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There's something that always bothers me when someone sees a statistic that says "Among racial and ethnic groups, African Americans had the highest poverty rate

There's something that always bothers me when someone sees a statistic that says "Among racial and ethnic groups, African Americans had the highest poverty rate, 27.4 percent, followed by Hispanics at 26.6 percent and whites at 9.9 percent." and flips it to say "almost 75% of blacks are not poor!" Yes, that's true, but if I were to go further and look at the source he cited's fact sheet on African Americans then I'd see some interesting factoids about wealth. For instance: > In 2010, the median wealth, or net worth, for black families was $4,900, compared to median wealth for whites of $97,000. > Blacks are nearly twice as likely as whites to have zero or negative net worth—33.9 percent compared to 18.6 percent. So yes, we can say "nearly 75% of Blacks are not poor" but that doesn't really work as a jumping off point for any argument about black wealth, at least in my opinion. It looks to me like this guy has taken his suburban upper class experience (he called his living situation "Huxtable-esque") and assumed that all black people who are living above the poverty line are somehow doing just as well as he is. Therefore the media is going out of its way to find the "archetypal" black entrepreneur who comes from that ~25% of blacks who grew up in poverty. I don't really buy that argument, especially because being above the poverty line doesn't really speak to matters of wealth, class, and social mobility. I'm not saying any of this to diminish his success, I'm happy he's made it, but I think he's failed to recognize his (sadly) exceptional situation that doesn't really speak for the rest of the 75%. EDIT: cleaned up some grammar.

5thaccount 10y ago
> It looks to me like this guy ... assumed that all black people Thus is the heart of the matter - in reverse. I'm not trying to be pointed, but there is no other way to say it, so here it is: it is you who have assumed, not the author. This extrapolation of the one to the many is at the heart of modern identity politics. It is the core of what the article gets at - to be identified as a thing you have to fit the stereotype. And anything the one does is instantly assumed to be a comment on the many or, in some cases, the all, and any way the one varies from the many doesn't change the definition, it is merely discarded. I despair at this, I really do. Why do we breakdown the individual homo sapiens in a story to their base elements of race, gender, sexuality, religion, rather than celebrate their unqiueness? I had a 23andme DNA test years ago, and I shared my racial profile (X% Scndanavian, y% norther european etc) and someone made a comment about the last line: "100% 5thaccount - you are 100% you". I still think about that comment a lot. These elements that make us up don't define us, as we are not the sum of these elements the way water is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. We are our own selves, who are more than, or sometimes less than, the sum of these things. Rather than reduce our experiences to the net sum of these simple elements, I think we should praise the unique - an unique implies not generalisable to the many or all - outcomes we each create.
- jakelazaroff 10y ago
  We can still "celebrate uniqueness" while acknowledging that how we're treated by society is in large part determined by what groups we happen to belong to. For example: if you're black, you will likely receive a longer prison sentence than a white person who commits a similar crime[1]. Full stop. You're your own self, you can't be reduced to the sum of your race/gender/etc, and yet on solely on the basis of your skin color you'll be given a more severe punishment. The "but everyone's their own person" critique of identity politics doesn't hold water because regardless of whether or not I bucket myself, society will still bucket me and treat me thusly. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304463789858002 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304...
  - zachkatz 10y ago
    > The "but everyone's their own person" critique of identity politics doesn't hold water because regardless of whether or not I bucket myself, society will still bucket me and treat me thusly. Yes, but everyone is being bucketed by society. By their gender, skin color, age, height, hair type, personality type, on and on and on—there are so many buckets that eventually you reach the level of the individual. Everyone is in their own bucket.
    - neumann 10y ago
      Perhaps I am misunderstanding you and you are responding to a particular point, but the buckets are not equal! Your 'bucket' is not just based on your unique identity but on social categorizations which influence others and their (and their government's) policy that can have decades, and even centuries long influences on you and groups of people.
      - jakelazaroff 10y ago
        Exactly! Using the same example, if you're being sentenced for a crime, the race bucket matters much more than the hair color bucket. The study of how these buckets interact is called intersectionality.
whack 10y ago
> "It looks to me like this guy has taken his suburban upper class experience (he called his living situation "Huxtable-esque") and assumed that all black people who are living above the poverty line are somehow doing just as well as he is." That's exactly the point. He hasn't. He's pointedly trying to avoid generalizations, and he's frustrated by the fact that the media only trafficks in anecdotes and stories that fit the prevailing generalization. And these generalizations aren't even reflective of the vast majority of black experiences. We can quibble over numbers all day, but even with the numbers you cited, the majority of Blacks aren't living in poverty. The majority of Blacks don't have "zero or negative net worth." The Author's life and experience is just as reflective of the "Black experience", as that of someone who grows up poor in the inner-city. Imagine if a Swedish newspaper decides one day that they want their readers to better understand "how Americans think". And so they start following, interviewing and publishing stories featuring a number of Americans. They approach you one day, you agree to go along, and then after a few months, you're told that your story is getting dropped because you don't resemble the "archetypical American". You do some digging around and find that every single one of their stories feature White Trump voters living in Middle-America, struggling financially. And the only reason you weren't featured was because you were a Democrat who didn't fit the above labels. How would that make you feel? Yes, the middle-America Trump voter is indeed an American, but that doesn't make Democrats any less American either. Ultimately, we need our media and news sources to tell the story of all individuals and perspectives. Because the only way we can better understand the world, and each other, is if we are exposed to a wide variety of perspectives and experiences. There is a very real danger of people only being exposed to a single story, and starting to stereotype everyone they meet to fit into the mold of that one single story. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a...
- uncletaco 10y ago
  Was the author really pointedly trying to avoid generalizations? His last paragraph suggests, at least to me, that he's more interested in building a new narrative of the "archetypal black entrepreneur". > We have a responsibility to command an image of the ‘archetypal Black entrepreneur’ which represents the majority of us, and not just the minority. By realigning the story from stereotypes and struggles to the significant amount of positive movement in the Black entrepreneurial space — and acknowledging the fact that many of us come from backgrounds set up for success, we can better serve our collective advancement. Let’s move away from the emphasis on Black suffering, and make the celebration of Black excellence — the new normal. In my opinion he's looking to replace one generalization with another rather than do what you're suggesting and push people towards telling stories of all individuals and perspectives. He's also doing this by zeroing in on a single statistic, emphasizing it's inverse, and then using that to build a case that more black people are living in his situation than are living in poverty. Unfortunately I have a hard bias against anyone who pulls numbers out of context in order to build a narrative. It also troubles me that taking a deeper dive into his source's findings on the lived experience of many African Americans shows that the single statistic he made up (based on the inverse of the source's findings) is fairly misleading. In my opinion he did the same thing that Milo Yiannopoulos did on Bill Maher. Milo said trans people are disproportionately involved in more sex crimes than the rest of the population. He said this while arguing in favor of the North Carolina bathroom law. Yes, what he said was true, but he failed to mention that trans people are the victims in the vast majority of those cases. While we can "quibble over the numbers", I think its dishonest to take data and twist it to push a narrative -- no matter the point being made. That is in large part what frustrates me with this article -- I find it paints a dishonest picture of black wealth in order to push a generalization of black entrepreneurship favorable to the author's own lived experience. While I'm largely in agreement with what you -- and Adichi -- have to say with regards to the dangers of the single narrative, I am not at all convinced the author's post was written in that spirit, considering he feels we have a "responsibility to command an image of the 'archetypal Black entrepreneur'".

5thaccount 10y ago

> It looks to me like this guy ... assumed that all black people Thus is the heart of the matter - in reverse. I'm not trying to be pointed, but there is no other way to say it, so here it is: it is you who have assumed, not the author. This extrapolation of the one to the many is at the heart of modern identity politics. It is the core of what the article gets at - to be identified as a thing you have to fit the stereotype. And anything the one does is instantly assumed to be a comment on the many or, in some cases, the all, and any way the one varies from the many doesn't change the definition, it is merely discarded. I despair at this, I really do. Why do we breakdown the individual homo sapiens in a story to their base elements of race, gender, sexuality, religion, rather than celebrate their unqiueness? I had a 23andme DNA test years ago, and I shared my racial profile (X% Scndanavian, y% norther european etc) and someone made a comment about the last line: "100% 5thaccount - you are 100% you". I still think about that comment a lot. These elements that make us up don't define us, as we are not the sum of these elements the way water is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. We are our own selves, who are more than, or sometimes less than, the sum of these things. Rather than reduce our experiences to the net sum of these simple elements, I think we should praise the unique - an unique implies not generalisable to the many or all - outcomes we each create.

jakelazaroff 10y ago
We can still "celebrate uniqueness" while acknowledging that how we're treated by society is in large part determined by what groups we happen to belong to. For example: if you're black, you will likely receive a longer prison sentence than a white person who commits a similar crime[1]. Full stop. You're your own self, you can't be reduced to the sum of your race/gender/etc, and yet on solely on the basis of your skin color you'll be given a more severe punishment. The "but everyone's their own person" critique of identity politics doesn't hold water because regardless of whether or not I bucket myself, society will still bucket me and treat me thusly. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304463789858002 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304...
- zachkatz 10y ago
  > The "but everyone's their own person" critique of identity politics doesn't hold water because regardless of whether or not I bucket myself, society will still bucket me and treat me thusly. Yes, but everyone is being bucketed by society. By their gender, skin color, age, height, hair type, personality type, on and on and on—there are so many buckets that eventually you reach the level of the individual. Everyone is in their own bucket.
  - neumann 10y ago
    Perhaps I am misunderstanding you and you are responding to a particular point, but the buckets are not equal! Your 'bucket' is not just based on your unique identity but on social categorizations which influence others and their (and their government's) policy that can have decades, and even centuries long influences on you and groups of people.
    - jakelazaroff 10y ago
      Exactly! Using the same example, if you're being sentenced for a crime, the race bucket matters much more than the hair color bucket. The study of how these buckets interact is called intersectionality.

whack 10y ago

> "It looks to me like this guy has taken his suburban upper class experience (he called his living situation "Huxtable-esque") and assumed that all black people who are living above the poverty line are somehow doing just as well as he is." That's exactly the point. He hasn't. He's pointedly trying to avoid generalizations, and he's frustrated by the fact that the media only trafficks in anecdotes and stories that fit the prevailing generalization. And these generalizations aren't even reflective of the vast majority of black experiences. We can quibble over numbers all day, but even with the numbers you cited, the majority of Blacks aren't living in poverty. The majority of Blacks don't have "zero or negative net worth." The Author's life and experience is just as reflective of the "Black experience", as that of someone who grows up poor in the inner-city. Imagine if a Swedish newspaper decides one day that they want their readers to better understand "how Americans think". And so they start following, interviewing and publishing stories featuring a number of Americans. They approach you one day, you agree to go along, and then after a few months, you're told that your story is getting dropped because you don't resemble the "archetypical American". You do some digging around and find that every single one of their stories feature White Trump voters living in Middle-America, struggling financially. And the only reason you weren't featured was because you were a Democrat who didn't fit the above labels. How would that make you feel? Yes, the middle-America Trump voter is indeed an American, but that doesn't make Democrats any less American either. Ultimately, we need our media and news sources to tell the story of all individuals and perspectives. Because the only way we can better understand the world, and each other, is if we are exposed to a wide variety of perspectives and experiences. There is a very real danger of people only being exposed to a single story, and starting to stereotype everyone they meet to fit into the mold of that one single story. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a...

uncletaco 10y ago
Was the author really pointedly trying to avoid generalizations? His last paragraph suggests, at least to me, that he's more interested in building a new narrative of the "archetypal black entrepreneur". > We have a responsibility to command an image of the ‘archetypal Black entrepreneur’ which represents the majority of us, and not just the minority. By realigning the story from stereotypes and struggles to the significant amount of positive movement in the Black entrepreneurial space — and acknowledging the fact that many of us come from backgrounds set up for success, we can better serve our collective advancement. Let’s move away from the emphasis on Black suffering, and make the celebration of Black excellence — the new normal. In my opinion he's looking to replace one generalization with another rather than do what you're suggesting and push people towards telling stories of all individuals and perspectives. He's also doing this by zeroing in on a single statistic, emphasizing it's inverse, and then using that to build a case that more black people are living in his situation than are living in poverty. Unfortunately I have a hard bias against anyone who pulls numbers out of context in order to build a narrative. It also troubles me that taking a deeper dive into his source's findings on the lived experience of many African Americans shows that the single statistic he made up (based on the inverse of the source's findings) is fairly misleading. In my opinion he did the same thing that Milo Yiannopoulos did on Bill Maher. Milo said trans people are disproportionately involved in more sex crimes than the rest of the population. He said this while arguing in favor of the North Carolina bathroom law. Yes, what he said was true, but he failed to mention that trans people are the victims in the vast majority of those cases. While we can "quibble over the numbers", I think its dishonest to take data and twist it to push a narrative -- no matter the point being made. That is in large part what frustrates me with this article -- I find it paints a dishonest picture of black wealth in order to push a generalization of black entrepreneurship favorable to the author's own lived experience. While I'm largely in agreement with what you -- and Adichi -- have to say with regards to the dangers of the single narrative, I am not at all convinced the author's post was written in that spirit, considering he feels we have a "responsibility to command an image of the 'archetypal Black entrepreneur'".