5 ms·

I also believe this is what African Americans are still experiencing, while maybe slavery was long ago to have been "worked out" of the genes, it was roughly ju

• wycs 8y ago
  If this is your explanation for disparate outcomes, it does not strike me as a good one. No population has gone through more stress than post-war Jewish immigrants yet their children were the most successful cohort in America. Chinese immigrants were subjected to horrific racism and yet they are far more successful than gentile whites on average. Whatever the explanation, Lysenkoist propagation of intergenerational trama is unlikely to be correct, though it may prove politically expedient.
  • xstartup 8y ago
    Jewish at least had an opportunity to migrate to other places. European atrocities in South Asia, for example, the engineered famine affected 40 million lives and 5 million dead.
  • lifeformed 8y ago
    The trauma olympics isn't usually a fruitful discussion, but I think it's worth pointing out that Holocaust survivors were from a single generation or two, while slavery in America existed for 240 years, so it might not be a fair comparison. And the level of racism Chinese immigrants faced is still of a much lower intensity than black Americans faced. I mean, even if you don't count the first 240 years of slavery, there's still the next hundred years of weekly extrajudicial executions in public by mobs.
    • civilitty 8y ago
      Hell, the whole "hard working" Asians stereotype was a racist attempt to discredit criticisms of racism towards African Americans. "Hey, look! We're not racist! If the blacks were as hard working as the yellows we wouldn't have a problem!" was literally their argument.
      • ThrowawayR2 8y ago
        > Hell, the whole "hard working" Asians stereotype was a racist attempt to discredit criticisms of racism towards African Americans. Did you really just attempt to discredit the rather well documented history of industriousness of Asians and Asian-American immigrants in particular in order to further your political narrative?
        • jonnybgood 8y ago
          I think you’re missing their point. People of all races are hard working. That should go without saying. To say a whole race of people are not hard working is nothing more than a form of racism.
    • lopmotr 8y ago
      Jews have been persecuted for a thousand years [1]! They whole reason for the Jewish diaspora was they kept getting kicked out of countries wherever they settled. Even where they were temporarily tolerated, they were still often discriminated against. Antisemitism wasn't just a Nazi thing, it was global and lasted far longer than slavery. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany
      • lifeformed 8y ago
        I know, but I was responding to the claim that "no population has gone through more stress than post-war Jews" and it being a counterexample to American slavery. It's a difficult thing to compare as it's essentially an apples-to-oranges comparison.
  • spraak 8y ago
    > No population has gone through more stress than post-war Jewish immigrants yet their children were the most successful cohort in America. That's really ignorant. How can you defend this viewpoint? Jewish immigrants were many levels better off than black Americans.
• aphextron 8y ago
  >while maybe slavery was long ago to have been "worked out" of the genes, it was roughly just two or three generations ago that there was segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynchings etc. Slavery in the US was only two human lifetimes ago. My grandfather has living memory of older relatives who were born slaves. And then white people who's grandparents were homesteaders, farmers, or small business owners wonder why black people today have no wealth.
  • patrickg_zill 8y ago
    In the 1920s or so, black men were 24% self employed or had their own small business. Now it is a lot less than that. What exactly happened is up for debate but the results are certainly sad.
    • adamsea 8y ago
      Desegregation and no more lynchings (which was prevalent enough it was basically domestic terrorism) is sad?
    • lopmotr 8y ago
      Can you show where that stat came from? 24% seems so high that it must be reflecting some major obvious phenomenon. Was there a big class of jobs that doesn't exist anymore? Were a quarter of white men self employed too? Was discrimination was so great that self-employment was a far better way to get work? Is that 24% of black men or working black men, or working-age black men? The statistic on its own leave so much confusion. Maybe self-employed meant itinerant farm laborer? It might not be so sad for that to stop existing.
    • jonnybgood 8y ago
      I would believe it and I also believe the decline was due to racism. Southern racists didn’t like seeing prosperous black people. Just look at what happened to Rosewood: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre
    • graeme 8y ago
      Was the small business rate more common for all ethnicities back then? Without context this stat doesn't really tell us much. Mass employment as employees is a relatively new phenomenom.
• TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  Jim Crow, segregation and lynchings were zero generations ago for a lot of people. It's easy to forget because so many of the leaders of the civil rights movement died early of unnatural causes, but someone who was 18 when the Civil Rights Act was passed is now only 72.
• code_duck 8y ago
  The past 50 years have not been so great for African American families either.
• SamReidHughes 8y ago
  It's a lot of fun to form beliefs in the absence of data.
  • ljf 8y ago
    Interesting you replied to this and not the parent?
    • always_good 8y ago
      Seems appropriate because it applies up the whole comment chain. And if you're going to try and draw conclusions, then come out and say it instead of noncommittally leaving it up to our imagination.
  • spraak 8y ago
    It's a lot of fun to assume. /s How do you know I haven't formed this view based on data? You're assuming I don't have any data.
    • SamReidHughes 8y ago
      Because if you had data you'd be like, "here's the data." If your guess is right, we'd see differences in the effects of Jim Crow depending on what part of the country people lived in. Well, do we? I don't know.
      • spraak 8y ago
        > we'd see differences in the effects of Jim Crow depending on what part of the country people lived in That's one, very obtuse hypothesis.
• lopmotr 8y ago
  When you choose your opinions so that they conform to popular politics, you're at risk of getting contorted into contradictions just to keep having the "right" beliefs. This research says stress causes genetic differences in subsequent generations. So if it's the cause of modern black poverty and violence, it would mean black people are genetically susceptible to being poor and violent. If you consider poverty and violence as inferior qualities, then it says black people are genetically inferior to white people, which is so incompatible with popular culture that you'll be be ostracized for even mentioning the idea!
  • spraak 8y ago
    I think you're reaching too far there
    • lopmotr 8y ago
      Sorry for assuming your motivation. Do you agree with my conclusion about blacks being genetically inferior? Is there a mistake in my logic? Perhaps being RNA, not DNA makes it not quite the same thing?
      • owebmaster 8y ago
        If the main objective of DNA and genes is to spread itself, black people still have some obvious genetics advantage, historically. And it doesn't seem to be changing, much the opposite.