Hacker News Reader

Comment by jenkins6g | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, but as a black man who grew up fatherless be mindful why black fathers are absent. Many times it's not by choice. There were and still are intentional systems in place to make it difficult for fathers to get jobs, stay within the prison system, and have access to quality education. I urge people commenting to ask their black friends for their insights. I came from an inner city and graduated from CMU. The two worlds are stark and mind blowing. But in the end, more mentors at an early age can help break the cycle. That's how you can play your part.

View on HN

Specifically, I understand a 1968 law put into effect the Man in the House rule. Black families had to decide if welfare would pay better than the father's job. Many left the house so the mother and child(ren) could receive the welfare payment. The Moe Factz podcast has been helpful to me in understanding these structural problems in society.

https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Man-in-the-Ho...

http://www.moefactz.com/

What was the justification for this rule? It almost seems intentionally malicious.

It sounds progressive at the time.

Men worked, if one wasn't part of the home then women needed more support.

poor women worked for decades prior to 1968

I'm guessing the justification was intentional maliciousness.

The authors of this regulation probably assumed that married couples would not be induced to split just to collect money, and that single moms would stay chaste in order to collect, and thus not have more out-of-wedlock children. So they set up a law that incentivized behavior they were trying to avoid. It's like the Marriage Penalty ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty ) except worse.

So it probably wasn't a result of maliciousness but rather a lack of imagination and empathy (aka stupidity).

According to your first link, the rule had been in place in some jurisdictions prior to 1968, but was struck down by the US Supreme Court at that time.

I'm at the end of my knowledge on the issue. Someone else will need to weigh in.

Such systems exist today, at least in Alaska. The GRA is only available to single parents. https://singlemothersgrants.org/single-mothers-assistance-in...

To clarify: the Supreme Court did not say that assistance could not be restricted to single parents. The "Man in the House" rule said that a woman was not single if she even had a boyfriend who was not her children's father, if her boyfriend ever visited her house. That's the part that was struck down.

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.

I struggle to buy this line of thinking that, somehow, the epidemic of single-parent (and no parent) households among blacks (or any ethnic or economic group) is the consequence of discriminatory systems or conspiracy or racism. Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now than when the government was enforcing Jim Crow, when schools were segregated by force, when the Ku Klux Klan was not only active but had active members sitting in Congress, and when academics openly claimed that non-whites were inferior to whites and proposed eugenic 'solutions'. Those horrible blights on American (and Western) society have mostly been buried yet the numbers of black children growing up without a father has exploded. Whatever contribution systemic racism, institutional racism, conscious bias, unconscious bias, etc. (which I concede are real things) have on health of the family unit within black American culture, something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction.

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.

> Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now than when the government was enforcing Jim Crow, when schools were segregated by force, when the Ku Klux Klan was not only active but had active members sitting in Congress, and when academics openly claimed that non-whites were inferior to whites and proposed eugenic 'solutions'.

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.

>Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now

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?

>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?

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 don't think you fully answered either of my questions. I appreciate that your limited personal experience is closer to what we would like to see, at least in your telling of it.

I still await your further thoughts.

It appears I can't answer your questions to your satisfaction. I live in the deep South. I provided my (not limited) experience and exposure to professional environments as evidence. And that experience, and the application of Occam's razor, tells me your claims that bias and racism is more effective now that it is comparatively invisible is absurd.

You could answer this question:

>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.

>You could answer this question:

>>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.

>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.

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 struggle to buy this line of thinking that, somehow, the epidemic [...] is the consequence of discriminatory systems or conspiracy or racism.

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.

> Additionally, I'm suspicious when I hear the 'system' being blamed because it's a convenient scapegoat.

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.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

The infamous Lee Atwater (advisor to Reagan, Bush 1 and chairman of RNC) quote comes to mind:

> 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.

Greater percentage of black men in prison today than in the jim crow era. If you're in prison, you can't be there for your children.

In my hometown, DC, one out of every three black men will be imprisoned in their lifetime.

There was that crack epidemic started by the CIA.

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.

That’s certainly true, but I’m not sure it’s a complete explanation. Jobs and education are less available in say Bangladesh than in US inner cities, and even among impoverished people families remain intact. Strong cultural and religious taboos on divorce and single parenthood play a big role in that. It’s worth noting that the percentage of white children raised without fathers has tripled since the 1960-1970s: https://images.app.goo.gl/SkTaWF9nyoZwXUbBA. That’s not a change that’s caused by institutional factors.

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.

Surely you must have met lower caste people in Bangladesh? You mean standing with respect to what?

I have a friend who switched worlds in adulthood simply because someone convinced him it was possible to do it. When he describes it, it isn't like it was a pep talk, it was more like someone telling you that you can change your own oil in your car and sends you steps. Part of that is that he was ready to hear it, and was quite smart, but if no one had said anything.

I like the phrase 'switched worlds'.

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.

>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.

I just happened to read a story where an Asian was killed while two blacks trying to steal laptop from him https://abc7news.com/5811847

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.

You can't understand someone having four kids?

No. Non of them has father present. I thought the context was obvious.

Currently, no. We don't know what the situation was like when they were having kids.

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.

Four kids as a baby mama, I'm guessing. A couple with an extended family can handle four kids, but an individual who may not be all that tight with anyone who can keep an eye on the kids... Well, chances are they'll fail at a lot of important things.

Ignoring the other possibilities, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_birth

I wonder if you would feel the same way if it was a good Middle American Catholic Family....

"and no daddy in their lives". I thought the context was obvious.

Woman and man get four kids together. Man dies or dissappears for some other reason. How is that hard to understand? Or did some racial bias make you assume that all the four kids had different fathers?

I don't know. "no daddy in their lives" makes me interpret differently. I guess.

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.

"Two blacks"

You're seriously just going to identity people by their color of their skin?

Interesting how you skipped past "an Asian" just a few words earlier in the sentence.

Humans, like all surviving animals, have a strong reproductive instinct, as required by evolution. Thus, many women have children.

>I urge people commenting to ask their black friends for their insights.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com