Black boys don’t need more discipline, they need mentors (2018)
educationpost.org
educationpost.org
Debt is part of wealth building.
[fn0]: Here, I may be incorrectly inferring your origins to be in a former colony.
[fn1]: For Indian readers, I hope this comment doesn't initiate a partisan discussion. :-)
It is possible to buy a house with money you saved. This also makes a lot of sense when the house will be passed on to the next generation (like it is done in africa).
Debt is spending your future cashflow for short term gains. Cash flow/liquidity is much more important than equity and net wealth(short term). I'm sure you know the old principle of "being poor is expensive" and "you need money to make money". Debt takes away your liquidity, the small things/"broken windows" you will always need to care for become neglected. Unplanned emergencies ruin your plans,etc...
At a national level, you should know how many african nations have borrowed endlessly and still gotten nowhere. Even after debts are forgiven and stable peacful times last decades.
Accepting debt is accepting a parasite. Havig a plan to pay it off is essentially saying you have a plan to kill the parasite before it kills you. Similar to how people think "it's ok, I can quit" before getting hooked on drugs.
YMMV.
No, debt is spending your future cashflow to increase your future cash flow.
>"you need money to make money"
Yes. This is where debt comes in.
>Debt takes away your liquidity
No it increases it. Debt lets you turn an illiquid asset like a building or accounts receivable in to immediate cash.
No, with debt you gain capital now. Future cashflow is not guaranteed oe even expected in most cases (e.g.:how will a mortgage generate future cashflow? Rent your house,hope future rent value is higher?). You might get more cashflow in the future if your debt was for a good investment. But even then, until you pay off the debt, your future cashflow will have your debt payments subtracted from it, even if you have positive cashflow after that, your argument only makes sense if the that cash flow is more than your existing cashflow (possible but rare).
There is a big difference between calculated debt made for a business investment and debt (however calculated) made to aquire equity or to afford goods and services.
> Yes. This is where debt comes in.
No, this is where revenue stream comes in. For a salary man, this means getting promotions and saving up. For a business person, this means making profits and increasing profit margins. In both cases what you can "afford" is liquid cash , not loans.
> No it increases it. Debt lets you turn an illiquid asset like a building or accounts receivable in to immediate cash
It does turn it into cash, but you're getting into debt to spend that liquidity right away. Who gets into debt for long term liquidity? If your business is modeled to grow then you should see increasing profit margins over time, this profit is what should sustainably provide liquidity. Your future decisions are not made in fear of missing bank payments. You will always need more cash, so whatever revenue you will make in the future will always go to banks since you're always getting into debt (unless you have remarkable discipline). If you get into debt because an unexpected event requires you to have more immediate liquidity than what you have, I think that's fine. But my position is that you shouldn't plan on getting into debt from the begining.
No leveraging with debt is not rare. Every small business owner I know uses debt. Some quick googling tells me the average for small businesses is $200k in the US.
You don't need remarkable discipline to manage it. It's pretty simple math. Fear doesn't need to come in to it. I'm not recommending everyone go out and redline their company with a ridiculous gearing ratio.
It is slightly different for business than people since a business loan is more on a case by case basis than consumer loans. With consumer debt, entire markets are restructures with consumer's ability to get loans in order to afford goods and services.
> It is possible to buy a house with money you saved.
...with decades of savings. Until you have those savings, how is paying rent to a landlord preferable to paying mortgage interest to a bank?
A builder spends 2000 hrs this year making your home. You pay him back 420 hrs annually over 5 years.
Some debts are just fine.
* They weren't really allowed viable property access until the last 50 years or so. 100's of years of catch up to make up for.
* Accumulating disadvantage of fatherless and motherless households.
* The blast radius of municipal violations disproportionately afflicts black people in the USA.
Not saying I like these things, but they're core problems.
You don’t need property ownership to have a decent upbringing. It does mean there isn’t a lot of generational wealth to go around, but that’s no longer specific to being black because it applies to huge swaths of the population.
Sure, there are plenty of poor people who are white, but when you are looking at aggregate statistics, the gap is extremely clear.
In my city, Boston, the average household wealth of a white family (excluding the value of the home) is $200,000. The average household wealth of a black family is $5. (and no, I didn't forget to put a thousand after the 5)
Redlining is also not over - a recent study found that when undercover black and white people went to the same realtor, 50% of the time the black buyers were given worse options or refused service.
Do you have a source for that?
Seems like you may be referring to this study[1] which only had a sample size of 78 white households and 71 black households. In that sample, the median net worth disparity was $247,500 to $8. I was not able to find how they picked their sample set.
[1]https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/one-time-pubs/color-o...
Despite your usage of the qualifier "only" to describe the sample sizes, that is more than sufficient to draw statistically significant conclusions about the racial gap in wealth in Boston.
Finally, here's the description of how the samples were selected:
> Various sampling techniques were used to locate and identify an ethnically plural sample consisting of the specifically defined ethnic groups. The techniques included the following: directory-listed landline samples targeted to census tracts where groups were known to reside; cell phone random digit dialing samples drawn from rate centers that covered the targeted ethnic group ZIP codes; samples drawn from targeted ZIP codes on the basis of billing address; and the use of surname-based lists targeting specific national origin groups.
Not really going to keep replying to this thread, but I think it's much more likely that the Fed is accurately reporting the reality of an extreme racial wealth gap, as opposed to the Federal Reserve Bank doctoring results to fake those wealth gaps.
Total Assets: White: $256,500 | U.S. Black: $700
Liquid Assets: White: $25,000 | U.S. Black: $670
Net Worth: White: $247,500 | U.S. Black: $8
Some definitions:
>Liquid assets, which can quickly be converted into cash, include money 18 in savings and checking accounts, stocks, money market, and government bonds.
>We totaled the value of all assets held by each racial group, including the value of all liquid assets, financial assets, retirement, home and vehicle equity, and the values of all other assets (these include life insurance policies and valuables such as jewelry)
>Net worth (or wealth), the sum of the value of total assets minus the value of debts, provides a snapshot of household financial well-being.
From this PDF: https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/color-of-wealth/...
There is no doubt that the accumulating disadvantages of single parent households (or worse) have had a terrible and disproportionate impact on blacks in the US. Unfortunately that is a much more recent phenomenon give that prior to 1960 the percentage of black children born to unwed mothers was sub-20% but now exceeds 70%. Current rates for white children are around 30% and only Asian children still enjoy a sub-20% unwed mother birthrate.
I'm not clear what "municipal violations" are in this context but certainly would appreciate further clarification especially as they pertain to the black community.
This was not an accident.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-la...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/podcasts/1619-slavery-sug...
This is both unsurprising and depressing. I am not sure if I have anything to say except that I feel incredibly sad that other human beings living today have to face such incredibly challenging circumstances.
Throughout my childhood, I always thought Black people seemed so cool and funny. They exude confidence and it intimidated my to make friends with them.
Now I teach people coding before and after my work as a full time software engineer. A few of my students are black. I had a hard time working with them.
Later, as I became friends with them, I realized they are very self conscious about their intelligence. (I know I'm generalizing here, but 100% of the black students I mentored felt this way). I realized my asian background and hyper-competitiveness and high expectations made the situation worse. This realization completely changed me as a person.
This eventually let to me starting a coding bootcamp at our public library and I try to create an environment to make students feel safe and not judged. I don't have this down to a process yet, if anyone knows please let me know. How does one create a safe environment so students showing up will feel emotionally safe enough to start asking questions without fear of being judged?
Say we measure the time from when a student walks in to the time when he/she starts asking questions whenever they have a question. Are there any activities to do that can reduce the comfort time to the minimum?
“Stupidest” or “first question” gamification haven’t given me much success, I suspect is because it comes off a little insincere.
However coming back to the bay area a decade later and making a lot of friends with local asians who grew up in San Francisco I am seeing huge racial inferiority complexes among asian males and females.
It's disgustingly huge. Among asian males racism manifests itself as hatred against white people for their white privilege and they talk openly about being scared of black people because they're all criminals. It's nuts. Note that this attitude mostly manifests itself among the native asian SF crowd who grew up here, not the tech migrants from outside of the city.
The other thing is racism manifests itself differently among asian females in the most pathetic display of inferiority I have ever seen in my life. The majority of single asian females in SF prefer dating white people over their own race. It's not even a superficial taste fetish either, literally a huge amount of asian females view their own race as too inferior and too weak to date. I don't know whether to blame the asian males or asian females for this level of patheticism.
I read posts from asians above and I'm astonished... I'm literally thinking what planet is this guy from? Then I realize that I'm from cupertino, I'm the guy who grew up on a different planet.
Who's getting harmed when Asian women have a preference for white men when dating? Who cares? To each their own, no? Are you implying there's some maximum percentage of women that can prefer another ethnic group when dating, and anything above that is problematic?
Edit: I should've specified that I'm talking explicitly about their commentary on asian women's dating patterns, not anything else in their comment.
Definitely not problematic to white males who are dating asian females though.
Honestly, among white guys it manifests itself as Asian women being "easier" and there's nothing wrong or racist for taking advantage of it, but it definitely won't appear to be a problem from your perspective even though something deeply wrong is happening.
You don't think there isn't anything racist about that? You have a strange definition of racism.
Asian women suffer from 3 main problems.
1. If other Asian women are desperate to white men because of racial inferiority, many white men will develop the idea that Asian women are desperate, think that they are superior for being white and treat Asian women poorly. Asian women would also have lower boundaries and would tolerate more misbehavior from white men that other women would not due to the inferiority.
2. People in general seek commonality in relationships. Some Asian women who are severely affected by an inferiority complex may sub-optimally choose unwoke partners that they have little in common with. The lower commonality and inferiority also bias Asian women's partners and the partners' friends and family toward being less accepting of diversity than the average interacial relationship. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAJAVHzBsAg
3. If she does have an racial inferiority complex, then chasing white men would confirm and strengthen her racial inferiority complex and cause additional suffering.
Having established that some forms of that type of relationship can be harmful, the question to answer then is: how prevalent are racial inferiority and status/acceptance seeking from the Asian women and fetishism and white superiority complex from the white men in these relationships?
Facepalm. Even a moderately good looking Asian female (and there are lots of them) would not have any problems finding good dates IMO, especially among well-to-do tech types.
Though this is typical: people are afraid of things and they absolve themselves of the potential failure by not even trying, because it's very easy to convince yourself that you're "disadvantaged", even if in reality the opposite is true.
I also definitely see a difference in self esteem between Asian Americans that grew up in California compared to the rest of the US.
Strangely, or maybe it makes sense, the Asian Americans that I saw with the highest self esteem were Mormons!
This is one of the reasons my wife and I moved back to Asia after we had kids. Despite other issues here, we felt it would be better for them.
In general there may be less pressure to conform and perform, from their partner, and more importantly from the family, when dating a white person.
Second of all, the pressures you describe are a bit exaggerated. The whole mother-in-law, make money and make baby deal is not very common at all. It exists and is more common among asians than westerners but it is still very very rare.
The stereotype on asians that does have credibility in modern times is the academic pressure. The pressures on a kid academically are enormous but after college the parents are just as human as the kid and it largely dies down later in life.
Third. No asian woman will ever admit this stuff to your face. Especially, if you're white. It's such a pathetic trait that they'd have trouble admitting it to themselves. Likely they'd make up some garbage excuse like "culture."
Before jumping to conclusions, there’s another question to ask: do Asian men not want white women, do white women not want Asian men, or is there another reason entirely?
Look you grew up in america, I grew up in america. We're not that different in what we want, and it's the same with asian women and white women.
> First of all if this were true you'd see tons of asian men dating white women to escape the cultural pressure. You don't see this at all, the phenomenon is largely among women.
argument is invalid. What's more there's no reason for you to be distinguishing between wants of asian men and women.
Your conclusion imo should just be that women of all races find asian men too weak to date. Men either don't find asian women weak, don't care, or care but in a positive way.
Who says this wasn't my conclusion? All women want to date up in terms of class. They also don't want to date black people. Black men and Asian men currently occupy the bottom of the dating ladder.
Guess who sits on top? White people. The problem is none of this is real. White people aren't the best, it's only this pathetic view point of racial inferiority that causes women to see the world like this.
Also I'm only emphasizing on asians because it's disproportionally pathetic. The inferiority complex is off the charts, I can't think of any other race that literally avoids dating their own race to the scale of asian women.
>If the difference is mostly white women not wanting Asian men, then your whole argument is invalid. What's more there's no reason for you to be distinguishing between wants of asian men and women.
Wrong. Not invalid at all. And I never ever made your claim above.
My claim in this context is that asian women dating white men is not the result of asian women trying to run away from strict asian culture. The whole point was to counter an argument made by another poster.
Asian Men wanting to date white women does not mean they don't want to date asian women. They do want to date white women but the ratio isn't as disproportionate as asian women women worshiping white males.
Also why can't I distinguish something? It's not me distinguishing anything. It's reality that is making a distinction.
I thought I understood that's because Aussie girls generally would seem loud, opinionated, immodest, over-assertive, disrespectful, compared with the Japanese feminine ideal, or even the masculine ideal. And Japanese males are often..more sensitive, artistic, considerate, reflective etc - not traditional Australian male virtues!
[0] i.e. Born in Japan, here since fairly young.
Again I would say there's more of this type of stuff still happening among asians but it's a very small minority.
1. Having a spouse who does not have the cultural knowledge, similar interests, empathy or language skills to communicate with your family is an issue. Her choice to date a white man is in a sense a rejection of her own family.
2. She herself may not have the same experiences, mindsets and interests to be able to really connect with her spouse if the relationship is driven by her attempt to run away from the expectations of her family.
3. A white man and his family/friends have a higher chance of being racist and insensitive to race issues. Weirdly enough, it does not seem like racist beliefs and white supremacy preclude white men from dating Asian women or Asian women from reciprocating interest: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/alt-right-...
Many asian kids are abused, it is disgusting what happens behind closed doors. If you had a better childhood or if you overcame your hardships, it would be really nice of you to show them some love and help them recover!
At the heart of it is the hierarchical and competitive nature of race in America, which does not have to be a zero-sum game but is cast as one anyway. As in learning to fight and be aggressive when threatened with violence, reclamation is reasonable, given the circumstances, but altogether unfortunate. We would be better off without the ego-protective behavior AND the racist circumstances that necessitate it.
Women generally prefer taller men. Asian men tend to be short.
The explanation works the other way too, with men typically preferring shorter women. There are other attributes as well, such as muscle mass and the amount of body hair.
Also the explanation does not work the other way. Men do not typically prefer shorter women. It is the women making a selection preference here.
On a 4-point grade metric (“A” = 4.0, “B” = 3.0, etc.), the average treatment effect was 0.03 grade points
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/gr...
One simple strategy is to close any bit of teaching you do with the phrase, "What questions do you have?" This is a subtle but important change from "Does anyone have any questions?" The first phrasing assumes people will have questions, and implies that you are looking for and welcoming questions.
When people do ask questions, you can ask how many other people had the same question. If you have more than just a handful of students, it's quite likely that if one person asks a question then others will have the same question. This normalizes the mindset of having questions, and not understanding everything as soon as it's presented.
It sounds like you are probably modeling a good atmosphere for asking questions. I think it's important to understand that you can't make everyone immediately comfortable asking questions. If people have been ignored or made to feel stupid when they've asked questions, it will take a while for them to trust you and the overall environment enough to start asking their own questions.
I taught high school math and science for 25 years, and always heavily emphasized that all questions are welcome. It took new students a while to understand that this was sincere; many of them had been told long ago to stop asking so many questions, or been publicly embarrassed for asking questions. Same goes for making mistakes; it's beyond infuriating that some teachers still intentionally embarrass students for not knowing things, or not getting things right on the teacher's schedule. Those practices are intellectually traumatizing to many people.
Step 2: Pick a curriculum to follow. Many other bootcamps have their curriculum online. I have my own that I built over the past 10 years of teaching and making sure every single student I taught got a job. You can use it too if you want: c0d3.com/book
Step 3: Pick a time. I picked 8am - 12pm to make it hard on students. Students who are willing to get up and show up at 8am are the students who is really committed. Around 10am I go off to my full time job, my students take over.
Step 4: (Best Practice) DO NOT put your students into cohorts. I made that mistake before and I had to spend months fixing it. Students have a tendency to compare themselves with others so they will start memorizing and pretend to understand to keep up. From day one, tell them that everybody will learn at a different pace and take as much time as they need to understand the material. Take time to be creative with what they learned and explore. You award their creativity (when they twist your teaching to do something strange) with your complete attention and they will keep pushing the limits of what they learn.
After students learn, you get free engineers to make your ideas come true! For my students, I simply have them build apps (open-sourced) that I wished existed and have them work together to build them.
I help them write their resume as they build features so the features count as work experience. My students list me as professional reference.
This is what I do, before work and after work.
If you need an example, here's our meetup group: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3/
Here's the core product our students built: https://c0d3.com/
Here's an example of a recent product launch: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Learnings-from-our-open-s...
The greatest gift I get back from doing this, is while I'm sleeping or busy at my full time job, I have 3-5 student engineers thinking about my side projects and building them.
Wow. Asking that instead of “do you have any questions” is so powerful.
You sound like a teacher who genuinely cares, thank you.
I wish I could hug you.
There must be a zillion useful "language hacks", if we only knew.
I learned "All negatives can be stated a positive" in the early 90s. Been trying to use it ever since.
For example, instead of "Don't run!", maybe say "Please walk." Completely changed my relationship to my kid.
One helpful bit in that particular "life skills" seminar was the practice and role playing.
I would never know to use your "Does anyone have any questions?" technique unless someone showed me.
And I still struggle to imagine how to apply these kind of life lessons in my every day.
It'd be fun, helpful to having a recording of all my interactions, and have professionals review the tape with me. I took some public speaking training where we actually did this. Illuminating.
FWIW, one of the best programmers I know strongly advocates acting lessons.
Had the same experience when I figured out to make offerings as A/B choices (and non-choices).
Instead of "Do you want broccoli?" It's: "Would you rather broccoli or cauliflower?"
Or the non-choice: "Do you want to eat your broccoli at the kitchen table or on the porch?"
I'm not an educator, but I think the goal is to normalize asking questions. This can be achieved by initially forcing everyone to ask a question (no matter how silly/not related to the topic of the day). You could give them time to write down the questions first, then everyone gets their turn to read it. Later, you can relax it so that questions become voluntary.
> Now I teach people coding before and after my work as a full time software engineer. A few of my students are black. I had a hard time working with them.
Speaking as black person this is an astute observation which I have observed. In Africa sometimes this is due to English not being someone's first language. In a meeting with people from different races I have noticed my black colleagues are way less vocal than when we are talking in Zulu on our own. They have a different demeanor and come out as more forceful and confident in Zulu. In English meeting they are less forceful.
A stable upbringing with a family that you can use as role models. If you don't have that, you're in for an uphill struggle.
If everyone around you is unemployed, or works in part time unskilled labour - if you're moving from home to home all of the time - if you have no bedroom - if your family argues, or you don't have proper food so your blood sugar is all over the place - these are tremendous things to overcome in isolation never mind all at the same time.
People talk about 'privilege' in upbringing because it's actually kind of rare to have a functional family.
This is what the class system really is. Some people can jump the gap after their formative years, but most people are going to be stuck in those patterns if they've spent 20 years in the trenches.
I grew up in a poor family; my father left when I was young. The one thing we had (aside from the absolute warrior-woman of my mother), provided by the government back in the day, was a council house. A low rent secure tenancy. So whilst everything else was a struggle, my mother was able to provide a relatively stable housing situation for us.
Without that I'm sure I would be a complete fuck-up now.
Most of our time over the last million years of evolution was spent completely in contrast to this. It's nurture influencing nature and I think we're about to turn the page and start using all of our information and abilities to bring the best out of people instead of the worst.
Ancient people didn't have massive food supply industries making sure things were relatively plentiful. If you didn't have a stable home or tribe in east Africa in 100,000BC, you were probably dead. I don't think our industrial society and pre-industrial times can be compared 1:1. You can be sent a welfare card with some fiat currency put on it, and get everything you need to survive. That's a new concept, charity usually came from the church, and before the church, the tribe. But the tribe (100,000BC) might have chosen to simply let you die instead, depending on their culture.
It certainly does. I'm having trouble digging up primary sources I've read on this before (there's a ton of secondary by searching "Consequences of fatherless childhoods", "consequences of single-parent households" and similar on DuckDuckGo), but studies are showing that children being brought up in single-parent or "fragile" households fare worse than their counterparts brought up in two-parent, comparatively stable households.
The issue is likely significantly compounding generation after generation. It's not really a surprise that children need a stable household with good role models at the helm though, and the absence of which being damaging.
I’m not sure how rare it is overall, but it definitely varies by region. Where I grew up (and where I live now, I moved back a couple of years ago) the traditional/stereotypically American “atomic family” seems to be the norm. Sure, I knew lots of peers as a child whose parents had divorced, but by and large they still had a functional family. The rate of so-called “broken homes” seems to have increased dramatically in the past few decades, but around me most people have an extended family to rely on. It doesn’t seem uncommon for a child to be raised by their mother (or grandmother), but even if the father is a failed person, drug addict, or criminal the kids generally have several male role models to turn to who aren’t self-destructive: uncles, grandfathers, cousins, etc.
> This is what the class system really is. Some people can jump the gap after their formative years, but most people are going to be stuck in those patterns if they've spent 20 years in the trenches.
I think you’ve absolutely nailed something here. I don’t necessarily see myself as a “mentor” - at least not formally - but I do what I can for people around me. The fact that I’m able to sit down and speak openly about my experiences and provide my perspective on their situations without coming from a place of “I’m right, you’re wrong, and this is what you should be doing” has lead to my hearing the stories of many seemingly random people who don’t have anyone else to turn to. Sometimes that has lead to their making significant improvements in their own life; sometimes it hasn’t. In every case though, I try to make sure they know that they have someone to talk to that is going to take them seriously and isn’t trying to get something from them.
I’m looking for ways to make a bigger impact in my community like this, but haven’t really found my place yet.
> I grew up in a poor family; my father left when I was young. The one thing we had (aside from the absolute warrior-woman of my mother), provided by the government back in the day, was a council house. A low rent secure tenancy. So whilst everything else was a struggle, my mother was able to provide a relatively stable housing situation for us.
My situation seems similar at least at first glance. My mother was 17, and my biological father was basically a burnout and petty criminal. I never knew him, but perhaps paradoxically respect him for that - he corresponded enough with my mother to know that I was safe and was being raised in a stable environment, so he explicitly made the decision to stay out of my life. Because of that my impression of him is of someone who was intelligent and empathetic, but flawed and misguided.
Where it sounds the state was a force of stability in your life, extended family took that role in mine. I lived with my grandparents until I was six years old because my mother was single and couldn’t afford to provide a healthy environment for me at the time. She was always there for me, and present as often as she could be, but she prioritized getting herself into an economic and social position to care for me over herself and what she wanted. I’m sure it was very difficult and painful for her to only see me on the weekends when I was young, but in that time she met my dad (my “real” dad, not my biological father), built a career, and got to a place where she could care for me. Eventually, she was able to care for my grandparents as well. I look at her life story so far as an inspiration; there are many parts that I wouldn’t want to experience and things she’s striven for that I don’t want for myself, but her sheer force of will and persistence is something I try to live up to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/26/us/opioids-kinship-ohio.h...
and
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/02/us/opioid-cri...
The kids who were raised under the shadow of the opioid epidemic are now reaching their child-bearing years. Hopefully the cycle of drug dependance can be broken once firmer opioid prescribing regulations take effect.
EDIT: Not trying to generalize your situation but to illuminate the problematic environments some children are born into.
You do know that arguing is normal and that suppressing it or hiding it from children fucks them up even more right? Part of being a functioning member of society requires being able to argue.
I feel that mentorship isn't just restricted to someone officially appointed to the position. It's pretty much anyone that has a weighted relationship to anyone (not just kids). That includes spouses, parents, relatives, older siblings, peers, teachers, cops, insurance adjustors, union shop stewards, DMV clerks, and, of course, bosses.
For example, corporate culture comes from the top. It almost doesn't matter what the corporate values statement says. I believe that the behavior of the C-suite is the single biggest driver of corporate culture.
I've learned that I need to model the values I'd like others to exhibit. It's not a guarantee that they will, but it improves the odds.
The wealth disparity between African Americans and the rest of America is growing. Mentorship is fine, but what most African Americans need is access to resources and stable community (which was destroyed through many years of Social Engineering).
Half of success in fatherhood comes from simply showing up. Absentee fathers contribute to the generational erosion of the family fabric that is almost impossible to undo.
I think, this is where the "atomic family" breaks down. Only having one person for this job, is simply too high of a risk. We should go back to a bigger type of family, so kids can have more people in their early lifes that fill this role, so when one leaves, there are still many left.
It's basically just one degree separated from the competition.
Let school handle the mundane, I'm teaching them strategy, leadership, multiple scenario event planning & prediction, personality types and the strengths and weaknesses of each, multiple types of investments & investment patterns, asset strategies, the agility that creating options give you - rather than having it given to you.
I'm teaching them how to avoid the types of people and thinking that takes down people and everyone around them. The types of events that downfall a person, and how to get out of the way when people display them. How to read the market, and get ahead of it for prosperity.
These things were not taught to me by my smart firefighter father, or great mother (teacher/nurse) - but I was keen to pick up by observing the world and reading, taking stupid risks, and growing. I'm jealous of my future kids - I wish someone had handed these to me.
edit: by "hackers" i mean the term for people who created their own solutions to existing systems of anytype. Not the cybercriminal definition.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4104793/
It's not easy to link to on this page (unless someone can help me out), but there's interesting data about fathers being present in the lives of their children and its impact.
The beige/tan chart about 35% of the way down is what I'm referring to.
Perhaps I'm naive, but I can't imagine it to be more than 15% of this population [and that would be pretty extreme]. If that's the case, how can incarceration be considered a major cause of these fathers "failing from showing up?" (I guess we'd need a number for that, too..)
2. 11% still doesn't go a long way in explaining the "fatherless issue", although we probably need firm numbers on that too.
That's absolutely enough to tilt the data significantly.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/mass-incarceration-statis...
The incarceration rate for blacks is lower than the rate of fathers not being around for their offspring. That’s a fact.
Anyone arguing that the entire problem is “we’re just locking up all these otherwise-would-be-there fathers because it’s a fun game to lock blacks up” is ignoring the reality.
I don’t have a strong opinion on it either way, but I’ve seen much better arguments that the welfare system has allowed for the higher rate of non-nuclear families. That it doesn’t take two parents to provide so the rate of single parents increased. Seems logical enough.
Now; there is LESS cash welfare in the US than there was. TANIF was reformed in 1996. There is still SSI/Disability, SNAP, child support as cash or cash equivalency. I support those programs, but also recognize that it is possible government handouts have contributed to the decline of the nuclear family.
Isn't it valid to put people who break the law behind bars?
If you make a whole bunch of laws that huge swaths of the population violate, and then use them to put subgroups you don't like in prison... it's not so "valid".
https://www.vox.com/2014/7/1/5850830/war-on-drugs-racist-min...
B) Non-whites are way, way more likely to be arrested (despite similar rates of drug use), and receive harsher penalties.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304...
The list goes on and on... "Broken windows" policing results in targeting of minority communities. Blacks and Hispanics are significantly more likely to be targeted under "stop and frisk" laws, despite equal (or lower) hit rates for contraband discovery when compares to whites.
Eggs aren't a necessity, there are plenty of alternatives available. Should we ban them too?
The problem is in large part cultural. You can see it easily with East-Asian immigrants that arrived dirt poor, yet saved and send their kids in college. After one generation they are not poor anymore. In Europe, the division are the same (White+Asian vs Black+Arab) despite difference in history (no descendants of slave). Also, education and healthcare are free and there is the welfare money. So why the results are similar? Because some value education and other don’t.
The USA is a society with a long documented history of actions to undermine a population because of their skin color so unfortunately, your perspective is a little too simplistic for this situation.
Black men have been and continue to be systamaticly oppressed in the US. Black men serve more prison time than white men for the same crime. Black men are more likely to be charged for a crime vs dropped by the prosecutor when compared to a similar situation for whites.
This has been going on since litterly before the US existed when blacks were sold like animals for two centuries in america. Black people face institutional barriers to voting, jobs, loans, education and more.
This is a matter of fact not opinion.
Well not as cut and dry as that, but cops harassing black kids walking the streets is an old tradition of law enforcement. Mix in some stop and frisk and you have an unfair system. I remember I made friends with some black kids in high school. I went down to their neighborhood. It didn't take long for a cop to pull up and start asking questions. I never had a cop approach me before that. It was eye opening. I lived only a mile away.
> laws...which are the same for everyone.
Oh really? Are you sure about that? There are many studies showing that black people have higher incarceration rates for the same crimes as their cohorts.
“Fathers” full stop is an argument that agrees with what can be true in our reality.
It’s almost as if things we know to be true are often just noises our motor functions generate, and may in fact, upon reflection, be belief not rooted in truth.
I think what people are speaking to is a second involved parent from shortly after birth-- which will most likely be a father/man. A second parental figure makes a world of difference, especially when confronting poverty and an educational environment that does not provide additional support.
> It’s almost as if things we know to be true are often just noises our motor functions generate, and may in fact, upon reflection, be belief not rooted in truth.
There's a whole lot of evidence that children of single parents have significantly worse educational and psychosocial outcomes, even when controlling for household income and other confounds; even when considering whether that parent remarries/a step parent shows up. The degree of involvement of the other parent is strongly predictive of the amount of harm; that is, there's a dose-response relationship.
If a comment is dead and you think it's unhelpful ("deliberately obtuse"), don't reward it by vouching for it. It's likely going to generate even more noise. (Note a sibling comment which is is only argumentative, not moving the discussion forward.)
If you have a point to make, make it in a separate comment.
Source your claims (at least one.)
I very much doubt this because only recently has it been possible for parents of the same sex to adopt, let alone evaluate their performance as parents and generalise it. I would very much love to be proven wrong, however.
That being said, the issue here is not the gender of the parent, but rather single parenthood. A working single parent interacts very much little with their kid(s) in comparison with an atomic family.
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Man-in-the-Ho...
Men worked, if one wasn't part of the home then women needed more support.
So it probably wasn't a result of maliciousness but rather a lack of imagination and empathy (aka stupidity).
As for the restriction to single parents, I can certainly see the potential for unintended consequences. Paying people not to get married means fewer people will get married — just as paying people not to work, as the "welfare cliff" effectively does, means fewer people will work. I broadly support the idea of helping people who need help, but it needs to be done in such a way that it doesn't tend to trap them in their situations.
The story mentioned one suspect's sister saying " I have 4 kids and no daddy in their lives ". I simply can't understand this. One kid , I can understand. But four? ... Four (Add: non has daddy present)? I just have too many questions.
Add: I interpreted "no daddy in their lives" as they never had a daddy present ever. This could be my mistake.
The dad (or dads) might not be around for a lot of reasons. Maybe they divorced five years after the last kid was born, maybe he got arrested, maybe he died.
OK. I just figured out. I interpret "no daddy in their lives" as they never had a daddy present ever. This could be my mistake.
You're seriously just going to identity people by their color of their skin?
Of course, systematic racism impacts culture too. People in Bangladesh may be materially poorer and less educated than those in inner cities in the US. But they have standing within a social framework that institutional racism denies to African Americans.
It's quite apt. I chose to switch worlds when I left school. It really is a complete bifurcation - you can go back, but it's a foreign land now.
It is and it isn't. Every society has some sort of proverb like "you can leave the X but the X will never leave you" because on some level people can't undo their upbringing.
Additionally, I'm suspicious when I hear the 'system' being blamed because it's a convenient scapegoat. Stuff like our code didn't work not because our programmers wrote bad software, but because our process is broken. Those FISA warrants that were granted because FBI agents and lawyers lied need to be fixed with 'better safeguards'. Or those banks get taxpayer bailouts and nobody goes to jail because there wasn't sufficient regulation to prevent systematic fraud and excessive risk-taking. Nobody has to be embarrassed for their own behavior or held responsible for their own actions when the nameless, faceless system gets the arrows.
If you want to talk about real privilege, it's the privilege of growing up in a healthy family unit. The greatest advantage I've ever received was a loving father and mother who were there to provide support, instruction, and discipline. All children - everywhere - deserve and desperately need good, loving, present parents. It breaks my heart that's become the exception and not the rule.
Unfortunately, they are. Those clumsy relics of explicit bias were too reliant on individual antipathy, which is dissipating in a connected world, where others' experiences area available through books, movies, and the Internet.
What we have, instead, is a much more sophisticated, and less error-prone system. It's not a "convenient scapegoat," it's actually very, very inconvenient. Institutional biases are hard to change, especially when they're baked into the ends, and not incidental means.
How do you figure? Is it easier or harder to fight discrimination in, say, employment when, "We don't hire negroes," is stated upfront, compared to when black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons?
>something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction.
Again, how do you figure?
Everywhere I've worked professionally I've had black coworkers. Everywhere I've hired considered and hired black applicants. I've had black supervisors. I've had black colleagues. I've had black reports. And this is true of virtually every professional environment I've interacted with, at least here in the South.
This most certainly wouldn't have been the case in 1950. And that confirms that such discriminatory systems aren't more powerful now than they were in generations past.
Really, I think claims to the contrary are absurd on their face.
I still await your further thoughts.
>Is it easier or harder to fight discrimination in, say, employment when, "We don't hire negroes," is stated upfront, compared to when black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons?
And expound upon this assertion:
>something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction.
>>Is it easier or harder to fight discrimination in, say, employment when, "We don't hire negroes," is stated upfront, compared to when black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons? You are begging the question. Of course it's easier to fight enemies who are out in the open, distinct, and widespread. And it's harder to fight enemies that are well-camouflaged. But it's also harder to fight enemies that are partially imagined, distorted, and sometimes nonexistent.
I take issue with your insinuation, as I tried to illustrate in my anecdote, that discrimination where black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons, is widespread.
>And expound upon this assertion:
>>something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction.
It's pretty simple, really. If one concludes that discrimination isn't as prevalent as it was decades ago and has diminished as time has passed while also noticing that its attributed consequences are more prevalent, then it's reasonable to assume something else is to blame.
Thank you for answering the question.
>I take issue with your insinuation, as I tried to illustrate in my anecdote, that discrimination where black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons, is widespread.
On what basis? I recognize your anecdote, and its anecdotal nature. I'd like you to look beyond your personal experience and justify your opinion with something verifiable.
>If one concludes that discrimination isn't as prevalent as it was decades ago and has diminished as time has passed while also noticing that its attributed consequences are more prevalent, then it's reasonable to assume something else is to blame
As this conclusion seems premature, it would be helpful to suggest what else there is to blame.
I agree, but I do think it's largely the unintended consequences of well-intentioned policy. Policies that were designed in part as a safety net for single mothers seem to have perversely incentivized family breakdown.
People should be equally suspicious when someone argues the system is in inherently fair, because it is often used to insulate ourselves from injustice.
It suggests we don't have to worry about inequality or the messy interventions that would be required to eliminate it.
> Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
I'm not saying the people within the government are more racist than before. But the systems that the government put into place in the 60's through the 80's were specifically designed to be racist in effect without appearing racist in intention.
If you reduce funding in segregated schools, then when desegregation happens, you protest "forced busing", you're effectively keeping black kids in worse schools.
Turns out if you criminalize marijuana and declare a "War on Drugs", you can arrest a whole bunch of young black men, lock them away and give them criminal records. Then you can go on bemoaning the lack of black role models.
Or you can simply neglect to fight redlining, ensuring that it's impossible to get a house in the white neighborhoods.
Or you can institute a policy that schools whose students fail to get good test scores are penalized. I wonder what that'll do.
I could go on, but I think James Baldwin says it best: https://youtu.be/_fZQQ7o16yQ?t=150
To preemptively respond to the argument that these policies were long ago, I like that analogy Obama gave of an ocean liner:
> Sometimes the task of government is to make incremental improvements or try to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that, ten years from now, suddenly we’re in a very different place than we were
Policy is about the next 50-100 years, not the next 10. If you put racist policies in to effect, people will see the effects for generations upon generations.
In my hometown, DC, one out of every three black men will be imprisoned in their lifetime.
As the wikipedia article says, "The subject remains controversial."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...
> From August 18–20, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published the Dark Alliance series by Gary Webb,[10][11] which claimed:
> > For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. [This drug ring] opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles [and, as a result,] the cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America.
I avoid talking matters of race as much as I can, because I don't want that person to feel that they're a "black" person in my mind or view. Because if I were a black man, I wouldn't want to define me. So I don't let that define those I contact. I strive to treat everyone the same. Most of the time, it works, you CAN train yourself to treat everyone the same. If you think "black" when you see a black person, then you need to keep working at it, like everything in life. After you're done, you'll still have some level of innate subconscious racism that comes with human nature, but the key is to not actively embrace or act on it.
That said, I work with a black guy (we're both developers). His dad was never around, he is a wanderer today and he called him a deadbeat. He said something about his dad being resentful that he turned out so well, and had nothing to do with it. My colleague attributes his success to his mom.
In his case, it sounded like his dad was absent by choice. My coworker is not a deadbeat dad, has children, an expensive home and a wife. Hard worker, as you have to be to be a successful developer. I think being born with a good mind helps, as well as a stable home even if it's just a mother. A little luck (circumstances) helps all of us.
Edit: Making this edit to clarify what I'm trying to say, since several responses has tipped me off to how it could be read. Being black doesn't have anything to do with committing more crimes. Higher crime rates is much more a factor of economic and family status. Both of which are negatively impacted by higher crime rates, which reinforces the cycle to everyone's dismay. Those statuses are on average worse in the black community than others, which causes a large part of the statistical difference. The causes of the difference stem from the legacy of racism and choices that were made in designing welfare programs, at least in large part. Which sucks.
The money quote: > "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 blacks, 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.”
Not a fan on the War on Drugs, especially not after reading that. On the other hand, I'm strongly in favor of enforcing the laws on the books, and if there is a bad law it should be changed, not ignored.
However, Pat Buchanan (long time adviser to Nixon) said in an interview that the quote is nonsense.
Based on your comment, it seems like you haven't done much independent reading on this topic...
Here's a place to start: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/1/5850830/war-on-drugs-racist-min...
Not really though.
From the primary source:
MORE THAN 100 DAYS OF USE IN PAST 12 MONTHS white: 4.5% black: 6.1%
Not really though. From the primary source for marijuana:
MORE THAN 100 DAYS OF USE IN PAST 12 MONTHS white: 4.5% black: 6.1%
Now for coke:
MORE THAN 100 DAYS OF USE IN PAST 12 MONTHS white: 0.1 black: 0.3
Now for crack:
MORE THAN 100 DAYS OF USE IN PAST 12 MONTHS white: 0.0 black: 0.3
Ok, ok, how about heroin? We know those white boys just can't get enough smack right?
MORE THAN 100 DAYS OF USE IN PAST 12 MONTHS white: 0.1 black: 0.2
Nope. Not sure how people can interpret these numbers to be "equal rates" when habitual daily use numbers are multiples higher for blacks.
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/quicktables/quickconfig.do?34481...
That Vox article is being misleading when they frame it based on "reported using the drug in the last year" because doing coke once on New Years is a lot different that doing coke daily. Looking at the daily use stats their statement that "In 2007, black people were 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than white people." doesn't seem so extremely disproportionate considering the daily usage is in some cases 3x as much. Very dishonest article.
Sorry for double post, it wouldn't let me edit the other one for more clarity.
Edit: Downvoters care to counter?
The most common drug people get arrested for is marijuana, and the difference in use (even by your chosen metric) is nowhere near 3.6x.
The only drug where you can make an argument even approaching 3.6x is crack, which is a relatively small percentage of arrests.
I also note you omitted the "stimulant" category (which in the 2011 dataset covered methamphetamine).
Wasn't trying to imply that black people are natural disposed to committing more crimes, just that currently they do, from a combination of economic and social reasons.
Source? Everything I've read suggests that crime rates are pretty much the same across race and ethnicity when controlling for economic status. The primary variable is contact with the justice system, i.e. getting caught.
This isn't about ethnicity, it is about economics and culture. It only disproportionately affects black people because of historical trends and welfare programs decades back that encouraged single parent homes, as was said in other comments.
They are, however, much less likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced to lengthy terms than similarly-situated black people. To be treated like a black person in the justice system, a white person must be some combination of much poorer, much less educated, and with a much longer criminal history. It is about race and ethnicity.
https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio...
You know what else happened in that time? The War on Drugs.
The demonization and denigration of functional but unorthodox living arrangements is nothing new to American discourse.
Are there any numbers on how many black fathers are absent?
And if you deem it beneath HN's standards to quote a comic strip as a response to another post, well, I would say the same about quoting Larry Elder.
Showing up is hard to do when housing policy explicitly forbids black people from living within a 2 hour commute of the few places that would hire them. It's hard to do when you have to work 2 jobs because the few neighborhoods you are allowed to live in are expensive. It's hard to do when under constant police harassment.
The erosion of the family fabric of black communities in America was malicious, intentional, and far more recent than many are willing to believe (which is why this comment will probably be downvoted to hell). And there's no great conspiracy about it because it was done in the open.
And yes, the “progressive” Bay Area, too. For anyone who wonders why the Bay has so few black people - the house I live in on the Peninsula was built in 1948. And its original deed forbade “colored people” from living in it. This was eventually overturned, I believe in the 60s. Given the housing values nowadays, how much generational wealth have blacks missed out on due to this? It’s not as though they weren’t here. After all, they’ve been in this country since its inception. Just like whites, blacks came westward. In the Bay they specifically also helped fill the demand for US shipbuilders during WWII. But systematically denied from one of the biggest wealth generating sources America had to offer in the 20th century (Bay real estate). And this also means their descendants are not in the position to benefit from the Bay’s 21st century wealth generation source (tech).
Many people do not know this racist history of the “progressive” Bay Area.
I assume you've read it since he focuses on the narrative of a black man working in the shipyards; but for anyone interested in reading further on the subject, I highly recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RHppw20Zm8
The sad thing is that had the original African-American inhabitants of East Palo Alto been able to buy in Palo Alto instead, they or their descendants would be multi-millionaires today given the tremendous boom in Silicon Valley's housing prices starting in the 1970s. There was only a decade-or-so window between when racial covenants became unenforceable and when Palo Alto's housing prices started booming in the 1970s due to the growth of Silicon Valley where African-Americans could buy in Palo Alto at affordable prices.
Also sad is the story of San Francisco's Western Addition, just south of the Japantown mall. Many African-Americans from the South migrated to San Francisco during WWII for the war effort and also for the war-related job opportunities that were abound in the area. Due to racial covenants, the Western Addition was one of the few places where African-Americans could rent and buy; that area had a lot of vacancies due to the unfortunate internment of Japanese-Americans who populated the area before and after the war. When WWII ended, Japanese-Americans and African-Americans lived side-by-side in the Western Addition. However, in the late 1950s, San Francisco started a massive redevelopment project where many of the old Victorian homes in the area were torn down and were replaced with public housing projects. This is also the time that Geary was widened. Many Japanese-Americans and African-Americans lost their homes during this redevelopment project. These homes would be worth a minimum of a million dollars each today, potentially more, due to their proximity to Downtown and Market Street.
An example of someone everyone knows is Sundar Pitchai. The only way out of middle class and to go upwards is education. Not by speculative real estate activities.
The point is that black Americans are not recent immigrants. They have been in this country just as long (if not longer) than white Americans. Therefore, it’s probably better to compare black Americans’ socioeconomic status to white Americans.
“Speculative real estate”? Not in the slightest. Simply the ability to buy a roof over your head and pass it on to your children.
Any hypothesis that attempts to explain the plight of black Americans needs to also adequately provide for the incredible success of Asian Americans. And, if you think it’s merely skin color, then you have to account for Indian Americans, who are often darker skinned than many black Americans, yet who out-earn white American households nearly 2 to 1.
That destruction had and continues to have a lasting impact.
There are many theories on why recent immigrants, including African’s, perform better than Black Americans. The psychological impact has been well documented and might help explain some differences in achievement compared to white Americans.
My father moved out when I was 14 and, although he was never far away and visited all the time, I was pretty angry about. For years. It really wasn't even his fault.
It is not just an issue for black boys, of course. Rates of fatherless homes have been rising in the US for whites and hispanics too.
When drugs were affecting the “inner city” it was all about “being tough on crime”. When it started affecting “middle America” it became about “treating drug abuse as a disease” and “increasing social services.”
I've been to Ft Worth a few times the last few years, and there have been protests about how police "protect and serve white folks only" each time near the area I stayed.
But what I can't get my head around is that nearly every cop I saw (near the protest or otherwise) was themselves a minority. So do we have a system where minorities arrest minorities at an unfair rate? Are the (apparent minority) white cops just arresting so many minorities that the arrest rate skews to minorities?
I have no theory on it, but couldn't help but wonder if better understanding what the people doing the arresting at (allegedly) unfair rates themselves look like would help find a path forward.
https://police.fortworthtexas.gov/Public/racial-profiling-re...
One of those is internalized racism and the societal norms that often cause even black people to apply common harmful stereotypes to other black people.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/black-cops-are-just-as-like...
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/04/513218656...
"Don't be snarky."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
When many of the dads are arrested in jail or prison, obviously they aren't being mentors. And they aren't permitted to be in their childrens' lives. And much of this is overpolicing and overcriminialization. Add this to sentences being worse, and it's unsurprising it happens. We as a nation are setting the situation, then surprised it happened.
And the cycle repeats.
You're talking about the heavily racially biased under-enforcement/implementation of laws and programs to reduce violent crime.
Just highlighting that a racial bias in the criminal justice system is the common theme. Not that you weren't making the same point, it just didn't seem clear to me one way or the other.
Here are some nice stats if anyone wants some numbers to chew on: https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/
The "discipline" referred to by the article more often boils down to punishment for misdeeds.
One form builds up a person into a better version of themselves. The other is intended to break the spirit of the person and make them submissive.
"Or, you know, fathers," is a... disappointing take, to say the least.
Yes, "the system" plays a role, but it's dangerous to make it the sole scapegoat. I like the idea of mentorship because it aims to change individuals, not just blame the system.
Black boys could break free from the cycle, if they had the knowledge and know how. And they can get that knowledge and know how by following the examples of mentors who are not trapped.
So when "the system is to blame", part of that is the fact that we so often assign blame to "the system" instead of holding individuals responsible. The part of "the system" worth blaming is the part that puts blame on "the system".
Nobody will. Literally nobody said that.
When talking about assistance programs to the needy, we consider statistical data in order to target the most needy. So eg the result is providing funding for these programs in minority heavy schools.
Though I don't know why it needs to be a competition. The content in the article is good for people to consider for the boys they care about in their lives. The biggest difference most people make isn't becoming convinced about policy positions but in how they engage with their loved ones and local communities.
I could just tell you why I think this article is focused as it is, but I think it will be a lot more useful if I challenge you.
So: why do you think this article is titled and focused as it is on black boys?
I'm not saying black boys would respond the same way whites do if they were accommodated the way whites are, but pure discipline doesn't seem helpful.
Genetics is only relevant to the degree that it provides a visual heuristic in skin color by which the construct of race is applied and enforced.
I think what's missing isn't so much simply mentorship - it's advocacy. The children suffering the most domestic instability are those least likely to get a parent helping them or helping their school to help them.
My (widowed, middle-class, white) mother volunteered for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sure_Start and as an assistant in schools.
She guided immigrant families coming to the country through the hurdles and stories of upset "native" children being upset as Daddy's come home [from prison] and isn't being nice to Mummy.
My takeaway feeling from hearing the stories (aside from pride) is that I, and I presume most of us here, were so so lucky. We got a pretty decent launch into the world and made of it what we wanted - we've got complaints, but mainly through our own actions.
> It is important for mentors and others looking to implement solutions for Black students to come from within our own communities. Studies have shown that students do better in class and have less disruptive behaviour when educators look like them, and mentorship is no exception.
Well this completely goes against the narrative that more diversity in schools is good. If people are literally biologically wired to be racist (at least in some sense of the word) and now people are advocating that blacks are taught by blacks and whites are taught by whites as a solution to the diversity problem then that's a little worrying.
On a more controversial note though, I also wonder why we expect peoples who have evolved separately for thousands of years with significant genetic variations to preform equally. There was an article by the New York Times recently that discuses why Ashkenazi Jews tend to perform out preform academically: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/jewish-culture-ge...
Unfortunately from the reading I've done on this topic, it does seem the author is probably right that there is a genetic element to all of this. Obviously it's not what people want to hear and the author was predictably slammed for writing it, but most intelligence researchers would agree that genetic plays a large role in intelligence and again, unfortunately, not all groups preform equally.
It does seem possible that part of the explanation as to why Whites and Blacks under preform East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews academically is simply genetics. And if that's the case, do we allow the best to rise to the top, or do we discriminate against Jews and Asians as the author proposes by segregating education or, as something universities do, discriminate against applicants based on race.
I'm sure I'll get down voted for but this won't get better until we start recognising and addressing certain realities.
Everyone was wringing their hands madly and talking about things like mentorship, and how the education system was inherently racist (and, unfortunately, always making implications about how white people were all racist and this was a deliberate outcome) or certain groups apparently having no fathers.
Fifteen years later, and black kids are more than twice as likely to go to university as white kids...funnily enough, if you mention race when you talk about this now...you get called a racist (it turns out, some people just really think race is the only thing that matters).
Either way, stop talking about race. It doesn't help. It is incredibly disempowering to have someone supposedly help you by constantly bringing up the fact you are different. And, shock, if you do this and things improve those children never stop banging on about race and think everything is rigged against them (in the UK, there is no black wage gap...if you mention this, you will get excoriated). Definitely, culture does matter (this just has no relation to race though) but if you create an environment of success then this can be overcome.
The US is the archtypical example of how not to do things. Six decades into civil rights, and the same people are still banging on and on about the same stuff (I will get trashed for this but in the US, this kind of grief mongering has almost become an industry in itself...you can see why it will never end, the vested interests are too powerful).
For example, this says that there is an ethnicity wage gap: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
Figure Four of that link (which allows you to clicky to remove different groups) clearly shows that "White British" have a higher median hourly rate than "Black, African, Caribbean, or Black British".
The picture for university attendance is a lot more complex. Prestigious universities are not accepting black students: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/russell-group-univ...
And black students appear to drop out of university at higher rates, partially because of the racism they face.
The UK has a serious problem with racism.
Btw, it is very clear that some ethnic minorities are underpaid and excluded from certain occupations (i.e. they are underpaid within occupation, aren't promoted, and are excluded from occupations systemically)...but it is Pakastani/Bangladeshi, not blacks.
What racism? There is evidence that the UK is one of the most racially tolerant societies in Europe and comparable with any other developed country (admittedly, Europe is not a good comparison because of the prevalence of intolerance there) - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2019.00012...
I will say that I have observed a definite change of attitude by black students however. I went to the university local to me, there are a huge number of non-white students (majority in some faculties) and I have never observed any problem ever (discussing race or nationality would make no sense to any of the students there). The Afro-Carribean society (one, btw, that has always had white members) held an event where white people were banned from attending (again, not just non-black...specifically white) on the subject of resisting white culture. This is a Russell Group uni that you need 3As for in almost every course. This is the result of hammering the idea of racism and inferiority into one group and repeatedly telling them that other people think they are less than. The idea that this is reducing intolerance is quite contrary to all the evidence.
Btw, it is kind of funny that the UK has a solution for this problem...it works...and no-one is interested. The only thing you seem to care about is more identity wars, more conflict, more hate.
If you're rejecting the Office for National Statistics there's not much I can do. These are robust and reliable stats with detailed information about method and limitation.
Do you mean the Low Pay Commission?
Can you link to their report, because I can't find it.
The only report I could find from them is this, which disagrees with your point.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
> Once in work, evidence shows that people from ethnic minorities progress less far and earn less money than their white counterparts. Baroness McGregor-Smith led an independent review of the issues faced by businesses in developing ethnic minority talent from recruitment through to executive level. Race in the Workplacereported a number of areas of concern at the time:
Here's the Equality and Human Rights Commission Report, but that supports my point that black people are paid less than white people in the UK. (Page 29 median wage) https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/rese...
Or there's this research: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/095001701244509...
> Research repeatedly demonstrates significant ethnic labour market disparities in Britain. While some groups do better than the white British majority, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and black Africans suffer higher rates of unemployment, lower occupational status and lower earnings (Berthoud, 2000; Heath and Cheung, 2006; Heath and McMahon, 1997; Platt, 2005). Such ethnic penalties remain even after controlling statistically for indi-vidual differences, for instance in respect of education.
> What racism?
> there are a huge number of non-white students
You appear to be splitting people into "white" and "non-white", and then looking at the non-white group as a whole. That's not a good idea because it causes you to come to incorrect conclusions.
It’s also important to note that although black children are more likely to go to university they are also 2.5 times more likely to be unemployed on comparison to their equally qualified white counterparts which indicates institutional racism. If as you suggest we avoid the topic of race solutions for issues like this will never appear.
Lastly, there is a huge black wage gap in the UK £3.2bn according to reports.
Speaking as a British black male I can say that race issues in the US and the UK aren’t as different as you make out and in a lot of ways the US is miles ahead in confronting the problem openly in contrast to the UK approach where people would rather sweep the whole issue under the carpet as you have so neatly illustrated.
Links to the data below.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/educ...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/201...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/money/2018/...
White kids underperform because of the "rise of popularism"...lul. Fml. Tbh, that sounds a little racist (again, I remember 15 years ago when people were saying similar stuff about "black culture").
Nope. No wage gap (if you look at actual studies of this i.e. by the Low Wage Commission). There is a huge gap for some ethnic minorities but not blacks (either British or migrants).
As said, you have proved every point I made. Thanks.