Or, you know, fathers.
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.
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.
"Don't be snarky."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
“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.