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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:
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