First listed reason for inequality in America according to The Atlantic: Slavery. Good to know what political slant they bring to the table.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Aree you going to say the same thing about Jim Crow laws? There has been a systematic will to enslave and degrade black people in America, and this is a continuing effort.
Are you mad, or are you posting from the wrong century?
Reality is tough, huh?
Jim Crow laws are from 1965, they directly connect to this country's history of slavery. That is not "so old" at all. And variations of Jim Crow laws still persist to this day, hence the Voting Rights Acts. That there are clever derivatives of these practices does not at all mean "they are so old they have no resemblance of". Yes foolish person, they do have resemblance of.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pasadena-texas-voting-ri...
For some book ideas so you can work on your ignorance of this present day relevant history: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/chris-hayes-...
If you want to refine the cause of inequality, that's fair, but on the face of it, calling it political and somehow therefore invalid or a weak argument, is itself weak and invalid.
I'd refine it by saying the reason is when exploitation is considered valid and moral, it exists for a purpose. It is OK to select your targets, where you gain and they lose, if they don't stop you. It's finders keepers losers weepers. It's a game of might makes right. You either agree that there are superior people with superior ideas and it's morally OK to exploit others, or you don't. But I consider exploitation the superset cause of inequality.
The specific instance of this exploitation in American history has been various kinds of servitude, varying from targeting races (African, Chinese, Irish, Italian). And even today there's exploitation that's class based: trying to make public institutions in a democratic tradition a pay for play, or privatized. Justice, education, privacy - these are products to be paid for, and if you can't pay, you get none or you get lower quality versions.
Once you involve market forces, and worse, the issuing of stock leading to ownership by a class that demands immediate returns of money for their investment, private agencies are seemingly required to screw over citizens, because that's how you extract money from them in large quantities.
Contrasted to that, the bureaucracy of public entities is a much more insignificant problem. Public internet might be sort of 'third world', but right now they are kicking our butts in that, and Comcast might be working hard (meh…) but they are not working for you, they are working to extract capital out of you in the most efficient manner possible.
Once you include the caveat of 'all citizens' (even in Podunkville) it's not even an argument anymore. There's an assumption that it's right and proper to hose Podunkville because they're not the big city and shouldn't have nice things if their productivity doesn't warrant it, and this assumption is fair to challenge or even contradict outright. I'm rooting for Podunkville (the big city doesn't need my ideological help) so I'm in favor of public entities.
I guess we'll be seeing some experimentation, in that we're likely to see a heavy swing to privatization right now, and most likely a counter-swing in four to eight years. Should be worth keeping track of how it all works. That 'all citizens', though, that's a conditional which is at the heart of the discussion.