Comment by ausjke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ausjke | Hacker News Reader

Why blacks are not doing well?

Because they were from Africa, but new immigrants from Africa came to US earn a pretty decent life quickly than those have been here centuries ago.

Because they're minority, but other minorities such as the Jews and Asians are working hard and earning a decent life here.

Because of less chance to get education, but you have affirmative action that you can get into decent college at a huge discount as far as scores go. Also so many financial support for economically disadvantaged families.

Because of unfair tax system, election system... those seem not the key reason to me too.

I might be missing something else.

I think it's probably more of a culture thing, that favors education, hard working, loyal to family, etc. Without that, the civil rights law or various diversity initiatives can only help that much. The black community needs to address that gradually and it's the only way to fix the "poor neighborhood" for good.

In where I live, the elected democratic officers decided to bridge the poor community with "rich" community by building government-sponsored condos right next to or in the middle of up-middle-class communities,the result is that people move out and the house price drops, does not look like a right fix to me.

Yes: you are missing the history of the United States. This was most of the point of the article: Black people disproportionately live in poverty (not to mention the history of discrimination in this country), and the effects of living in poverty are extremely harmful. Your post seems to be missing the history of human slavery in the United States, the subsequent history of discrimination, and the conditions it created whose effects and legacy are still very strong today. You can't control for these factors by comparing to other minority immigrant groups!!

One can argue that there are negative cultural effects, but it's a chicken-and-egg issue because history has created conditions for cultures of e.g. gangs and violence to arise. Similarly, the solution must address both the chicken and the egg. Your comment about "the black community needs to address" black culture, while perhaps well-intentioned, is the sort of argument historically commonly used by powerful whites to justify a "not my problem" philosophy toward black poverty and living conditions that create a negative culture.

How does one create a culture that favors education when inner-city schools provide useless educations and are filled with gang violence, when there is little hope of using education for good? How does one create a "hard working" culture when the best "jobs" that seem realistically available are selling drugs, or when hard work fails to be rewarded due to discrimination? How does one create a culture of "loyal to family" when 73% of black children live in single-parent households (compared to 25% of white children)? (source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/... )

All I can do in closing is suggest that, if you really want to understand your question "why are blacks not doing well", you should read some history, studies/statistics, and accounts of what life is currently like for blacks in the US.

(Edited to change the source of the data.)

I live in a ~70% black neighborhood in NYC and the crack epidemic[0] of the late 80s into the 90s really destroyed a lot of the healthy culture that americans of african descent cherished through the 60s and 70s. Older guys on my block describe it like a warzone and, while I'm sure slightly hyperbolic, really took its toll on everyone there. There's so many factors here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic

> Your comment about "the black community needs to address" black culture, while perhaps well-intentioned, is the sort of argument historically commonly used by powerful whites to justify a "not my problem" philosophy toward black poverty and living conditions that create a negative culture.

This is a terrible argument. Statements are not automatically false because awful people agree with them. If Hitler thinks 2+2=4, decent people are not forced to choose 3 or 5.

It seems to me that only black people can change black culture. Who else would do it? How?

It was not an argument, just a comment. But to address your second comment, part of the point of my post is that people outside the black community can do many things to improve the conditions that lead to a negative culture (which is not necessarily about being black but more common to poverty broadly): provide better schools, better housing options, decrease discrimination of all forms, better/fairer policing, replace the war on drugs with a fight against addiction, ...

Opportunity doesn't cure everything. If you take two people who both have the opportunity to earn the same income, that doesn't equate to the same standard of living. In particular, blacks (and other minorities) have dramatically lower levels of savings. This has real world consequences - if you have family members with savings, you have opportunities to take risks and fail. You have family members that can loan you money if times get rough rather than have to deal with payday loans, credit cards, or other high interest/high risk sources. You may feel more able to start your own business, knowing that if you fail there are family members who could take you in for a bit. The consequences run far deeper than just these examples.

The ability to fail, safely. The ability to take positive risks can restore hope that those risks will pay off.

That might be an ingredient to successfully breaking the negative aspects the culture of poverty. Anyone who is big on BIG as a solution is probably seeing it from this angle.

I think it's mostly cultural. I don't know of any other culture where the idea of shunning success is so widespread. People are made fun of for "acting white", studying, or shunned for "not being black".

Very true, same ideology was/is prevalent among the lower class in certain parts of England. (See Theodore Dalrymple)

Yes slavery and unfairly treated in the past combined are hurting blacks very much, but we can't go back and change history. My point is that new immigrants came here with nothing can earn a decent life with hard working , put education first etc, why local blacks can not reboot themselves gradually over these years? I am just thinking without a grass root level from within to change the culture, it will be very difficult to better the situation.

Especially in the hi-tech era, without proper education, the only thing left will be extreme riot, or live on food stamp for life.

I have been thinking about adopting a black kid myself, to give him/her the best education possible and the culture I believe in, I may do that sometime.

> I have been thinking about adopting a black kid myself, to give him/her the best education possible and the culture I believe in, I may do that sometime.

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

The discrimination against other minorities is nothing like the discrimination blacks have faced and still face. I am white and I got half asian kids, but when I talk to a white mom with half black kids, the kind of stuff her kids has to deal with is nothing like what I deal with. Or rather I don't deal with anything.

Affirmative action can't compensate, when most of your success in life depends on what happens the early years of your life. If you spend all your first years in shitty schools, shitty preschool and shitty neighborhoods, some late in life Affirmative action isn't going to make any difference.

"I might be missing something else."

The whole "centuries of brutal slavery" thing is an obvious and rather curious omission in your list.

Also, the hundred years of overt discrimination and decades of covert discrimination that followed that.

The original blacks who came to the US were not immigrants, they were slaves. For one thing there might be a bias in immigrants that doesn't apply to slaves, like having a certain education or wealth (immigrating tends to cost money). And immigrants are free to buy books, slaves presumably weren't.

I agree it is probably a culture thing, but society as a whole created that culture.

People often disregard this very important point. The original free blacks of the north did quite well. Noticeably better than the Irish e.g. Black culture in the north got destroyed when the large migration of former slaves migrated north. They took with them a bad culture. Slaves learn quickly e.g. that putting in an extra effort is never good for you. It doesn't pay of.

Adam Smith remarked hundreds of years ago how slave labour is very inefficient because nobody works efficient or hard when they don't do it out of free will and their own benefit but rather to the benefit of others. Roman agriculture suffered immensely for this in the latter years as slave estates started taking over.

So black in the south had grown up over generations in a culture which did not reward hard work and which actively discouraged education.

It seems rather offensive when people casually just say the poor work ethic and attitudes towards education among many blacks in the US is their communities problem. How about white people's responsibility for creating this culture in the first place?

It is like abusing a person for years and then as soon as you stop the abuse you expect the person to instantly become and upstanding citizen.

~11 million unauthorized immigrants as of 2014 (1)

Black labor participation rate at ~60% (2)

Black population in US at ~45M (3)

45M * (1 - 60%) = 18M

(1): http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/19/5-facts-abou...

(2): http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/01/black-labor-force-pa...

(3): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

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