wrong signal to both black and white Americans. To one, it would have sounded condescending, to a certain 63M others it would have sent the message that it’s all black’s fault that their communities are in the state that they are in. I see no way Obama could have threaded that needle then. Perhaps now, though still, I feel it’s fraught. It must be a grass roots movement by people like @thickpancrease. I suspect there are many more who think like him than most of us are aware of.
I think what’s more common and equally damaging is households where nobody cares what you brought home because education and achievement is not central or valued. If a kid sees that his parents don’t care, then why should the kid?