Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap

[Trausti]

Coates’s mistaken view about the origin of American prosperity is part of a larger fallacy about national wealth in general: the assumption that if a nation is wealthy, it must have stolen that wealth from somebody else. To the contrary, a nation’s wealth has more to do with the economic system it adopts and the set of skills its citizens possess. The example of Singapore is instructive: although it was raided by Portugal in the seventeenth century and colonized by Britain in the nineteenth, today Singapore is wealthier than both Portugal and Britain, in terms of median wealth per adult.

The prevailing progressive narrative also gives short shrift to the history of immigrant groups succeeding in the face of racist hostility and without help from the government. Baradaran, for instance, criticizes the “pervasive myth that immigrant success was based purely on individual work ethic.” To the contrary, she claims, “most immigrants’ bootstraps had been provided to them by the government.”13

But history tells a different story. Starting with the California Alien Land Law of 1913, fourteen states passed laws preventing Japanese-American peasant farmers from owning land and property. These laws existed until 1952, when the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. Add to this the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II, and it’s fair to say that the Japanese were given no bootstraps in America. Nevertheless, by 1970 census data showed Japanese-Americans out-earning Anglo-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish-Americans.14 For Asian-Americans on the whole, an analysis of wealth data from 1989 to 2013 predicted that their “median wealth soon will surpass the white median level.” If wealth differences were largely explained by America’s history of favoring certain groups over others, then it would be hard to explain why Asian-Americans, who were never favored, are on track to become wealthier than whites.

Conspicuous by its absence in the progressive account of the racial wealth gap is any active role for blacks themselves. Reading Baradaran, Rothstein, and Coates, one gets the impression that there is nothing blacks could do to improve their lot—outside of asking the government for radical policy solutions. But there are things that blacks can do. Indeed, there are certain elements of black American culture that, if changed, would allow blacks to amass wealth to a degree that no government policy would be likely to match.

But the entity responsible for a harm cannot always redress it. This truth is illustrated by ‘The Parable of the Pedestrian,’ from legal scholar Amy Wax: A reckless driver runs a stop light and hits a pedestrian, injuring her spine. Doctors inform the pedestrian that if she ever wants to walk again she’ll have to spend many painstaking years in physical therapy. Clearly, she bears no responsibility for her injury; she was victimized by the reckless driver. Yet the driver cannot make her whole. He might pay for her medical bills, for instance, but he cannot make her attend her tedious physical therapy sessions; only she can do that. Still, she might resist. She might write historical accounts detailing precisely how and why the driver injured her. When her physical therapists demand more of her, she might accuse them of blaming the victim. She might wallow in the unfairness of it all. But this will change nothing. The nature of her injury precludes the possibility of anyone besides her healing it.

Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap

One of the worse aspects of present-day progressives is the catechism that if there is a disparity between a non-White person and a White person, that disparity is explained by events that happened long ago or by invisible power structures. What a horrible idea to inculcate into someone's head. But to suggest that the progressive diagnosis is faulty is to risk being called a heretic or a witch. That's a risk most simply will not take. Unsurprising, the author of this piece is not White.

 

[lpetrich]

That's the old "Why can't American blacks be like some model minority" argument. Asian Americans and the Professional Burdens of Being a ‘Model Minority’ - The Atlantic, Asians in the 2016 Race - The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan's column is more proof we need to stop resurrecting old myths about race

Asian-Americans got stereotyped as a virtuous "model minority" after the black civil-rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's.

MLK: A riot is the language of the unheard - CBS News:

WALLACE: Even Sen. Jacob Javits asked the question recently. He said that he was a slum resident, but he and some of his fellow Jews were able to make it out of the ghetto on the lower East Side of New York. The same thing is true with lots of Irish, Italians, and he asked the question why the Negro finds it so difficult to make his own way up out of the ghetto? You did.

KING: Number one, no other racial group has been a slave on American soil. It's nice to say other people were down and they got up. They were not slaves on American soil. The other thing is that the Negro has had high visibility, and because of the prejudices existing in this country his color has been against him. It's been against him and they've used this to keep him from moving up. In the final analysis, when you say to a man that you are in this position because of your race or because of your color, you say to that man that he can never get out of it. Other racial groups have been able maybe to change their accent or to change their names, but the Negro can't.

 

[Mumbles]

Read this article before - it's basically garbage. Not bad for a philosophy undergraduate, perhaps, but it ignores the entirety of research into economics, culture, and history aparty from Thomas Sowell - who also has run into numerous similar problems. A few examples:

But slavery is hardly the root cause of America’s prosperity. If it were, then we would expect American states that practiced slavery to be richer than those that did not.

Um, why? There's literally no real reason to believe this, much like the incredible wealth disparities among many oil-rich nations last century, or mineral-rich countries today.

And this ignores the massive wealth destruction cause by the Civil War, including both Sherman's March, the near-destruction of an entire generation of white men, *and* the fact that much wealth on paper was fundamentally invested in the slaves themselves - and this wealth was wiped out entirely by the end of slavery. It also assumes that banks, and industrial towns outside the south had nothing at all to do with the wealth tied up in, and products created by, the slaves, which is questionable.

But slavery is hardly the root cause of America’s prosperity. If it were, then we would expect American states that practiced slavery to be richer than those that did not.

Coates has never said this. he has said that white supremacy essentially drains wealth from black (and Native American) peoples, and transfers it to groups of white people, inside the US. This is a fundamentally different claim.

Baradaran makes the same mistake in her description of life for blacks in the 1940s and 50s: “poverty led to institutional breakdown, which led to more poverty.”11 But between 1940 and 1960 the black poverty rate fell from 87 percent to 47 percent, before any significant civil rights gains were made.

The claim that no progress was made until 1960 is itself risible. See - integration of the military and other federal government services, some gains from the New Deal (though certainly not a proportional share), moves against housing bans, Browder vs. Gayle, and so forth.

But history tells a different story. Starting with the California Alien Land Law of 1913, fourteen states passed laws preventing Japanese-American peasant farmers from owning land and property. These laws existed until 1952, when the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. Add to this the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II, and it’s fair to say that the Japanese were given no bootstraps in America. Nevertheless, by 1970 census data showed Japanese-Americans out-earning Anglo-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish-Americans.14 For Asian-Americans on the whole, an analysis of wealth data from 1989 to 2013 predicted that their “median wealth soon will surpass the white median level.” If wealth differences were largely explained by America’s history of favoring certain groups over others, then it would be hard to explain why Asian-Americans, who were never favored, are on track to become wealthier than whites.

Those Japanese that were effected by internment were, in reality, paid reparations. Oops.

This also ignores the high number of Asian families that immigrated far more recently, and with their own wealth. It also ignores the difference between different Asian groups - Vietnamese and Hmong immigrants have fared far worse than Japanese and Chinese immigrants - except for a short hand-wave that assumes that both are seen as the same "race", which is not established. It also ignores something very obvious about racism - namely, it discriminates according to the perceived race. "Well, if Chinese immigrants can do fine, then there can't be discrimination against black Americans." is obviously absurd - just substitute "European" for "Japanese" to see the problem. This also applies, for obvious reasons, to African or Caribbean immigrants compared to black Americans in general. It's still easy to distinguish when accents, basic mannerisms, names, and the like are plainly different.

And of course, the "culture/spending" argument also has a long, and weary past. You can see it among the "talented Tenth" to some degree, to black people who said that black people who don't "act right" are bringing discrimination on themselves, to writers like William Hannibal Thomas (who even used the "costume jewelry" argument). And the writer often makes little to no attempt to see if these supposedly horrible habits are actually wrong for poorer people - such as ignoring the simple fact that a cell phone both allows for job calls while traveling (far more important), and is often the sole means of internet access for many poorer people. And there's this:

But if we learned anything from the explosion of violent crime and single motherhood following welfare expansion in the late 1960s, it was that cash transfers cannot solve a problem that the absence of cash didn’t cause.

Relatively few proponents of reparations state that simple cash payments are the end of it - this is another strawman.

 

[Axulus]

Some of the arguments in the article are suspect but I thought the most compelling part was this:

A 2017 Nielsen report found that, compared to white women, black women were 14 percent more likely to own a luxury vehicle, 16 percent more likely to purchase costume jewelry, and 9 percent more likely to purchase fine jewelry. A similar Nielsen report from 2013 found that, while only 62 percent of all Americans owned a smartphone, 71 percent of blacks owned one. Moreover, all of these spending differences were unconditional on wealth and income.

To what extent do poor spending habits explain the persistence of the wealth gap? Economists at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania asked this question after analyzing 16 years of nationally representative data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Consistent with the Nielsen data, they found that blacks with comparable incomes to whites spent 17 percent less on education, and 32 percent more (an extra $2300 per year in 2005 dollars) on ‘visible goods’—defined as cars, jewelry, and clothes. What’s more, “after controlling for visible spending,” they concluded that the “wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, conditional on permanent income, declines by 50 percent.” To be clear, that 50 percent figure doesn’t pertain to the total wealth gap, but to the proportion of the gap that remains after income is taken into account—which was 40 percent. The upshot: the fact that blacks spent more on cars, jewelry, and clothes explained fully 20 percent of the total racial wealth gap.

To make matters worse, spending patterns are just one part of a larger set of financial skills on which blacks lag behind. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis followed over 40,000 families from 1989 to 2013, tracking their wealth accumulation and financial decisions. They developed a financial health scale, ranging from 0 to 5, that measured the degree to which families made “routine financial health choices that contribute to wealth accumulation”—e.g., saving any amount of money, paying credit card bills on time, having a low debt-to-income ratio, etc. At 3.12, Asian families scored the highest, followed by whites at 3.11, Hispanics at 2.71, and blacks at 2.63.

Next, they asked if education accounted for the differences in financial habits by limiting the comparison to middle-aged families with advanced degrees. Surprisingly, they found that the racial gap in financial health-scores didn’t shrink; it widened. Highly-educated Asian families scored 3.49, comparable whites scored 3.38, comparable Hispanics scored 2.94, and comparable blacks remained far behind at 2.66. Thus, the study authors concluded, neither “periodic shortages of time or money” nor “lower educational attainment” were the driving forces behind the differences in financial decision-making.

A government handout can't change this aspect of the wealth gap. These are behavioral differences and who is to say spending more on these kinds of goods in exchange for lower wealth is wrong? It is wrong to argue that this portion of the wealth gap is discriminatory when personal preferences differ between groups.

 

[Mumbles]

A government handout can't change this aspect of the wealth gap. These are behavioral differences and who is to say spending more on these kinds of goods in exchange for lower wealth is wrong? It is wrong to argue that this portion of the wealth gap is discriminatory when personal preferences differ between groups.

I was assuming that people would actually look at the studies and say, for example, "Wait, but black women are wildly underrepresented in SUV and Truck owners, though, and those are often bought by people who have little or no use for such a vehicle. It's pretty dishonest to leave that sort of thing out." As I said, there are a lot of basic problems with the article.

 

[ruby sparks]

One of the worse aspects of present-day progressives is the catechism that if there is a disparity between a non-White person and a White person, that disparity is explained by events that happened long ago or by invisible power structures. What a horrible idea to inculcate into someone's head. But to suggest that the progressive diagnosis is faulty is to risk being called a heretic or a witch. That's a risk most simply will not take. Unsurprising, the author of this piece is not White.

I do not see how it is a 'horrible idea'. Perhaps if it's caricatured, or overplayed, yes, but is that really the usual? Do most so-called 'progressives' (strange pejorative term if you ask me) go as far as to say that history and 'invisible power structures' are the only factors? If some of them do, that would be going too far, being too 'liberal', arguably. So I agree that to instead blame (or allocate responsibility to) black people themselves or as a group for many of their own misfortunes can be, wrongly imo, seen as heretical.

That said, the more 'horrible idea' surely, would be not to accept the validity of the historical and invisible power structure factors. That would be discrimination denial.

So, for my money, it's fine and good to have excessively 'liberal/progressive/PC' paradigms questioned in the way that this article does (temporarily assuming such paradigms are in fact common or usual) but one would have to be wary of going too far the other way.

It's my impression, as a non-American, that the USA, or even a political 'side' in it, has not at all gone 'too PC/progressive'. The American 'left' is hardly a left at all, by international standards. What I do think is that there has been a perception, imo probably partly fuelled by spin and scare tactics (not unlike the 'reds under the bed' thing) from those who favour the non-progressive status quo, that it has.

 

[PyramidHead]

One of the worse aspects of present-day progressives is the catechism that if there is a disparity between a non-White person and a White person, that disparity is explained by events that happened long ago or by invisible power structures.

I would say all behavior is explained by events that happened long ago or by invisible power structures. That's not a progressive catechism, it's a fact about reality. Even if we make free choices, we didn't freely choose all of the things that influenced our free choices. And among the influences we DID freely choose, not all of THOSE were influenced by things we freely chose. There's no such thing as a completely self-initiated act.

But the entity responsible for a harm cannot always redress it. This truth is illustrated by ‘The Parable of the Pedestrian,’ from legal scholar Amy Wax: A reckless driver runs a stop light and hits a pedestrian, injuring her spine. Doctors inform the pedestrian that if she ever wants to walk again she’ll have to spend many painstaking years in physical therapy. Clearly, she bears no responsibility for her injury; she was victimized by the reckless driver. Yet the driver cannot make her whole. He might pay for her medical bills, for instance, but he cannot make her attend her tedious physical therapy sessions; only she can do that. Still, she might resist. She might write historical accounts detailing precisely how and why the driver injured her. When her physical therapists demand more of her, she might accuse them of blaming the victim. She might wallow in the unfairness of it all. But this will change nothing. The nature of her injury precludes the possibility of anyone besides her healing it.

Whether she plays a role in her own healing process or not is a function of the person she is, and is at least strongly influenced by factors she had no hand in causing to be. If she doesn't have the willpower to initiate her own healing, then the hospital should increase its efforts accordingly instead of letting her die. Sound familiar? Progressives do not want the government to help black people succeed in society because the government was responsible for the initial harm--it's because the government is in the best position to provide the biggest benefit, like the hospital!

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Those Japanese that were effected by internment were, in reality, paid reparations. Oops.

Question: If black people in the USA today were paid reparations, would that end wealth disparity between races within a generation or two? Or could there be something to the claims of a counter-culture of learned helplessness and victimhood?

This also ignores the high number of Asian families that immigrated far more recently, and with their own wealth.

Yes. This explains a lot of it, though culture does as well.

It also ignores the difference between different Asian groups - Vietnamese and Hmong immigrants have fared far worse than Japanese and Chinese immigrants - except for a short hand-wave that assumes that both are seen as the same "race", which is not established.

Another essential point. I am sick of seeing all Asian people branded as "Asian" rather than as being from China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Cambodia, etc. There are so many Asians, yet we all get treated as a monolith of rich, privileged people. Why should a poor Filipino student be given a harder time getting into school because she is "Asian" and there are so many Chinese and Japanese students in already?

But if we learned anything from the explosion of violent crime and single motherhood following welfare expansion in the late 1960s, it was that cash transfers cannot solve a problem that the absence of cash didn’t cause.

Relatively few proponents of reparations state that simple cash payments are the end of it - this is another strawman.

The single motherhood thing is a point I have seen raised often.

 

[PyramidHead]

The false dichotomy between "culture" (something thought to be the full responsibility of all people who are part of it) and "circumstances" (only these causes of misfortune should be redressed by public policy) has been a rallying cry of conservatives for a generation or more. The left needs to call their bluff. So what if 'Asian culture' has some effect on the well-being of Asians relative to other minorities? Doesn't that just make blacks and Hispanics unlucky to have been born non-Asian, and thus in greater need of assistance? Culture is not something planned out ahead of time by members of a race or ethnicity. It evolves in response to hardships, downplaying certain priorities and reinforcing others in a slapdash way that can't be predicted from first principles. Of all the people in a position to influence the future of a culture, those living in it are perhaps worst equipped to do so, especially if they are still responding to the same hardships that moulded the culture of their parents' parents in the first place. Cultures change when social and economic conditions change, and we live in an interconnected world where such complexities can be handled through legislation better than through bottom-up revolution.

 

[Jarhyn]

Question: If black people in the USA today were paid reparations, would that end wealth disparity between races within a generation or two? Or could there be something to the claims of a counter-culture of learned helplessness and victimhood?



Yes. This explains a lot of it, though culture does as well.

It also ignores the difference between different Asian groups - Vietnamese and Hmong immigrants have fared far worse than Japanese and Chinese immigrants - except for a short hand-wave that assumes that both are seen as the same "race", which is not established.

Another essential point. I am sick of seeing all Asian people branded as "Asian" rather than as being from China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Cambodia, etc. There are so many Asians, yet we all get treated as a monolith of rich, privileged people. Why should a poor Filipino student be given a harder time getting into school because she is "Asian" and there are so many Chinese and Japanese students in already?

But if we learned anything from the explosion of violent crime and single motherhood following welfare expansion in the late 1960s, it was that cash transfers cannot solve a problem that the absence of cash didn’t cause.

Relatively few proponents of reparations state that simple cash payments are the end of it - this is another strawman.

The single motherhood thing is a point I have seen raised often.

The success of reparations depends wholely on the implementation, like any policy. If you just hand every person of a minority race money, that's going to fail pretty spectacularly. In reality, many of us who believe in reparations want to direct money at education, youth services, improving access to home ownership/loans/mortgages, cultural outreach, and enforcing racial neutrality in employment settings, and ending racial disparities (and hamstringing generational cycles) in criminal justice settings. Once people have homes, educations, jobs, and things to do after school, and aren't forced into the hustle to make ends meet, the problems will largely resolve themselves.

 

[ruby sparks]

The success of reparations depends wholely on the implementation, like any policy. If you just hand every person of a minority race money, that's going to fail pretty spectacularly. In reality, many of us who believe in reparations want to direct money at education, youth services, improving access to home ownership/loans/mortgages, cultural outreach, and enforcing racial neutrality in employment settings, and ending racial disparities (and hamstringing generational cycles) in criminal justice settings. Once people have homes, educations, jobs, and things to do after school, and aren't forced into the hustle to make ends meet, the problems will largely resolve themselves.

Well, that is the idea at least, I suppose.

And personally, I think it has quite a bit going for it. But I'll only support it if it DOESNT COST ME PERSONALLY A PENNY AND NOBODY GETS ANYTHING I DON'T.

Seriously though, how'd the thread get onto handouts? Oh yeah, Axulus brought it up. Because doing anything about social injustice is about handouts? I'm just guessing.

 

[ruby sparks]

One of the worse aspects of present-day progressives is the catechism that if there is a disparity between a non-White person and a White person, that disparity is explained by events that happened long ago or by invisible power structures.

I would say all behavior is explained by events that happened long ago or by invisible power structures. That's not a progressive catechism, it's a fact about reality. Even if we make free choices, we didn't freely choose all of the things that influenced our free choices. And among the influences we DID freely choose, not all of THOSE were influenced by things we freely chose. There's no such thing as a completely self-initiated act.

But the entity responsible for a harm cannot always redress it. This truth is illustrated by ‘The Parable of the Pedestrian,’ from legal scholar Amy Wax: A reckless driver runs a stop light and hits a pedestrian, injuring her spine. Doctors inform the pedestrian that if she ever wants to walk again she’ll have to spend many painstaking years in physical therapy. Clearly, she bears no responsibility for her injury; she was victimized by the reckless driver. Yet the driver cannot make her whole. He might pay for her medical bills, for instance, but he cannot make her attend her tedious physical therapy sessions; only she can do that. Still, she might resist. She might write historical accounts detailing precisely how and why the driver injured her. When her physical therapists demand more of her, she might accuse them of blaming the victim. She might wallow in the unfairness of it all. But this will change nothing. The nature of her injury precludes the possibility of anyone besides her healing it.

Whether she plays a role in her own healing process or not is a function of the person she is, and is at least strongly influenced by factors she had no hand in causing to be. If she doesn't have the willpower to initiate her own healing, then the hospital should increase its efforts accordingly instead of letting her die. Sound familiar? Progressives do not want the government to help black people succeed in society because the government was responsible for the initial harm--it's because the government is in the best position to provide the biggest benefit, like the hospital!

But why is the government in that position? Isn't it partly because enough people get off their arses every day to work hard to make money which the government takes a slice of to pay for stuff like hospitals (well, some hospitals, at least)? This woman, along with a lot of black and other people, allegedly, are potential freeloaders!

(even if I agree they have no actual free will to be other than what they are).

 

[PyramidHead]

I would say all behavior is explained by events that happened long ago or by invisible power structures. That's not a progressive catechism, it's a fact about reality. Even if we make free choices, we didn't freely choose all of the things that influenced our free choices. And among the influences we DID freely choose, not all of THOSE were influenced by things we freely chose. There's no such thing as a completely self-initiated act.



Whether she plays a role in her own healing process or not is a function of the person she is, and is at least strongly influenced by factors she had no hand in causing to be. If she doesn't have the willpower to initiate her own healing, then the hospital should increase its efforts accordingly instead of letting her die. Sound familiar? Progressives do not want the government to help black people succeed in society because the government was responsible for the initial harm--it's because the government is in the best position to provide the biggest benefit, like the hospital!

But why is the government in that position? Isn't it partly because enough people get off their arses every day to work hard to make money which the government takes a slice of to pay for stuff like hospitals (well, some hospitals, at least)? This woman, along with a lot of black and other people, allegedly, are potential freeloaders!

(even if I agree they have no actual free will to be other than what they are).

Everybody is a freeloader. We just have to get over that and move onto the actual business of helping people who need help.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

The success of reparations depends wholely on the implementation, like any policy. If you just hand every person of a minority race money, that's going to fail pretty spectacularly. In reality, many of us who believe in reparations want to direct money at education, youth services, improving access to home ownership/loans/mortgages, cultural outreach, and enforcing racial neutrality in employment settings, and ending racial disparities (and hamstringing generational cycles) in criminal justice settings. Once people have homes, educations, jobs, and things to do after school, and aren't forced into the hustle to make ends meet, the problems will largely resolve themselves.

Agreed, but I wouldn't call that reparations. And beyond efforts to keep things race neutral, I wouldn't make them race based either. There is no justifiable reason to give one person in need an opportunity or scholarship and not give it to another because they are different races.

 

[PyramidHead]

The success of reparations depends wholely on the implementation, like any policy. If you just hand every person of a minority race money, that's going to fail pretty spectacularly. In reality, many of us who believe in reparations want to direct money at education, youth services, improving access to home ownership/loans/mortgages, cultural outreach, and enforcing racial neutrality in employment settings, and ending racial disparities (and hamstringing generational cycles) in criminal justice settings. Once people have homes, educations, jobs, and things to do after school, and aren't forced into the hustle to make ends meet, the problems will largely resolve themselves.

Agreed, but I wouldn't call that reparations. And beyond efforts to keep things race neutral, I wouldn't make them race based either. There is no justifiable reason to give one person in need an opportunity or scholarship and not give it to another because they are different races.

Sure, and I thought Obama was on the right track when he suggested making such programs tied to economic indicators instead of race, but that was never implemented. That said, basing it first on race and then making sure that the economic indicators match the assumption behind the selection is an inefficient way of getting to basically the same place. Nobody is getting scholarships SOLELY based on their race. It's always race + disadvantages. Of course, this raises the reasonable question of what to do about disadvantaged people who do not belong to races that are targeted by private scholarships. Tackling poverty with the Bernie Sanders approach is the way to go, and he lost a little Democratic support because he didn't emphasize race enough, but I'd say he (and Obama, in that moment of clarity) had his head in the right place at least. Still, there is no reason to first scrap the programs that help disadvantaged minorities before implementing policies to help disadvantaged people generally.

 

[Jarhyn]

The success of reparations depends wholely on the implementation, like any policy. If you just hand every person of a minority race money, that's going to fail pretty spectacularly. In reality, many of us who believe in reparations want to direct money at education, youth services, improving access to home ownership/loans/mortgages, cultural outreach, and enforcing racial neutrality in employment settings, and ending racial disparities (and hamstringing generational cycles) in criminal justice settings. Once people have homes, educations, jobs, and things to do after school, and aren't forced into the hustle to make ends meet, the problems will largely resolve themselves.

Agreed, but I wouldn't call that reparations. And beyond efforts to keep things race neutral, I wouldn't make them race based either. There is no justifiable reason to give one person in need an opportunity or scholarship and not give it to another because they are different races.

When I comes to schooling, it comes down to the fact that like any other racist policy in a day and age where clear racism is out of fashion, the problem is that the (non)funding of specific schools is done as a proxy for race. Look at the differences in funding between Edina and North Minneapolis school districts. The money doesn't exist in the district to fund the school because nobody in the district had a decent education because there isn't money in the district to fund the school... and on top of that Vicious Cycle, all the undeducated people in the district ask why education is important, because they never got a decent education and turned out "just fine".

The world over, the solution to ignorant shitholes is education. It doesn't matter what caused the shithole to be a shitty hole, it almost certainly has nothing to do with real differences in race and everything to do with real differences in opportunity and education*.

Edit: and home life is a big part of education. Nobody is going to give up the hustle and bury their face in a book when there's already not enough food on the table and the landlord is knocking on the door asking for rent. Maybe these policies should be extended everywhere disparity exists, but even if they were, they would still be targeting "black" communities because that's where disparity exists in the US.

 

[ruby sparks]

Everybody is a freeloader. We just have to get over that and move onto the actual business of helping people who need help.

To be pedantic, everyone is an unfreeloader, surely?

And to be even more pedantic, where, though of course I am at least slightly inclined to agree with you, do you get the normative/imperative in the second sentence? Are you a do-gooder?


In all seriousness, I don't easily agree that everyone is a freeloader. Whatever one accepts is the set of causes, some people do more to 'earn' what they get than others. No?

 

[ruby sparks]

Still, there is no reason to first scrap the programs that help disadvantaged minorities before implementing policies to help disadvantaged people generally.

Like hell there isn't. When the minority is black, it's RACISM, dammit. You just don't get it. You have been brainwashed by Identity Politics.

 

[PyramidHead]

Everybody is a freeloader. We just have to get over that and move onto the actual business of helping people who need help.

To be pedantic, everyone is an unfreeloader, surely?

And to be even more pedantic, where, though of course I am at least slightly inclined to agree with you, do you get the normative in the second sentence?


In all seriousness, I don't easily agree that everyone is a freeloader. Whatever one accepts is the set of causes, some people do more to 'earn' what they get than others. No?

That's a narrative we tell ourselves, but I don't think it's actually true. Not in the sense of one person 'deserving' something more than another, as a result of what they did. Because as I mentioned, what they did is dependent in large part (even if not entirely) on who they are, which they couldn't possibly have been fully responsible for. We all rely on each other and on the system to make us into things that function in society, and we can thank each other for that without singling out anybody as more worthy than anybody else.

 

[ruby sparks]

That's a narrative we tell ourselves, but I don't think it's actually true. Not in the sense of one person 'deserving' something more than another, as a result of what they did. Because as I mentioned, what they did is dependent in large part (even if not entirely) on who they are, which they couldn't possibly have been fully responsible for. We all rely on each other and on the system to make us into things that function in society, and we can thank each other for that without singling out anybody as more worthy than anybody else.

Yes, but I was trying to avoid implying that when I opted for 'earn' (in inverted commas) rather than deserve, though it's hard, since almost every available word is loaded.

Bald fact: the early bird gets the worm. It doesn't matter that the bird isn't capable of understanding morality. I think it's possible to be too non-darwinian about such things. Albeit it's complicated, but all things being equal, the early bird may not have any good reason to give half the worm away to a toad.

I agree that the human narrative of 'deserve' is awry in many ways.