9 ms·

I really think these articles are important to read. I still think about and reference Ta-nehisi Coats' article "the case for reparations" https://www.theatlant

I really think these articles are important to read. I still think about and reference Ta-nehisi Coats' article "the case for reparations" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas... He makes a strong point. Now, I'm a white guy, my father owned a small business after selling his scanning electron microscope company to a bigger player. He paid for my University education outright including rent. I had to work for any spending money I wanted, but I basically had a free ride into my current programming job. A poor black kid living in a high-violent-crime area who is the child of a minimum-wage-working single mother, is not going to have the same chances. If he gets caught underage by cops with a six pack of beers or a jar of mixed hard-alchohol stolen from a liquor cabinet, or good forbid enough marijuana for a joint, he's not going to be able to rely on his parents' to hire the lawyer to get those charges removed. This is (according to this article and others) traceable in a large part back to slavery. But it also comes from gererational poverty. Lack of parental resources leading to malnutrition, which leads to inattention in school, parental long hours at work leads to a lack of attention and corrective feedback. Or the parents are addicted to something and modelling bad behavior to begin with. The child in these cases starts innocent and realistically has an infantessemal chance of success. The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. Free breakfast and lunch for kids, raise minimum wage, etc... The Palmer Luckey's of the world have to catch on to just how fucking privileged they are as middle class white kids. These articles don't deserve to be rejected outright under "bias" they're based on real solid research.

teslabox 9y ago
> The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. It'd be even better to end institutionalized racism, institute a mass pardon program, and pay reparations to the victims of Nixon's stupid escalation of the war on plants: At the time [1994], I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpe... edit: John Taylor Gatto [1] points out in one of his books that black families were pretty stable post-civil-war, until the governments started sending black men to prison for teh ganja. Children do better when they have a father around. [1] https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/ https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/
- alexc05 9y ago
  I miss-wrote. It sounded like I thought there was ONE solution required. Clearly you have a point and there is far more to the story and there isn't any reason I can think of why you wouldn't be able to do both of these and more.
Banthum 9y ago
You had 'intact family privilege' not white privilege. 'Generational poverty' explanation fails since it didn't seem to be a big issue for Vietnamese boat people, Iranian refugees, Cubans, or various other very poor minorities who succeeded. 'The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty.' After 60 years of that, no serious improvement. And huge losses in intact family privilege. Black illegitimacy went from 25% to 70%. Not in spite of these guilt-easing handout programs - but because of them. They discourage intact families. Like Saudi oil money or giving cash to a meth addict, the free funds paradoxically harm the recipient by reinforcing their problems permanently while easing the symptoms only temporarily.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  It's a good thing it was such a nice tidy experiment, with perfectly designed programs providing assistance and no other factors in play at all.
- alexc05 9y ago
  Well, not precisely, he was a single dad as well. But I take your point, along with another commenter who says "mass pardon program" (which one would expect to have the effect of bringing some fathers home) Maybe it's a case of yes, and. I'm certainly a little embarrassed for making it sound like I knew one solution would fix it. I definitely meant "among other things" Overall the situation is pretty fucked. There will have to be more than one solution all pointing towards the same goal. I don't agree that there has been 60 years of a failed taxation experiment. In fact from the 30's to the 80's the middle class grew massively which was a period of high taxation, while from about '85 to now, under voodoo trickle down, we've seen massive GDP growth but virtually none of those gains going to the middle class. We really need to increase the amount of support in the social network.
- curun1r 9y ago
  My mother is a child psychologist who works primarily with victims of crime and, overwhelmingly, African-Americans. She's come to the conclusion that there are specific parenting faults that you find in the African-American population that you don't find in other similarly-impoverished populations and she believes that they're a legacy of slavery. Parenting abilities/tendencies/techniques are all passed down through the generations. We, as humans, learn our parenting by being parented. But, too often during slavery, this chain was broken. Children were ripped away from their parents and that accumulation of parenting practice was lost. Since involved parents are the single biggest determining factor in educational outcomes and education is the surest way out of poverty, this legacy of slavery rings the most true to me as the explanation for why African-Americans find it so much harder to break out of the cycle of poverty than other minority groups. Perhaps the best group to compare with are more recent immigrants from Africa. I have a number of friends who's parents came to the US from Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia. They had very little when they arrived here and have the same skin color which is purported to be such a disadvantage to the African-American population. And while they've universally told me that they have experienced discrimination and prejudice, they've also not had much difficulty lifting themselves out of poverty by the second generation.
phil21 9y ago
> If he gets caught underage by cops with a six pack of beers or a jar of mixed hard-alchohol stolen from a liquor cabinet, or good forbid enough marijuana for a joint, he's not going to be able to rely on his parents' to hire the lawyer to get those charges removed. I'm curious if you've ever lived in these areas and had friends that fit the description of your comment. I think you'll find that inner city kids get just as many breaks as suburban white kids. You'd have a point if it was the black ghetto kid in the suburbs being caught at a party - but within the city environment absolutely no way. The kids who got in trouble for that stuff growing up were on their 14th chance. I lived in such a neighborhood and had local friends growing up. It took a lot to get arrested for something as simple as a joint. You were generally well known as a troublemaker by then, and rightfully so. The typical response to those issues was dumping out the liquor/drugs and telling the kid to go home unless he was a known problem, in which case yeah - the cops used broken window policing to get them off the streets.
- sprafa 9y ago
  Inner city kids have as many chances as suburban white kids ? What city is this?
chongli 9y ago
It's a red queen's race. On the one hand you can give free lunches to kids who don't have enough to eat. You put together a volunteer after-school study group to help the kids get their grades up. Meanwhile, the rich kid has private tutors coaching him on SAT prep for several years, he belongs to multiple extracurricular clubs, maybe he gets a summer internship at a Cravath System style law firm or a job as a page in Washington, maybe he wins a medal at the International Math Olympiad... We're not going to solve inequality by nudging people up from the bottom. We've gotta tackle the elephant in the room: capital pays more and capital is easier to move around than labour. That's all there is to it.

teslabox 9y ago

> The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. It'd be even better to end institutionalized racism, institute a mass pardon program, and pay reparations to the victims of Nixon's stupid escalation of the war on plants: At the time [1994], I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpe... edit: John Taylor Gatto [1] points out in one of his books that black families were pretty stable post-civil-war, until the governments started sending black men to prison for teh ganja. Children do better when they have a father around. [1] https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/ https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/

alexc05 9y ago
I miss-wrote. It sounded like I thought there was ONE solution required. Clearly you have a point and there is far more to the story and there isn't any reason I can think of why you wouldn't be able to do both of these and more.

Banthum 9y ago

You had 'intact family privilege' not white privilege. 'Generational poverty' explanation fails since it didn't seem to be a big issue for Vietnamese boat people, Iranian refugees, Cubans, or various other very poor minorities who succeeded. 'The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty.' After 60 years of that, no serious improvement. And huge losses in intact family privilege. Black illegitimacy went from 25% to 70%. Not in spite of these guilt-easing handout programs - but because of them. They discourage intact families. Like Saudi oil money or giving cash to a meth addict, the free funds paradoxically harm the recipient by reinforcing their problems permanently while easing the symptoms only temporarily.

maxerickson 9y ago
It's a good thing it was such a nice tidy experiment, with perfectly designed programs providing assistance and no other factors in play at all.
alexc05 9y ago
Well, not precisely, he was a single dad as well. But I take your point, along with another commenter who says "mass pardon program" (which one would expect to have the effect of bringing some fathers home) Maybe it's a case of yes, and. I'm certainly a little embarrassed for making it sound like I knew one solution would fix it. I definitely meant "among other things" Overall the situation is pretty fucked. There will have to be more than one solution all pointing towards the same goal. I don't agree that there has been 60 years of a failed taxation experiment. In fact from the 30's to the 80's the middle class grew massively which was a period of high taxation, while from about '85 to now, under voodoo trickle down, we've seen massive GDP growth but virtually none of those gains going to the middle class. We really need to increase the amount of support in the social network.
curun1r 9y ago
My mother is a child psychologist who works primarily with victims of crime and, overwhelmingly, African-Americans. She's come to the conclusion that there are specific parenting faults that you find in the African-American population that you don't find in other similarly-impoverished populations and she believes that they're a legacy of slavery. Parenting abilities/tendencies/techniques are all passed down through the generations. We, as humans, learn our parenting by being parented. But, too often during slavery, this chain was broken. Children were ripped away from their parents and that accumulation of parenting practice was lost. Since involved parents are the single biggest determining factor in educational outcomes and education is the surest way out of poverty, this legacy of slavery rings the most true to me as the explanation for why African-Americans find it so much harder to break out of the cycle of poverty than other minority groups. Perhaps the best group to compare with are more recent immigrants from Africa. I have a number of friends who's parents came to the US from Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia. They had very little when they arrived here and have the same skin color which is purported to be such a disadvantage to the African-American population. And while they've universally told me that they have experienced discrimination and prejudice, they've also not had much difficulty lifting themselves out of poverty by the second generation.

phil21 9y ago

> If he gets caught underage by cops with a six pack of beers or a jar of mixed hard-alchohol stolen from a liquor cabinet, or good forbid enough marijuana for a joint, he's not going to be able to rely on his parents' to hire the lawyer to get those charges removed. I'm curious if you've ever lived in these areas and had friends that fit the description of your comment. I think you'll find that inner city kids get just as many breaks as suburban white kids. You'd have a point if it was the black ghetto kid in the suburbs being caught at a party - but within the city environment absolutely no way. The kids who got in trouble for that stuff growing up were on their 14th chance. I lived in such a neighborhood and had local friends growing up. It took a lot to get arrested for something as simple as a joint. You were generally well known as a troublemaker by then, and rightfully so. The typical response to those issues was dumping out the liquor/drugs and telling the kid to go home unless he was a known problem, in which case yeah - the cops used broken window policing to get them off the streets.

sprafa 9y ago
Inner city kids have as many chances as suburban white kids ? What city is this?

chongli 9y ago

It's a red queen's race. On the one hand you can give free lunches to kids who don't have enough to eat. You put together a volunteer after-school study group to help the kids get their grades up. Meanwhile, the rich kid has private tutors coaching him on SAT prep for several years, he belongs to multiple extracurricular clubs, maybe he gets a summer internship at a Cravath System style law firm or a job as a page in Washington, maybe he wins a medal at the International Math Olympiad... We're not going to solve inequality by nudging people up from the bottom. We've gotta tackle the elephant in the room: capital pays more and capital is easier to move around than labour. That's all there is to it.