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The Source of Black Poverty

The Source of Black Poverty?

  • The culture-of-poverty option

    Votes: 21 42.9%
  • The black culture option

    Votes: 17 34.7%
  • The racism exists option

    Votes: 10 20.4%
  • All three, with some lean towards 1 & 2

    Votes: 4 8.2%
  • Any combo, including government

    Votes: 13 26.5%
  • Other

    Votes: 14 28.6%

  • Total voters
    49
It's not "construed as racism", it is racism. Your post is racist and you are a racist. You are treating attitudes shared by many young WHITE Americans as unique to young black Americans as a means of denigrating the latter and acting as if the latter is inferior to the former. How many young WHITE people are inundated with messages of "you have to be a famous, rich, and having lots of meaningless sex to be happy and the best way to achieve this is to be a reality star, pop star or greedy/amoral banker"? Most of them. How many teenage WHITE boys worship those same rappers you mentioned and praise the idea of smoking marijuana and using cocaine and having a hundred sex partners? Many of them.

Your racism is not in your recognition that young black people face a lot of damaging messages. Your racism is in your inability or refusal to recognize that young white people face similar damaging messages. Your racism is in treating "black culture" as inferior to "white culture" by highlighting problems in the former while ignoring the fact that the same problems exist in the latter. It's racism, pure and simple. In fact, it's kind of like how straight people denigrate gay people by attributing things like promiscuity to "gay culture" while ignoring promiscuity among straight people.

you both make valid points, but i believe your post best illustrates what is preventing many from breaking the cycle of poverty
yes, members of all races subscribe to negative behaviors, keeping many of them in the lower rungs of economic achievement
but those who refuse to do the things that lift oneself out of poverty - getting an education, getting married and staying married, not having a child until there is a marriage and the financial wherewithal to maintain a family - those negative traits are most endemic among black people - if not in raw numbers, certainly as a percentage of the population
yes, absolutely, many persons within the white, red, yellow and brown cultures remain in poverty for the same reasons. this is not something exclusive to the black culture, but this is something much more prevalent within the black community than the others
and here is another example displaying the substantial portion within the black community which refuses to play by society's rules:
graph racial disparity prisons.jpg
yes, enforcement is uneven, and often biased against members of the black community, but it is a hard sell to convince me that this disproportionate amount of criminalization does not speak to something which desperately needs to be cured within the black culture
i get that there remains a residue from jim crow laws, overt racism, and a minimal economic legacy to pass forward to the next generation; those things certainly do serve to handicap the members of the black community from achieving a higher economic standing
just as i refuse to blame the teachers for poor educational results of students when we observe that many of those kids in the same classrooms learned what was being taught, evidencing it was the student rather than the teacher/system bearing the brunt of the blame for their educational failures, i also observe large numbers from the black community who do the right things to achieve financial success in America. they succeeded by their own work ethic and willingness to make the right decisions. something must explain why there is so much economic success being experienced by members of the black community - and there is, just as something else must explain the reasons why such a large number of that same community continue to reside in poverty

i believe there is a dearth of effective leadership within the black community. where once we had the likes of Dr King, we now have al 'twanna brawley' sharpton and jesse 'hymietown' jackson. bastards who are self serving shills who promote black failures as something inflicted upon the black community; those who tell those who choose to listen that members of the black community are not to blame for their bad consequences reaped from bad decisions. instead, they insist, the high levels of continued black poverty are visited upon them from outside (white) forces

even within the predominantly black churches, the non-religious focus is often on telling the congregation about the mechanisms available to obtain government assistance, and not on how to become productive citizens who will not remain reliant on such public services

but what most alarmed me about your post was your willingness to insist the other forum member is a racist because he dared voice opinions about what is presently lacking within America's black culture. that name-calling kills the dialog. without a discussion about what is preventing the black community from experiencing economic success, is it really expected that many who are in poverty will actually rise out of it by repeating the very actions that caused them to be in poverty. quit the name calling and let's continue the discussion
 
A real failure of the current educational system is that it teaches people to live to dogmatic slogans and ideologies - rather than pragmatic reality. Schools - nor most parents - teach their children how to play the cards in life they actual have and how to constantly be improving their hand in the game of life.

Take jobs, for example. The military has ALWAYS been the best road for people out of poverty. However, the competition to go into the military is becoming very competitive. The military increasingly is adding disqualifiers.

Do schools teach about those? How many high school kids know if they get at tattoo they are barred from military service? How many parents know if they put their kid on ANY type of psyche or behavior drug, or even just an inhaler, their child loses that option for employment?

Schools and society no longer teach people how to succeed in the COMPETITION of life - and that's what it is. Certainly is economically. Rather, they teach feel-good nice platitudes and ideology. And then the kid suddenly is 18 and with NO CLUE about actual reality.

Insightful post. And points, yet again, to a school system that doesn't even begin to teach students how to succeed in life. I had a client who told me, "The only way I survived my neighborhood was to enlist in the service at 17. If I hadn't? I'd have been dead or in jail before I was 20." My hearing that was a shocking truth.

When I've talked about 'teaching kids to succeed' in our inner-city schools on this board, I've been met with, "Who are you to say they can't go to college??" WTF does that have to do with anything?? And who said teaching kids to deal with real life precludes college? We need two tracks in our schools, in my opinion: #1 On to college; #2 On with life. We fail at the second one.
 
Good point. Plenty of that here, and plenty of commonalities as well. Lack of education and family structure, along with dependence on welfare programs. Personal habits and laziness fit in there as well. Not uncommon here at the beginning of the month to see people in Walmart wearing whatever they slept in last night with a cart full of bad choices. Prepackaged foods, a carton of smokes and the latest video game. We have a very low black population here, but for the most part they are average or above average income and lifestyle.

The slavery issue is rediculous. There is nobody walking around today in this country who was a slave or slave owner. Let it go already. When I have changed jobs in the past it was not uncommon to take a week or two in between, but 200 years is a bit much, don't you think? In addition the descendants of the Chinese railroad workers did not seem to suffer the same fate. And before I get "But you don't understand because your great grandparents weren't slaves", I'm Polish. My descendants came here to escape the Nazis MUCH more recently. Somehow for them adversity built strength and character.

It's not that slavery is still in effect, it's the precedent event that set a standard for which following generations used as an example. It became a class distinctive, dividing line that culturally was impossible to erase.

The Latino's have a very similar hurdle to overcome, while the Asians and Indians assimilate into euro-Caucasian culture more easily. It's not 'IMO' a racism separation, as much as a cultural one, that's why I mentioned redneck/hillbillies. They're typically not successful bankers, doctors and lawyers for the same reasons.

We're almost ALL actually race centric or racists, though we're not all mean spirited bigots. Much of what is brought up as racism is merely a person favoring their cultural proclivities, which is not a horrible crime or even unethical.

I find all this casual name calling of people as racists, baby killers and perverts disgustingly stupid and hateful.
 
It's not "construed as racism", it is racism. Your post is racist and you are a racist. You are treating attitudes shared by many young WHITE Americans as unique to young black Americans as a means of denigrating the latter and acting as if the latter is inferior to the former. How many young WHITE people are inundated with messages of "you have to be a famous, rich, and having lots of meaningless sex to be happy and the best way to achieve this is to be a reality star, pop star or greedy/amoral banker"? Most of them. How many teenage WHITE boys worship those same rappers you mentioned and praise the idea of smoking marijuana and using cocaine and having a hundred sex partners? Many of them.

Your racism is not in your recognition that young black people face a lot of damaging messages. Your racism is in your inability or refusal to recognize that young white people face similar damaging messages. Your racism is in treating "black culture" as inferior to "white culture" by highlighting problems in the former while ignoring the fact that the same problems exist in the latter. It's racism, pure and simple. In fact, it's kind of like how straight people denigrate gay people by attributing things like promiscuity to "gay culture" while ignoring promiscuity among straight people.

I am not pretending that it is not affecting a lot of young white men.But you cannot ignore how the likes of Lil Wayne and Future are tolerated within the black community despite what they openly promote. I have worked with a lot of college educated black men who speak openly about the "ignorant black folk" in their community. To put it beyond critism because it permeates into other racial cultures is to ignore how innately self destructive it is. Please try to defend a Future song. What is the equivalent in other racial cultures to this thuggish bullcrap?

I do not know of a huge music industry within the gay community that promotes promiscuity.
 
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Soon it wont matter because all of us will be poor.
With the extinction of the middle class on the horizon and the Right's quest to take from the poor and give to the 1%, it wont be long before all of us are clumped together at the bottom with the 1% owning it all.
Our infrastructure will begin to fail in less than 20 years but we can't build a bridge because some billionaire needs some welfare, somewhere.

Sources please? Everything you say is bull**** btw, just for the record, but carry on.
 
It's not that slavery is still in effect, it's the precedent event that set a standard for which following generations used as an example. It became a class distinctive, dividing line that culturally was impossible to erase.

The Latino's have a very similar hurdle to overcome, while the Asians and Indians assimilate into euro-Caucasian culture more easily. It's not 'IMO' a racism separation, as much as a cultural one, that's why I mentioned redneck/hillbillies. They're typically not successful bankers, doctors and lawyers for the same reasons.

We're almost ALL actually race centric or racists, though we're not all mean spirited bigots. Much of what is brought up as racism is merely a person favoring their cultural proclivities, which is not a horrible crime or even unethical.

I find all this casual name calling of people as racists, baby killers and perverts disgustingly stupid and hateful.

I like your take on it. However there are cultures that use events of the past as an excuse to take the path of least resistance. There is no basis in past slavery that translates to today's lack of family structure and disproportionate percentage of abortion. In my families ascension in this country, starting as poor immigrants and rising to positions of business and political power within just a few generations, we did not see someone catching a break and doing well for themselves only to pack up a few of their closest friends and leave their neighborhoods behind. They used their success to help those who were there before their success. Consider many professional athletes and entertainers who suddenly strike it rich and disappear from the culture they escaped rather than staying to uplift those they grew up with (while at the same time claiming their "street cred"). Fathers who have no involvement with their children, would be mothers who abort their children (granted, likely because they can not afford them in the absence of the father) but continue to do this knowing how it ended the last time. To me it is not so much a remnant of a previous culture as it is a selfishness and willingness to devalue human life.
 
This thread is another gathering point on the forum for white male racists who are failures in life. Pathetic people.
 
Insightful post. And points, yet again, to a school system that doesn't even begin to teach students how to succeed in life. I had a client who told me, "The only way I survived my neighborhood was to enlist in the service at 17. If I hadn't? I'd have been dead or in jail before I was 20." My hearing that was a shocking truth.

When I've talked about 'teaching kids to succeed' in our inner-city schools on this board, I've been met with, "Who are you to say they can't go to college??" WTF does that have to do with anything?? And who said teaching kids to deal with real life precludes college? We need two tracks in our schools, in my opinion: #1 On to college; #2 On with life. We fail at the second one.

The other failure is essentially no education in terms of economic future. Learning Shakespeare and social correctness is nice, but it doesn't pay the rent.
 
Hey Joko, go fly a kite buddy. My message is 100% true in each of the facts I laid out. If you can't handle the truth, that's your hangup. Now quit being the hall monitor and go find a hobby.

What you posted are racist lies.
 
Call me a racist if you want, but as a social worker, it is largely the "black culture option". The others play a role too, including the government, but nothing does more harm to the African American community than the African American community. It is a culture that often embraces and celebrates ignorance.

Forum rules do not allow me to call you a racist even if you invite doing so.
 
What is the source of white poverty? It must be absent white daddies, white culture, the white community and white leadership. Right?
 
IMO, the source of 'black' poverty is a lack of integration.

'Blacks' should be integrating with other 'races' FAR more then they do.

Stop grouping only with other 'blacks', move out of 'black ghetto's' and into better areas...even if it means sharing apartments to get by at first.

Befriend people of other 'races', work with them, socialize with them, marry them (if you love them), have children with them (if you wish)..blur the 'race' distinction so America becomes a true melting pot.

But huddling together along 'racial' lines does little more, IMO, then propagating negative 'racial' stereotypes that does no good for any decent American.


It's 2014...the days of 'race-based' communities should be long a thing of the past.

Ghettos should be bulldozed down.
 
Lol, go, sing and dance for your friends. Maybe they'll invite you to dinner every now and then.

Your messages on the forum frequently are intensely bigoted and filled with excuses and self pity. You want to put people in zoos so you can point at them and declare "pity them!" and tossing in "pity me!"

Excuses are worthless. Self pity is worthless. Sitting in a puddle of mud and blaming others for it while staying there is ignorant - but that is what you demand people do - because your views are fundamentally bigoted and racist.

My friends - as you put it - come to our house. Ours is the largest and most costly, because my wife and I both play our cards in life particularly well and we both have a life history to expending the efforts to improve the hand we have. We also are better at manipulating and organizing people to our benefit.

Your view is to just rage that the game is unfair and accuse everyone of cheating. Its called being dedicated to being a loser - and demanding everyone else be a loser too.
 
Poverty is not color-based.

Correct, but the forum's white male racists will insist otherwise. It makes them feel superior, where otherwise they are nobody failures.
 
I like your take on it. However there are cultures that use events of the past as an excuse to take the path of least resistance. There is no basis in past slavery that translates to today's lack of family structure and disproportionate percentage of abortion. In my families ascension in this country, starting as poor immigrants and rising to positions of business and political power within just a few generations, we did not see someone catching a break and doing well for themselves only to pack up a few of their closest friends and leave their neighborhoods behind. They used their success to help those who were there before their success. Consider many professional athletes and entertainers who suddenly strike it rich and disappear from the culture they escaped rather than staying to uplift those they grew up with (while at the same time claiming their "street cred"). Fathers who have no involvement with their children, would be mothers who abort their children (granted, likely because they can not afford them in the absence of the father) but continue to do this knowing how it ended the last time. To me it is not so much a remnant of a previous culture as it is a selfishness and willingness to devalue human life.



Nobody is saying that the euro-Caucasian culture didn't work hard for their success. But as a culture that is familiar and comfortable with their members, they have not blended in outside differences or influences very well. They couldn't change enough to include Native Americans, so they either killed them or put them on Reservations.

And historically, only recently has the racial field been leveled to be more inclusive. Any race can compete in the mixed, but culturally Caucasian dominate, capital business system. And though it's changing, it's still a club that you have to fit into.


I blame it on MiO, it changes everything.



tumblr_mcuc6o12k81qj689bo1_400.gif
 
My concern for the black community takes a different form, I want them to have jobs. I believe it is devastating to black men to have such an astronomically high yearlong joblessness rate. This is why I'm so damn vocal about illegal immigration. This is a displacement that is happening. I understand that employers would rather hire a compliant Mexican illegal instead of a young black man but too goddamn bad, that young black man is a citizen and the Mexican illegal is not. With that job, a climb up the social mobility ladder becomes easier to achieve. A job is the first tool needed to start repairing the dysfunction in the black community.

^ Another racist message.
 
Interesting topic...
I cannot claim much personal experience with the situation in question, since the area I live in is predominately white, and rural at that.
However, IMO option 4, or possibly 5, is the most likely.

The main cause of all poverty is cultural. There may be a race-specific culture that reinforces the poverty culture in some areas, but I think that they are mainly one and the same.
I also think some sliver of racism exists still. And is in part reinforced (especially in areas that are both poverty-ridden and predominately populated by one race) by the 2 cultures previously mentioned. If a racist can point to "those blacks" and say "it's their culture (even if it IS, albeit area-specific more than race-specific)", it allows them to (erroneously) claim that race is one of, perhaps the main, factor....


I also think that some government policies, again area-specific, contribute to the culture of poverty...



Actually, I think that many of the problems we have these days can be traced back to changes in culture that have had negative effects on things.

Some would claim things as "negative effects" (gay marriage becoming more prevalent) when they are not (or at least debatably so). This, IMO, dilutes the focus on actual negative effects of cultural changes.


One of the MAIN cultural changes I see going on is that people tend to accept government oversight and control of far more things than would have been reasonable just a decade ago, let alone two.

Or perhaps that has always been the case, I dunno...


Still, I get this impression that the...foundation, if you will, of our identity (as the USA) is....dissipating. Some of the dissipation is good (racism, bigotry, etc). But it seems that the dying bad is taking the good with it...


Hopefully something replaces it.
 
Yeah I took a long look and decided not to stick anything of mine in this particular snake-hole....
 
People trying to blame it on certain specific things are simplifying a complicated issue. It is indeed culture but it is also economics, history, disparity in sentencing and law enforcement, the war on drugs, breakdown of black family's... I mean seriously, it has many factors.

The only thing that is for certain is no amount of government intervention is going to change anything. The only people who can fix the black community as a whole is the black community.

A good place to start is teaching our young the importance and value of education and that education is cool. In school we need to be teaching them how to become PRODUCTIVE members of society. Teach them how to write a resume in English. How to speak English. The fact that people accept ebonics as OK is horrifying to me. During an interview the woman (who came dressed in a halter top and shorts) replied to "what do you want out of this position?" with "to git minez." I **** you not. How in the name of all that is holy is someone to get a job when they can't speak, and they can't dress??? Walmart here we come! I mean Asians and others come here with heavy accents and are easier to understand.

In the end we need to start as a people... someplace. Of course when a white person points out these failings and asks for solutions they are racist. When black people ask these questions they are uncle toms. The media is content to keep us racially divided for ratings "white Hispanic." :roll:

So I guess the problem will not get any help anytime soon.
 
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