Omegavegeta wrote:
Gbaji wrote:
But it's not. Demonstrably not, in fact. If that were true, then only those blacks who are direct descendants of slaves would be in the group performing statistically poorly. But the same poor performance is present among blacks who have no US slaves in their ancestry.
I'm only talking about African Americans (descendants of slaves). If you'd like to lump all black people together, have at it. I'd love to see a cite though.
Given that it's hard to even statistically determine what percentage of blacks are descendants of US slaves, much less which ones specifically, its hard for me to believe that the volumes of studies showing discrepancies between black and white in this country magically take that into account. What do you want me to cite for this? I'm not even sure what you're asking me to do here. The US census does not distinguish based on slavery in someones ancestry. Where do you think most of our socio-economic data comes from?
Do you really need me to link to some one else on the interwebs pointing this out?
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Gbaji wrote:
Clearly some more recent socio-economic factors are involved which have a much stronger role in this than whether someone was a slave back in the 19th century.
It's certainly a combination of factors; but the fact is the biggest factor in how much money someone is going to make over their lifetime is whom their parents are (& how much wealth they have).
Absolutely. But less significant is their grandparents, or their great grandparents, and so on. There's a point at which the current fortunes of each individual today are influenced very little by the specific conditions of their ancestors over 130 years ago. Even group statistics should have been normalized over that period of time if all we were looking at was economic conditions.
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The fact is, the descendants of slaves have always been at a disadvantage when compared to the descendants of slave owners & very little has ever been done to try & close that gap. Further more, most white people are fairly ignorant when it comes to just HOW bad African Americans have it.
Or we can say that some scholars fail to see what that gap really means. I think that most people don't see money as being the problem, and that's what's reflected in that studies results.
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In reality, "white households average about $150,000 more wealth than the typical black family. Overall, total wealth for white families is about five times greater than that of black families, a gap that has persisted for years."
I'd really need to know how they calculated wealth there. And again, wealth has less to do with how much you start with and more to do with what you do with what you have. While Trading Places is an hilarious film, it's not indicative of the likely result. Whether someone accumulates or loses wealth is mostly determined by their own actions, and that is most influenced by their own learned habits. I suspect that much of the gap this study focuses on is white people assuming that if *they* were black, their outcomes would not be affected much.
Obviously, this is going to depend on how much you view black success/failure as being influenced by what they are taught at home growing up and their own expectations and actions and habits. I think it's reasonable to expect that a white person magically transformed into a black person but otherwise possessing the same memory, personality, skills, habits, etc would perform better economically than someone who has been black all his life.
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In regards to reparations, "data suggest that such resistance [to reparations]is not because white Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt, or ethically flawed,†Banaji said.
“White Americans suffer from a glaring ignorance about what it means to live as a black American.â€
Again, I disagree. I think that white americans understand better than the typical sociology professor that being raised in a black (American) household has a greater negative effect than simply "being black". But it's a factor that most race studies folks don't want to look at because it shifts the blame for the results from external racism to internal factors within the black community as a whole.
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THEN, when you remove the black-white connotations, and people are instead given a choice of being born in a fictional country as a minority, they'd want $500k - $1million to be born that minority. This further supports that whites are pretty blind towards the inequalities that African Americans face in the USA.
Or they don't agree with those conducting the study that being a minority in the US is really as much of a hardship. I think that most white americans really do believe that each individual can succeed no matter what their skin color. Again, this comes down to how much you see the group outcomes deriving from actions/habits within that group, or some sort of external racism expressed towards that group.
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Once again, I don't think AA or Reparations are the best solutions. However, I don't think the former solves the problem that being born the descendant of an African American is a disadvantage. And the latter is a fantasy, but would address that issue.
I don't think either solves anything. It's a topic that is brought up mostly as an attempt to paint those who disagree as racists or bigots, and not a whole lot more.
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I'm fine if any & all of you disagree with me, but what would you do to fix the problem?
I think we should first identify what the problem actually is, what is causing it, and *then* look at solutions. But I think that most of those pushing for a solution today don't want to do this because they wouldn't like what they might find.