My guess is that you’d be surprised how many of them aren’t up to no good, and are just regular people trying to get by in life just like you and me.
I might be. But then again, I didn’t dream up the stereotype all on my own, either.
So then it must be accurate.
To varying degrees, based on the sample size.
You wanna hazard a guess? :rolleyes:
So do you also think Mexican people spend all day sleeping under cacti while wearing giant sombreros?
If you came to my neighborhood, you’d see tons of black people in their early 20s just hanging out all over the streets day. On the weekends, it’s house parties everywhere. You may think “Look at the parasites.” in reality, I live right next to Howard University and what you’d be seeing is probably the finest group of high-achieving young African American leaders in the nation, doing absolutely normal things that college students do.
Stereotypes, no matter how well founded, tell you absolutely nothing about an individual. Nothing.
No kiddin’? And of course stereotypes tell you nothing about an individual.
But neither of these things (small college neighborhoods and individuals) are what this thread is about. It’s about the remaining 99.9% of the young dudes wasting their time on front stoops in neighborhoods of all kinds all across the country regardless of whether or not there is a party going on next door. But that does tend boost sales.
Jesus Christ, dude, way to miss the point.
At least the white chicks have kids in school and their husbands are at work and therefore pay the taxes that pay the inner city rent and for food stamps!!! I’ve seen worthless kids and adults of every race who sponge off their mothers and/or grandparents. Scum of the earth and should be sent to Guantanamo for some water boarding immediately if not sooner! And I will make this clear, this man has never and will never have white guilt. Don’t give a shit what color you are, get a job.
To be honest, of the black women I worked with in 3 successive call centers, none of them had a permanent boyfriend or husband living with them, and referred constantly to the ‘babydaddy’ and most of them had multiple ‘babydaddies’ with multiple kids.
<shrug> I was actually affianced to each of the 2 fathers of my miscarriages, and married to the father of my final miscarriage. I would not have gotten pregnant voluntarily and was actually on birth control properly used for all 3 [though how one can misuse a tubal ligation I leave to the imagination of the reader]. If that is the culture you are raised in I guess you see no problem in the sperm doner not sticking around.
You wouldn’t happen to be a new deal democrat, would you?
We should start a campaign to tell black people about the magic of engagement rings.
For what it’s worth, the four years I was in high school, all the pregnant girls were white AND not engaged to anyone.
What the OP is describing is the natural consequence of our new non-industrial economy. We have no more factories in the inner cities-we buy all our stuff from China. So there are no low skill factory jobs for inner city residents. I have seen this in my lifetime-when I was a kid, Boston was full of small factories, that made everyuthing from lamps to raincoats. These places were businesses that could give you a start, and provided you with money and training. They are all gone now-most employemnt in Boston is in finance, academia, and university education-fine if you have a MBA, PhD, or MS-not so good if you are a HS dropout.
Thank you for your input!
Sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays
(As in Monday, April 20, 1889)
Why? Does the book recommend solutions like giving everyone a gun, banning gay marriage and cutting taxes for the wealthy? Generally I found the phrase “I expect it not likely to be well-received by Liberals” should often be proceeded by “I’m going to say something racist or moronic.”
Marcus Hopsin himself spit the truth “…why do black people gotta be the only ones who can’t evolve?, because you in the streets acting like neanderthals.”
The only people that anyone should be mad at, are the ‘successful’ rap artists who manage a way out of the streets only to spend all their time glorifying the streets instead of actually giving something back by promoting a lifestyle absent the a-typical ghetto activities. But they don’t..they just keep doing the same useless nonsense - more hamsters stuck in the loop.
I’m not interested in my tax dollars going to useless socialist programs so they can further sit on the corner and do nothing all day - who then further have the audacity to criticize their own for making something of themselves, as if being successful is a sign of selling out. Stop being naive and thin skinned. Either deal with these people head on, or let them rot away on their own.
To the author:
I would say if you really want to know more about them, simply ask them.
If you want to help, try to get them a job.
And if you’re just looking for more confirmation that they are probably low life and useless to society, you needn’t come here for that, you already knew the answer.
Yes and no. “Ghettos” are often located in cities with lots of shops, restaurants and whatnot.
I don’t think what the OP is describing is particularly inaccurate or different from what you would see in a rural (mostly white) trailer park. What you have is a culture of poverty that continues from generation to generation. The kids grow up, often to unwed single moms while the father is in jail or otherwise absent. The mom might work long hours at multiple low-end jobs. Kids being kids, they will get in all sorts of trouble. There aren’t a lot of jobs anyway since those areas are economically depressed, so many will turn to gangs, drugs, hustling or other illegal forms of income.
The problem is a complex one which usually requires a solution more nuanced than the Conservative “Get a job!” or the Liberal “We need more safety nets!”
The book contains nothing whatsoever about guns, gays, or taxes. It is an academic study of the stratification of American neighborhoods based on IQ. The idea being that beginning in the 1950s, colleges, largely through the use of IQ tests, became very good at attracting the brightest students to the most selective schools.
Before the 1950s, the most likely thing you could say about a student at Harvard was that he was probably from a wealthy family; the intelligence of the students at Harvard generally varied little from the range of all college students. Now, the smartest students tend to go to the best schools, and these days the most likely thing you could say about a student at Harvard is that he is very, very smart.
The author claims that American neighborhoods are becoming stratified not by race or other factors, but by intelligence and educational level. People live in communities with people who have similar educational backgrounds, and these days tend to have very little social contact with people of different classes, unlike the old days when the factory workers and the bank presidents and their children lived near each other and went to school and church and lodge meetings together; i.e., there used to be much more rubbing of elbows with people of different social classes then there is today.
His claim is that many people today spend most of their lives in isolated neighborhoods surrounded by people with similar intelligence and education. Since high IQ parents tend to have high IQ children and vice versa, the social isolation between the classes is self-perpetuating with little opportunity to escape.
So no, the book is not about guns or gays or taxes, nor is it about race, but I expect that many Liberals who are uncomfortable with the scientific study of intelligence will try to make it out to be, simply because of the author’s previous work (which, by the way, is accepted as valid among those who work in the field – the one’s who trash it are the liberal media, not the scientific community of his peers.)
I’ve never read the Bell Curve or anything else by that author so I can’t comment on that.
I do, however, currently live adjacent to one of the more blighted and crime-ridden cities in the US: Flint, Michigan. Plus I volunteer with a local domestic violence program for women and children based in Flint. And have previously lived in or near what many here would call “ghetto” communities.
Many years ago I came to the conclusion that none of it is about race; it’s all about culture and poverty (especially generational poverty.) Impoverished cultures that don’t value - and sometimes denigrate - education, independence, self realization, work and career, responsible parenting. These may be black, white, Hispanic, [del]Asian.[/del]
I know extremely high-acheiving black people, but they are invariably from families who value family, education, work ethic. I know extremely low-acheiving white people too and the converse is true: they are from families who have generations of welfare under their belts and as a rule don’t value education, work, family, etc.
And of course I know many high-achieving people of any color but the common thread is not race but family and culture and expectations.
It certainly does not help that in Rust Belt areas like this, the days of Generous Motors and people who never graduated high school getting $60,000+ annual salary jobs are gone, gone, gone.
Solution? Nuanced and complex, as msmith537 said. There is no easy solution.