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>never mind the cultural bonds (dare I say submissiveness) that descends from over a century of slavery. You (and the parent) completely discount the structura
by omegaworks 11y ago
>never mind the cultural bonds (dare I say submissiveness) that descends from over a century of slavery.
You (and the parent) completely discount the structural deficiencies present in our society to this day.
In the 50s and 60s with soldiers moving into the middle class on GI bill funding, banks systematically denied access to home loans to blacks looking to move in to suburban neighborhoods, literally trapping people in certain sections of the city. These were enormous infrastructural investments on the part of governments. Suburbs wouldn't exist without fast highway and expressway access to the urban core. Black neighborhoods were literally bifurcated to make way for these huge infrastructure projects. These broken and divided neighborhoods were left to rot. Nobody invests in a place politicians put first on the chopping block. We built these ghettos.
This blight of a suburbia built on exclusion will continue to burden America for generations to come. We as a society continue to divest from education and funnel billions of dollars towards war and incarceration. With mandatory minimum sentencing and zero-tolerance punishments for minor drug possession we house 22 percent of the world's prison population; we have more of our citizens locked up then any other country on Earth. 1 in 3 black men are behind bars.
This is a societal failure, and framing it as "failure of individual responsibility" is one of the most malicious distortions of reality one can muster.
- Aloha 11y agoNo disagreement from me in any part - I don't disagree with you about institutionalized racism, not at all, but I also believe that accepting the role of the victim (until very recently) was (largely) the status quo (the acceptance of the status quo is the cultural bods I spoke of). The African American community only in the last 5 years has stood up and said simply "this state of affairs is neither fair nor right, and must change". I also agree with Mandatory minimums are a pox on our civil society as are things like offender registries and a the lack of real representation for the accused - our justice system is based around the idea of free and fair trials, and the punishment discharging the debt to society.
- omegaworks 11y ago>only in the last 5 years has stood up and said simply "this state of affairs is neither fair nor right, and must change". I'm not sure what you're trying to stay here. The Civil Rights movement grew out of the 60s.
- Aloha 11y agoI don't consider the historical civil rights movement and the black lives matter movement to be deeply linked, they had different goals, and different means of accomplishing those goals
- innocentoldguy 11y agoI agree that there is a societal aspect of it, but individual responsibility is the one thing each and every one of us has ultimate control over. You can whine about century-old affronts and complain about societal deficiencies for centuries to come, but the one thing that each of us can change today is our own personal behaviors. It isn't a malicious distortion. It is an alterable reality. Why not control what you can control first before you try to tame the impossible?