Blacks to avoid spending money 3/31/2003

[Johonebesus]

That is actually a situationally dependent value judgement. If you take a hypothetical situation where racism is overt and rampant, that is a small price to pay for getting minorities a foot in the door (coworker suspicion is better than lifetime unemployment and endless doors closed to you because of your race). Conversely, if you take a hypothetical situation where racism is virtually nonexistent, then AA causes more problems than it solves.

Therefore, one's opinion on AA tends to depend on whether one believes there is still a serious racism problem in America. Blacks tend to believe there is, while most whites pooh-pooh it and say the blacks are just making it all up (although they're rarely blunt enough to come out and say it in those terms).

The problem is that racism in America is at neither extreme. It is not as rampant as many blacks claim, and generally not very overt, but it is still a real problem. Also, many of the problems faced by blacks are more about economics than racism. Too many blacks are too quick to blame whites for everything and refuse to take any responsibility. When the black kids on the bus are more rowdy, it's not because they are brought up to struggle against authority, it is because they were brought up to be contemptuous of white authority. When I was in highschool the black teachers rarely had any discipline problems, but the white teachers were never able to control the black students, and then the white students got angry and misbehaved, and chaos reigned. It was the same with the buses. Too many blacks are just angry at whites, and nothing will change that.

[Darth Wong]

The problem is that racism in America is at neither extreme. It is not as rampant as many blacks claim, and generally not very overt, but it is still a real problem.

Precisely, which is why AA should be adjusted (ie- weakened) but arguably not eliminated.

Also, many of the problems faced by blacks are more about economics than racism. Too many blacks are too quick to blame whites for everything and refuse to take any responsibility.

There are other problems:

1. Shitty role models. When you read the biographies of some of the early civil rights leaders, they struggled to get an education and to accomplish something. But government and social programs designed to "benefit inner-city kids" usually focus on sports programs rather than academics (some blacks actually feel this is a conspiracy to marginalize the black community; take that as you will). Ask most inner-city black kids for black role models and they will rattle off names like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Chris Rock, etc. The wealthiest black people are in show business (see Oprah Winfrey). This teaches precisely the wrong lesson, particularly since so many athletes and entertainers are absolutely horrible role models.
2. Racial solidarity. This may sound odd, but honestly, too much racial unity and racial pride can be a bad thing. It can also lead to many forms of "reverse racism". My parents came here from Hong Kong and Taiwan with nothing. My father showed up with his clothes and a hundred bucks. They worked their asses off to get somewhere, and there were no "Asian History Month" specials, "Asian Entertainment Network" specialty stations, or "Asian Achievement Week" publicity campaigns to egg them on, unlike all of the "black empowerment" campaigns that you see in print, on TV, etc. That kind of bullshit is a distraction from the truth, which is that you must be successful not for your race, but for yourself.
3. Reaction to persistent racism: like it or not, you don't need every single person to be a racist asshole in order to generate resentment in a black person. If he has a racist incident every month for ten years, this will have a huge effect on him, and he would only have to run into one racist for every hundred people he runs into.
4. Resentment for social background: it would be difficult to grow up in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood composed mostly of blacks, and then drive out to a posh, wealthy suburb composed almost entirely of whites without feeling resentment and believing that the divide is racial. The raw racial divide of a large American city can be simply stunning. Try driving from downtown Detroit to one of the affluent suburbs to see what I mean. You've got to be kidding yourself if you think kids who grow up in this situation won't develop a psychological connection.

Too many blacks are just angry at whites, and nothing will change that.

Defeatism. A sincere government drive to clean up inner-city crime and improve inner-city schools would work wonders, but it ain't going to happen because America currently labours under the dogma that smaller government is ALWAYS better government, so governments do the bare minimum (and maybe not even that). Simply claiming that they're intrinsically set this way and would be unresponsive to any remedial efforts is not fair.

[Johonebesus]

There are other problems:

1. Shitty role models. When you read the biographies of some of the early civil rights leaders, they struggled to get an education and to accomplish something. But government and social programs designed to "benefit inner-city kids" usually focus on sports programs rather than academics (some blacks actually feel this is a conspiracy to marginalize the black community; take that as you will). Ask most inner-city black kids for black role models and they will rattle off names like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Chris Rock, etc. The wealthiest black people are in show business (see Oprah Winfrey). This teaches precisely the wrong lesson, particularly since so many athletes and entertainers are absolutely horrible role models.
2. Racial solidarity. This may sound odd, but honestly, too much racial unity and racial pride can be a bad thing. It can also lead to many forms of "reverse racism". My parents came here from Hong Kong and Taiwan with nothing. My father showed up with his clothes and a hundred bucks. They worked their asses off to get somewhere, and there were no "Asian History Month" specials, "Asian Entertainment Network" specialty stations, or "Asian Achievement Week" publicity campaigns to egg them on, unlike all of the "black empowerment" campaigns that you see in print, on TV, etc. That kind of bullshit is a distraction from the truth, which is that you must be successful not for your race, but for yourself.
3. Reaction to persistent racism: like it or not, you don't need every single person to be a racist asshole in order to generate resentment in a black person. If he has a racist incident every month for ten years, this will have a huge effect on him, and he would only have to run into one racist for every hundred people he runs into.

All of that is very true.

4. Resentment for social background: it would be difficult to grow up in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood composed mostly of blacks, and then drive out to a posh, wealthy suburb composed almost entirely of whites without feeling resentment and believing that the divide is racial. The raw racial divide of a large American city can be simply stunning. Try driving from downtown Detroit to one of the affluent suburbs to see what I mean. You've got to be kidding yourself if you think kids who grow up in this situation won't develop a psychological connection.

There is truth in what you are saying, but in many places the economic divide is not so obviously racist. In many towns it is very easy to find neighborhoods which are just as poor as any innercity ghetto, but are filled with whites. In more rural areas you often have poor blacks and whites mixed in together. Even in these areas the blacks wll insist that they are consistently oppressed by white society, even when the poorest waifs running around in filthy rags are white. It's not just innercity kids who learn to blame white racism for all woes, real or imagined.

Too many blacks are just angry at whites, and nothing will change that.

Defeatism. A sincere government drive to clean up inner-city crime and improve inner-city schools would work wonders, but it ain't going to happen because America currently labours under the dogma that smaller government is ALWAYS better government, so governments do the bare minimum (and maybe not even that). Simply claiming that they're intrinsically set this way and would be unresponsive to any remedial efforts is not fair.

I agree that something could be done to help the economic problems suffered by blacks, but it is not going to happen. And what do you think will be the reaction when police forces really crack down on inner-city crime, when white officers come in and arrest and incarcerate black criminals? When police ignore crime, they are racist, but if they arrest too many blacks, they are racist. I never said that blacks are intrinsically set to be poor or some such, but black culture, through some of the ways you mentioned, is set up to engender and perpetuate a resentment against whites. Such resentment can be bolstered by real experience, but it does not need such experience to exist. Government alone cannot solve all the problems (though it could do a whole lot of good), and for many blacks, blaming white society is just too big a crutch to put down.

[The Yosemite Bear]

I was just remembering a discussion I had about 10 years ago with a co-worker who seriously believed that htere was a Jewish led, White conspiracy to keep "His people Down". I looked at him, and said, Ok, I just want to know why they forgot to give me my cut of the action then.

ahh, nice being part of the vanishing blue collar, salt of the earth types.

[Ignorant twit]

[Detroit Rant]

Defeatism. A sincere government drive to clean up inner-city crime and improve inner-city schools would work wonders, but it ain't going to happen because America currently labours under the dogma that smaller government is ALWAYS better government, so governments do the bare minimum (and maybe not even that). Simply claiming that they're intrinsically set this way and would be unresponsive to any remedial efforts is not fair.

It has been tried. Back in the day Detroit had the STRESS units, undercover cops whose job it was to crack down on crime. Granted they were heavy handed, by all accounts I've heard from family they were working. Coleman Young campaigned on eliminating the STRESS units, his alternative crime reduction plan? Ask the criminals to rob people on the other side of 8 mile (local boundary line)

Likewise the Detroit public school systems have been the laughingstock of Michigan schools for years. While the rest of Michigan was watching school performance go up and everyone was watching funding increases across the board, excepting a few dismally rich suburbs with unreal property values; Detroit public schools were still a den of cooked books, piss idiot tenured teachers, and other idioacy with a whopping 29.7% GRADUATION rate. The school board can't be assed to actually accomplish anything -not even a working fiscal budget - and after years of failure however you look at it, the governor took over the school district in a move that is not exactly legal. It was a bipartisan effort, with the backing of the black democrat mayor (who appointed 6 of the 7 new reform board members).

And the black community in Detroit pissed and moaned about this being "racist", "fascist", and accuse the mayor of "licking whitey's boots". I mean yes it sucks that you have to terminate voting rights, but come on they've had decades to elect a responsible school board that could get the job done. No working alternative, no promises to work towards bettering the school district, just plain old political demagogery to keep their asses in charge - that was was the plan of the outgoing schoolboard.

The problem with the inner cities is more than just sincere efforts to take down crime and improve schools. It is that places like Detroit keep going in a vicious cycle. The schools and crime levels went to pot decades ago. The educated top of the population - both black and white - got the hell out. So the school district got worse, the people who went through it came out uneducated with zip for critical thinking skills. At this point you start having businesses that can't find people with the requisite skills in the city ... so they get the hell out of Detroit for the suburbs where a good pool of educated workers reside and where new employees want to live. So any new educated people move out to follow the job market. This makes the labor pool worse so more businesses leave, the school district gets worse, and the electorate is a mass of people who flunked out of high school. Yes that is generalizing, but there is WAAY too much truth to it.

Places like Detroit have reached the point where the electorate cannot be counted on to vote compotent people into elected offices, they scream "racism" at ANYTHING that smacks of accountability, and any black leader who doesn't pay at least lip service to their position is torn up and down in the public eye. Those who DO see Detroits glaring problems tend to get the hell out, rather than stay and try to fix it against opposition - and I can't say that I blame them.

Sometimes I wonder if we'd be further ahead to burn the city down and build a new community over the rubble ... and if that would be cheaper than dealing with the hellhole that is Detroit. But then I'm from the forsaken hinterlands of Michigan so I'm not exactly objective.

[/Detroit Rant]

I'd be far less leary of Affirmative Action if its supporters would offer clear objective measures specifying when it is "successful" enough to be needed no longer. People say it is a situational judgement, fine, can anyone offer me objective standards of when the net benifits no longer outweigh the net costs?

edited for cosmetics

[RedImperator]

Defeatism. A sincere government drive to clean up inner-city crime and improve inner-city schools would work wonders, but it ain't going to happen because America currently labours under the dogma that smaller government is ALWAYS better government, so governments do the bare minimum (and maybe not even that). Simply claiming that they're intrinsically set this way and would be unresponsive to any remedial efforts is not fair.

The inner cities have plenty of government. They're practically feifdoms of whichever party machine is running that particular city and a host of Federal agencies. For the poorest residents of any major city, their entire existence is in the hands of bureaucrats who couldn't give two shits about them. The cities don't need MORE government, they need MORE EFFECTIVE government. I'm a libertarian, so I think smaller is more effective. If you can make a case for a larger government in the cities that does the job better than the current one, tell me about it.

The first and simplest way to improve the cities is to end the disaster known as the War on Drugs. The majority of drug users are suburban whites, but the supply chain for illegal drugs runs through the inner cities. That won't deal with the problem of drug USE in the inner city (though putting the dealers operating on their street corners out of business would certainly help), but throwing people in jail for fucking up their own lives isn't dealing with it either. The inner cities would still be poor, but they wouldn't be open war zones, and it would be a first step towards brining legitimate businesses back.

The second way is to reform education. That means paying teachers like professionals, while at the same time breaking the backs of the unions if they continue to protect incompetence. The seniority system is particularly awful: talented young teachers are paid less and given less protection than incompetent old timers. The tunrover rate for teachers in the cities is something like 50% within the first five years, and many of them are the ones who started out the most dedicated and talented. Imagine what would happen to engineering if 50% of all new engineers, the majority of them amongst the most talented young engineers, quit after five years. There are a number of causes for this, but an oft-cited reason is that teachers have had nearly all control over cirriculum and classroom discipline stripped away from them (not surprising when schools face lawsuits for suspending students) while at the same time "progressive" teaching has made them responsible for students' social development as well as their intellectual development, and placed the onus entirely on the teacher to "inspire" students to want to learn, rather than responsibility on the students to learn or face career options restricted to "counter, drive-in, or grill". Standardized testing moves control over cirriculum into the hands of state and Federal bureaucrats and encourages teachers to teach to the test (I had an entire eighth grade class that was supposed to be about literature which instead taught us how to beat the NJEWT) rather than teach their subject and risk missing something the test writers thought was important. Educational policy in America is, frankly, FUBAR, and however bad it is on average, you can count on it being worse in the cities.

The third thing that needs to be done is that the cities need to be places people want to live in again. Effective public transportation and city government that doesn't scare away the middle class is essential. The other essential is out of the cities' hands--people have to get sick of the suburbs. Thanks to the McDonaldization of America, the suburbs are getting so congested and soulless that this seems to be happening. It's up to the cities not to blow this opportunity.