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Comment by dgudkov | Hacker News Reader

>Historical discrimination has left black families much poorer than they would otherwise be.

What about immigrants that arrived to the US with a suitcase and $100 in pocket?

You really can't compare the two cases. When you're born into that type of system, where your skin color is seen as less desirable, it's easy to develop inferiority complex and a lot of insecurities that will hinder ones will to reach for the top. I'm from a third world country where a lot of emigrants to the US tend to be more successful than the average Black American. It is easy to jump to the conclusion that they are lazy and all, but I have come to realize that we were not born or have parents that have been demoralised by the systemic racism common in the US

At least you admit that the root cause is not poverty, but the mindset.

I don't think this hypothesis holds much water to be honest. The most effective way to get better jobs isn't to have the right mindset (although it helps), it is to know the right people who will think about you when something comes up. This is also where I could imagine race (and similar things play a huge role).

Let me leave you in the projects at age 10 with a poor family. Let's see how far your mindset takes you.

Exactly. But the mindset behind the above comment to be precise.

“it’s just a mindset”, takes all responsibility off of the ruling class and places it all on the backs individual. While I’m all for taking responsibility for oneself in a rigged system, I’m not going to pretend the system isn’t rigged and shouldn’t be fixed. Imagine if we promoted approaching flawed and broken software architecture like this.

> Imagine if we promoted approaching flawed and broken software architecture like this

We do. All the time. It's why half the shit we work on is covered in a thick layer of technical debt and the other half is written in self contained microservices.

A software stack from a company that's been around long enough is going to be more random, redundant and glued together than the processes in our evolutionary biology.

Agreed. That’s why I put “promoted approaching” rather than “approached”. But you’re 100% correct.

I use the 'promote better' ideas when dealing with people in poverty. Usually most of what happens is what I call 'bad choice' economics. Usually do one thing or another. One is not 'fun' the other is. The 'fun' one gets you right now but usually hurts you weeks from now. The not fun one helps you long term. Usually the excuse of 'oh I have money coming later' with no idea of what if 'later' does not happen.

One guy I had to talk down from having his car detailed (150 bucks) vs paying the 2 month late car payment. He literally did not think of the idea of they will take the car away from you if he did not make the payment, until I pointed it out to him. He was very fixated on the 'clean the car'. That is but one small example. I have hundreds of examples like that.

That short term thinking is absolutely acidic long term on you, your family, and friends. It can create a spiral that is very hard to get out of. Being poor costs substantially more long term as well. I as a wealthy person can buy things ahead of time when on sale because I know I will use them in the future. Being poor means you buy in the 'now'. You do not buy for the future because you do not have the means to do so. So on average simple things cost you more. But being in the 'now' can hurt you even worse by giving you fun vs not fun choices. But not being able to see you have been give an bit of 'luck' to make your future better.

The short term thinking was exacerbated by historical discrimination. There were cases where black businesses became successful but then were forced out by whites who wanted what they had. Such a system doesn’t promote long term thinking.

> When you're born into that type of system

The trouble is that the way out is not easy. We can no longer keep talking about "you're at a disadvantage because you're born into x." Even if it's true, mentally it paints a victimization culture that brings people down. If you tell someone the major of their problems are due to their class, or the history of their people, or police or some other bogeyman (both real and imagined), how are people going to see a way out?

We can't keep blaming. Maybe the narrative needs to be, "Yes, the scales are not as fair as they could be. Maybe they're super unfair. But fuck em. Show them what you can do, and don't stop until you beat them at their game!"

I don't know if that's naive or overly simplistic, or if it's just some form or noble lie or noble truth.

A lot of it is luck too. My father grew up during a war, his family lost everything and had to start from scratch. He made it through University where his two brothers struggled to learn English. They all grew up in the same situation, and he's told me he didn't know what made him different. Higher IQ? Stronger drive? Who knows.

> A lot of it is luck too

Yeah it is. But if you model it as a statistical likelihood and you start two populations at different distributions you would see how long it would take for them to "catch-up" as a group.

What you're telling people is "keep at it, you'll get there in a couple decades". Meanwhile the disparity continues, leads to more prejudices (because yeah, statistically they're poorer/underrepresented) and counteracts some of the "pure luck" gains.

I hate to break it to you, but it is a noble lie. Black people in America were born into these disadvantages long before people were talking about them. There wasn't a victimization culture, but they were still being brought down, because the culture isn't what is bringing them down, but rather the system that was designed and implemented to keep them poor and disadvantaged.

Weren't many of those kids coming from India, for example, "born into that type of sytem"? Isn't that exactly why they are here and not there? I would dare say that racism/classism in modern day India is much worse than it is here in the contemporary US.

Another wrong analogy. If you look at the statistics correctly, you will notice a lot of emigrant from India to to the US tend to be from the upper class

The difference here is an immigrant is coming into the system of their own volition, while black people in the USA are born into the system. Both immigrants and black people (and many other groups indeed) suffer greatly but one has been pushed down for centuries and, while the methods are less obvious now, the economic inequality is rooted deep in the system and will affect people for generations to come.

They didn't have a large majority consider them inferior for long, or being bitter that they are not longer their slaves (like they were for their grandparents and earlier) and thinking "how dare they not know their place".

Those immigrants also didn't have seggregation laws against them until the 70s...

> They didn't have a large majority consider them inferior for long

Arguably untrue, ask a Trump voter of your choice about whether they think Chinese or Latino looking people are inferior to whites...

> seggregation laws against them until the 70s

All the SV hiring we are talking about is people born in the 80s and 90s. How are those worse off than the SE Asian or middle eastern first/second generation immigrant who also possibly gets racially stereotyped in some places but doesn't have preferential privileged college admissions and special scholarships?

> ask a Trump voter of your choice about whether they think Chinese or Latino looking people are inferior to whites

They are not. There you have your answer.

I would posit you have created a 'hallucination trump supporter' that does not exist.

Consider the internment of Japanese during World War 2.

"...we find large place effects on individual economic outcomes like income, education, socioeconomic status, house prices, and housing quality. People assigned to richer locations do better on all measures. Random location assignment affected intergenerational economic outcomes as well, with families assigned to more socially mobile areas... displaying lower cross-generational correlation in outcomes."[1]

[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/shoag/publications/long-run-caus...

That was during war, lasted only a few years, and with endless "we're sorry" afterwards.

Hardly the same as 400 years of slavery, and 150 years of Jim Crow, lynchings, redlining, racism, seggregation, and so on...

> What about immigrants that arrived to the US with a suitcase and $100 in pocket?

What about them? You haven't given the reader anything in the way of argument yet; you've just pointed at another group.

Immigrants are a very self-selected group don't you think. Would you think that 100% of the people you know would either

* have the ability to pass the legal immigration process of the US if they weren't citizens

* have the courage and drive to fight for a better live by abandoning their status-quo situation and move to another country

Lots of them make it nowhere great (though nowhere great in the US could still be vastly better than the conditions they came from).

In any case, you’re acting like this is a sure path to a good life. It’s not. It’s a cultural trope.

What about them? The majority of immigrants do not arrive at the border with a suitcase and $100. But it makes a great story for the bootstraps demographic.

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