Aripyanfar wrote:
When the slaves were freed, the white population had an astronomical head start on the black population overall in terms of asset accrual. Such a large head start that blacks are still catching up. The biggest determinant of educational achievement, health, welfare, employability, further wealth accrual and lateness of the average birth of the first child is determined by an individual's parent's assets.
That difference was not as astronomical as you've likely been lead to believe, and should have been largely erased over the time since. There are other factors involved.
Quote:
Given the same start, the same number of individual blacks "succeed" in life as whites, and the same number of blacks individuals "fail" at life.
I'd be curious if you have a cite for that, because I don't think that's exactly correct. My understanding is that when blacks and whites who are middle class or better are compared, the outcomes are similar. But when we look at the poor and lower end of the working class, blacks do not gain as much ground over time statistically as whites.
This should not be the case, especially given the removal of opportunity blocking/limiting structures like segregation 40-50 years ago. When we look at this, conservatives and liberals give two different explanations:
Liberals believe that there is still some institutionalized racism which prevents black people from advancing, so we need racially targeted social programs to balance that out.
Conservatives believe that the very social programs enacted by the left to help poor black people actually prevents them from advancing, and if we eliminated them, they'd be better off in the long run.
Which is true is a subject of debate, of course. But the data fits the Conservative explanation better. If institutionalized racism was the culprit we'd expect to see greater limits on the top end of the economic spectrum. But what we're seeing is that once a black family reaches a certain level of prosperity they succeed normally, but those still at a low enough economic level to qualify for government "help" succeed at a lower rate. Obviously, it's not as simple as that. We'd have to also take into account historical migrations of black populations from rural communities into inner cities (ghettoisation) as well, which dramatically reduces the opportunities for those "stuck" living in areas in which there are not enough jobs for the numbers. Um... We'd also have to look at how that happened, given that blacks were encouraged during the civil rights movement to move into more highly populated areas in order to increase their representation in congress.
Everyone loves to toss around assumptions about motive, and examine alleged code words and phrases looking for signs which they can interpret as racism. But to me, we ought to look at actual actions, legislation, and policies, and what effects we can see have resulted from them. Joph loves to talk about things like the "Southern Strategy" as though the phrase itself has meaning and weight. But when pressed to give examples of actual legislation or executive action clearly aimed at unfair/unequal treatment of people based on their race, he balks. It's easy to point to a word or phrase and insist that it has some secret meaning. It's easy precisely because when the other guy insists that it doesn't mean that, you can also just say he's lying to cover up the secret meaning. But that very ease should give us pause if we want to rationally address this issue.
We should look at actions, not words. And when we look at the actions and assess them by objective racial standards, it's hard not to see that the policies of the left and of the Democratic party have clearly not only been racially aligned, but in some cases have backfired and actually *hurt* those they intended to help. The GOPs position is that we should treat everyone equally under the law and allow time and social progress to change everything else. But the Dems don't want that. They seem to want to make race an issue and press for "racially aware" laws in some claimed attempt to make change happen faster. But the biggest effect of those laws seem to be to create yet more differences which can be pointed to in order to support the need for yet more laws.
It's a self fulfilling and IMO ultimately harmful policy. What's wrong with actually treating people equally under the law? Shouldn't that be our objective? Judge people, not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character? What is wrong with that?
Edited, Jul 30th 2010 5:46pm by gbaji