If I had to guess, I would say it's the cultural imperative of the family unit.
One of the worst things slavery did, to african americans as a people, is to strip away their cultural meaning of family unit.
I think it's on-par with the holocaust in terms of the human cost. Yes, there are a lot of other things, but not having a stable family unit while growing up messes up the next generation, perpetuating the cycle. That is how black people are different from any other ethnic minority in the US. And that's why I think hispanic people(PC term?) will climb the economic ladder before/faster.
Great point and I'm glad you brought this up. Like I mentioned, America has many gaping wounds which I believe can be traced back to institutional racism. When talking about the prevalence of black kids raised under single family homes we have to take into account why these kids may be raised that way. Is it a character flaw of black families? I don't think so. I'm black and familial ties run DEEP in almost every family I know: especially those with Southern roots where most of black America still resides.
I think the answer to this question can be found in looking at incarnation rates. Right now there are about 1.5 million black men who are "off the grid" because they are locked up in prison[0]. How many of them have kids? How many men who were previously locked up were incarnated while their child was of elementary school age, and could not be there to provide the stability that is so crucial in the first five years of a kids life for them to succeed? Even if they came back into their kids life at 7 or 8 years old they missed out on kindergarten, which many study have shown that kindergarten performances correlates to school performance later in life.
My mother is a child psychologist who works primarily with victims of crime and, overwhelmingly, African-Americans. She's come to the conclusion that there are specific parenting faults that you find in the African-American population that you don't find in other similarly-impoverished populations and she believes that they're a legacy of slavery. Parenting abilities/tendencies/techniques are all passed down through the generations. We, as humans, learn our parenting by being parented. But, too often during slavery, this chain was broken. Children were ripped away from their parents and that accumulation of parenting practice was lost.
Since involved parents are the single biggest determining factor in educational outcomes and education is the surest way out of poverty, this legacy of slavery rings the most true to me as the explanation for why African-Americans find it so much harder to break out of the cycle of poverty than other minority groups.
Perhaps the best group to compare with are more recent immigrants from Africa. I have a number of friends who's parents came to the US from Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia. They had very little when they arrived here and have the same skin color which is purported to be such a disadvantage to the African-American? population. And while they've universally told me that they have experienced discrimination and prejudice, they've also not had much difficulty lifting themselves out of poverty by the second generation.
> family support, educational background, financial position,
All of which are harder to come by or worse on average for black Americans, because of the US's history of race-based slavery and racial discrimination.
I can't speak for him, but I don't think there is any sort of hidden implication.
As for the problem? Well, the 72% illegitimacy rate among African-Americans is an absolute social disaster (1). No amount of school funding or social welfare programs can fix an economic problem of that scope. And yes, I believe that this is a cultural problem. What is the solution? I don't know, but I'm open to debating, engaging, and supporting policy that will help.
"How have we gotten here? What has shifted in African American customs, in our community, in our consciousness, that has made marriage seem unnecessary or unattainable?"
Well, for one thing: Welfare. Welfare was created at a time when most poor, single moms were "the deserving poor" -- ie widowed -- and having a child out of wedlock was a big taboo and hardly done. Welfare, while well-meaning, was (unfortunately) designed in a manner that rewards women for becoming poor, single moms -- and thus actively grew the population that fits this profile by changing the social contract. Although (iirc) most people on welfare are white, the small amount of money involved in getting food stamps and welfare is more alluring to people who are very poor and live in neighborhoods where the mentality is one of hopelessness, with no expectation that one can get ahead honestly. Add in the fact that blacks are "last hired, first fired" and the tendency for young black males to be the biggest victim of that reality, and you have a situation ripe for developing a culture where a woman has a baby by one man, gets on welfare, breaks up with him and then finds a different boyfriend -- in part because a father is expected to provide for his kids (and gets booted out the door when he cannot) but mom's new boyfriend is seen as generous for doing anything for the kids, even if he doesn't actually provide for them. "Gifts" are enough.
There are some books, articles and studies about such things. I've read a fair amount of stuff like that over the years.
On the upside, I've seen some stuff that indicates that black women tend to have more say in how the money is spent when they are part of a couple than white women do. The paychecks of black women are more needed for a black couple to make it at all. The paycheck of a married white woman who has kids is more likely to be seen as "fun money" -- something the family can spend on vacations and other extras but not really needed for basic necessities -- and this tends to carry with it less "voting" power when financial decisions are made.
> We can also imagine an inner city black who has a choice between two value systems
Far too many black families do no have the luxury to choose a new value system. Extreme generational poverty is bad enough, but many are not allowed to even start on a path towards self improvement because 7.7% of adult black men are currently in prison. How, exactly, does "pro-family culture" improve social mobility for the 1-in-9 black children with a parent in prison.
> It may be that bourgeois values are hostage to other social, economic, and cultural factors.
Exactly - it wouldn't surprise me at all if the "benefits" attributed to marriage are actually a proxy for race.
How could it not be terrible? Black america is screwed. The rate of fatherlessness is apocalyptic. Especially when you combine that with the fact that single parent households, with the mother as the parent, produce far more criminals and mentally ill per "family" than households with both parents.
Black america is screwed to be a perpetual underclass. imo.
Though I imagine the prevalence is much higher in black youth, this is a general issue that goes beyond race.
A stable upbringing with a family that you can use as role models. If you don't have that, you're in for an uphill struggle.
If everyone around you is unemployed, or works in part time unskilled labour - if you're moving from home to home all of the time - if you have no bedroom - if your family argues, or you don't have proper food so your blood sugar is all over the place - these are tremendous things to overcome in isolation never mind all at the same time.
People talk about 'privilege' in upbringing because it's actually kind of rare to have a functional family.
This is what the class system really is. Some people can jump the gap after their formative years, but most people are going to be stuck in those patterns if they've spent 20 years in the trenches.
I grew up in a poor family; my father left when I was young. The one thing we had (aside from the absolute warrior-woman of my mother), provided by the government back in the day, was a council house. A low rent secure tenancy. So whilst everything else was a struggle, my mother was able to provide a relatively stable housing situation for us.
Without that I'm sure I would be a complete fuck-up now.
You hypothesize that the American black population is suffering because their African culture has been taken away from them. I'm merely pointing out that African culture doesn't seem to have built many thriving populations anywhere.
American black culture wasn't nearly so dysfunctional before the rise of the welfare state and the War on Drugs. Illegitimacy was under 30% in 1960 (compared to about 80% today). That has a lot of knock-on effects for other social ills.
Alot of what you said I can agree with, but I don't agree it's endemic to either African American or Hispanic cultures, even if there are specific weaknesses culturally that we can identify (such as broken homes).
But isolating the African American experience from issues such as poverty is going to be really tough, both because of our cultural history and the sample size to contrast it with is relatively tiny. Everyone still debates what the full causes are (whether that's poverty, institutional bias, or some combination), but I do think for many cultures there is something uniquely broken and I'm not against discussing the question. But it would be highly presumptuous of me to assume that I do have the answers, or that I'm some kind of White Savior who can rescue "those people" (I'm not implying that's anywhere near what you're saying, but just an admission of both seeing the issues, and not knowing the right way to solve them. But all cultures have a long list of social ills).
To answer your questions though,
> Is society better off from the averaging effect that comes from mixing high and low performers? The fact that performance is segregated racially is incidental to my point. Does a rising tide lift all boats?
Yes, a rising tide lifts all boats and sometimes drowns someone as well, but I think on the whole, even if the spoils are disproportionally distributed, our general societal success has raised quality of life for most people.
But your questions are fair, so I'll try to address the point.
An example I think about is with the Department of Education specifically.
I think we all agree that it's generally a good thing that we enforce kids school attendance, even if we hear upsetting statistics about a high illiteracy rate among high school graduates.
But what I do know is that even with that illiteracy level, on the average, more kids have a higher level of general literacy than many if not most of their historical counterparts that were kept home to tend the farm, and could get by without needing to read or write with any fluency.
Literacy seems like something that has degenerated in our society, but literacy was often a privilege of the wealthy, and I think it's averaged itself out better than if we were to replace it with nothing.
> Can we remain competitive as a nation if we improve our low performers at the expense of our best and brightest?
Honestly, can we be competitive without trying to help as many people as possible contribute to that success?
What would competitive as a nation even be considered if it were only limited to a small percentage?
Also, you're assuming that the cost to the "best and brightest" is one they can't shoulder.
By definition, they're more capable of addressing the issues than those who are merely caught in the cycle of perpetuating them.
Where I do agree with you is that education or a nicer school aren't panaceas to solving deep issues, but they do play a role (if they didn't, we wouldn't be having the discussion... if it's so important that the best and brightest need "good" schools, then I think we can agree that it would benefit not just them).
I also don't think this is something that just throwing money at is going to solve (it's actually played out where its the opposite now).
But IMO what you're describing is an amputation of sorts. And while we can believe that amputation is the proper remedy for certain cases, I don't think that should be the one we assume is the right one or one we have as the go-to, especially when there are many cases where things have been improved without that need.
I don't have a pet agenda to preach as the one right way to fix the issues that plague schools, but for good and bad, I believe we've generally been harmed when we isolate improperly, and generally benefited by being more inclusive, even if some of those kids choose to throw it away.
Alot of this will probably come down to how we feel comfortable with generalizing a lot of people and in reality the solution will probably be really sticky and take a ton of laborious and inadequately praised work.
But I say better that than replacing one flawed system with an even worse one, which I think is what you described (racially or economically segregating kids from access to an accepted level of education).
I disagree with the general premise, which is that the issues stem from inherent problems with certain minorites as well as that solving the issue somehow is addressed by segregation of those groups.
If I misread your point though, I'd be happy to learn where I'm missing it.
You're assuming racism is the cause of the gaps. Big assumption. Out of wedlock births alone will explain a gap of that size: more than 70% of black American children are born out of wedlock. That's a disastrous figure, an emergency really. There is no point wasting a moment's time on imagined racism when variables like that are looming so large. If that behavior doesn't change, there will be no closing of any gaps.
2) Professional labor loaded with student loan/mortgage debt; to
3) Financial stability; to
4) Being able to launch high-risk high-reward ventures
That's possible, but it generally takes a few generations"
That sequence is coming up a lot lately in discussions of African Americans low wealth accumulation across generations, relative to whites.
In the sense that, first through slavery, then through Jim Crow, then through red-lining, and other forms of egregious discrimination, that multi-generational sequence of wealth accumulation has been artificially interrupted.
It's not clear what should be done to rectify that imbalance. (Reparations? Or is it enough to allow this sequence to play out unobstructed starting with current generation of African Americans, similarly to if they were a new immigrant family.)
They're quite distinct problems. Study after study shows that Black boys have much worse outcomes than white boys even when comparing families that have similar incomes: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c.... White boys whose parents have an income at the 90th percentile (compared to all households) will statistically end up around the 70th percentile (regression to the mean). A black boy raised to parents who have a 90th percentile income will end up at the 55th percentile.
There is something unique about the economic status of Black Americans, especially Black boys. The income gap between Black and whites hasn't narrowed at all since the end of Jim Crow in the 1960s. Gaps for other groups have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing-even groups, such as Hispanics, that typically come into the country near the bottom of the economic ladder.
> The research makes clear that there is something unique about the obstacles black males face. The gap between Hispanics and whites is narrower, and their incomes will converge within a couple of generations if mobility stays the same. Asian-Americans earn more than whites raised at the same income level, or about the same when first-generation immigrants are excluded. Only Native Americans have an income gap comparable to African-Americans. But the disparities are widest for black boys.
For black people, at least, they were enslaved in the US in much larger numbers than any other ethnic group. This is bound to hurt their opportunities relative to other ethnic groups, among many other problems.
> They also found that 69 percent of black children under the age of six (2.2 million total) lived in low-income families
American ancestors fucked the African American community so bad. They are left in this perpetual cycle of poverty, where they grow up poor, can't afford education, end up poor adults, and have children who also end up growing up in poverty.
I mean, considering the era they quoted, I would say that black people might've had a bit more trouble raising kids than white people in the 1950s-1970s for reasons I hope would be incredibly obvious.
Ah that reminds me, we should not discount racism as a factor. Many would rather become debt slaves for life or forgo children than live cheaply around black people.
> The research makes clear that there is something unique about the obstacles black males face. The gap between Hispanics and whites is narrower, and their incomes will converge within a couple of generations if mobility stays the same. Asian-Americans earn more than whites raised at the same income level, or about the same when first-generation immigrants are excluded. Only Native Americans have an income gap comparable to African-Americans. But the disparities are widest for black boys.
Percent of children in single-parent families by race in the United States:
One of the worst things slavery did, to african americans as a people, is to strip away their cultural meaning of family unit.
I think it's on-par with the holocaust in terms of the human cost. Yes, there are a lot of other things, but not having a stable family unit while growing up messes up the next generation, perpetuating the cycle. That is how black people are different from any other ethnic minority in the US. And that's why I think hispanic people(PC term?) will climb the economic ladder before/faster.
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