I think it’s particularly cruel to compare Far Eastern immigrants in this country to African-Americans and then to blame African-Americans for having less stable families and a lower education level.
It matters a lot why someone (or someone’s ancestors) came to this country. When the slave merchants selected their stock of human flesh, they didn’t screen them for their ability to do well in science and mathematics. When the slaves arrived, they were denied anything other than a religious education and their families were routinely separated. It has never been the case in this country that the black community, as a whole, has had parity on the quality of the education available to them. They’ve never had the communal wealth of other immigrant populations. They’ve never been treated equally by law enforcement or prosecutors or judges or juries or real estate agents or car dealers or landlords.
The law has frequently been set up to move them into slums where the law has usually permitted every kind of predatory scam that can be designed to separate people from their money.
I’m very much in favor of being forward-looking at not wallowing in the pain of the past, but there are reasons why African-Americans have lower educational attainment and less stable families than other immigrant groups. And just lecturing people to get married before they have kids and to get a good education is disrespectful even if it is good advice.
But this doesn’t have much to do with white privilege. Bill O’Reilly says that white privilege doesn’t exist. But there’s approximately zero chance that Bill O’Reilly would have ever have a son shot down in a blaze of police bullets for the crime of walking in the middle of the street. It’s almost impossible to envision a child of Bill O’Reilly getting shot for the crime of walking in the rain while talking on his cell phone. So, the privilege in some cases is as simple as the privilege of being alive.
Lack of lightning frying O’Reilly’s ass where he stands is pretty solid proof of the lack of an angry God. No way Jesus has that much compassion.
Let us go back further and remember that numerous people with higher educations were not the one’s drafted. Numerous people with money never served nor did any of their family members.
Thus, who were those drafted? Look no further than the masses of poor. Both black and white poor people were drafted in droves. I dare to say this is one of the main reasons that members and prior members of military service are treated the way they are.
To BillO all of the poor no matter what race are inferior. These people deserve what they get. Here is why so many supporters of the TPGOPers have never served in the military.
Look to all of the poor to care the load yet again if we enter another boots on the ground war.
and note the part about the “ghetto pity parties”.
While I agree that historical discrimination was a problem, we live in the present, and history is in the past. It’s time to take charge of our own fates. There are limits of that, but there is a huge problem, a vast problem, in wallowing in the injustice of the past while the current situation degenerates.
While I agree that historical discrimination was a problem, we live in the present, and history is in the past.
Keep telling yourself that, dataguy.
Racism is a smaller problem today than it was 50 years ago.
However, many black politicians and leaders are not comfortable with the reflexive “racism” charge. Prior to a charge of racism, it’s important to understand self-defeating behaviors. These include single-parent trends in this commmunity, failure to become educated, and other problems.
DP Moynihan identified these problems in 1975. Today, they are no better.
Recognizing and acknowledging historical events and their direct relevance to events of today is not “wallowing in the injustice of the past”. It is recognizing that history is not simply isolated bits of human experience, it is an eternal thread that is always connected, in ways both large and small, to all the events that have preceded today.
Those who deny white privilege don’t understand the true nature of it and confuse it with upper-class privilege. It’s not about getting goodies because you’re white, it’s about not getting the grief that non-white people get.
They know the truth. The reason they’re in denial is that they really want to maintain their priveledge.
Booman, good post generally, but I’m a little disturbed by this: “When the slave merchants selected their stock of human flesh, they didn’t screen them for their ability to do well in science and mathematics.”
Are you suggesting African Americans have a lower education level than Asian Americans because African Americans weren’t screened for an interest in learning before they got here? I don’t think you are, given that you go on to talk about African Americans being systematically denied educational opportunities from the moment they were brought here and going forward, but the way you’ve phrased that one sentence kinda sounds like you’re pinpointing the “selection process” as a factor in the disparity.
Look, there is a selection process in every immigrant population.
When my Italian great-great-great grandfather got on a boat to come to New York in the late 19th-Century, he probably couldn’t read, but he had a lot of gumption. He lacked fear of the unknown. He was different.
And he has at least enough resources to make the voyage and figure he wouldn’t starve when he arrived. Immigrants who came here by choice were never a neutral representations of the populations they came from. They were, almost be definition, more likely to succeed than those who wouldn’t or couldn’t take the risk.
So, yeah, the Italian immigrants to this country were more industrious that the Italian average at home.
This was probably true for the Chinese immigrants who came here to build the railroads, too, and for the Filipinos who put all the eggs in our cartons today, and the Latinos who work in the mushroom fields in southern Chester County.
And then they build up human capital and actual capital by banding together, giving the new immigrant a hand-up.
If you look at the Asian-Americans in this country, they do better on tests, they have more income, they do better overall than any other immigrant group. Is this because they’re inherently superior at math and science and business? I suppose that’s possible, but it’s certainly a major factor that the people who come here aren’t coming here to build the railroads anymore. They’re coming from well-to-do families, and they’re coming because they’re good students. So, if we took all the best students from the wealthiest families in Africa, we’d get a population of people who score better on tests, do better in school, have more stable families, etc., that the African-American community. They’d probably do better than the American community. That’s because they’ve been selected to be good at those things. The slow people have been weeded out. The poor people have been weeded out.
So, yeah, from the beginning, the slave population was different from immigrant groups just in terms of who wound up on this ships. The wind up here penniless. They have no rights. They’re not allowed to learn. They’re not allowed to marry, really. Their kids are ripped away from them.
You can’t build up any capital, or institutional knowledge that way. It’s very hard to even band together to start up businesses. And that’s before we even get to all the additional roadblocks that are put in the way.
So, you know, if you are an individual, there are opportunities there. But, as a culture and as a people, you can’t expect African-Americans to have the same wealth and education as Asian-Americans. You can’t expect that any basically random population is going to score well against a population that is built up from a subsection of wealthy and promising kids and young adults. And this is especially true when you beat that population down at every turn and throw obstacles in their way.
Since race is such a charged issues, let’s take it out of the equation for a moment.
Take a population of kids who are smart enough to finish to the top percentiles of aptitude on standardized tests. Then take only the ones whose parents can afford to send them for a semester in Europe. Then take a totally random selection of kids and send them to Europe, too. Are these two populations going to succeed at the same rate?
Then, try not letting the random kids attend class or read any books.
This is the kind of comparison that Bill O’Reilly is making. It sounds like I’m saying that Asians are smarter than blacks, but that’s actually pretty much the opposite of what I am saying. I’m saying that voluntary immigrant populations are heavily advantaged over involuntary immigrant populations. It isn’t fair to ignore this and then play the culture card and say that one group should do as well as the other but doesn’t because they’re inferior somehow.
Another way of looking at it is that the Asian-American population would dust the Chinese on test scores, too. That’s because the Chinese have an enormous peasantry that’s basically illiterate. They don’t come here to go to Stanford.
Booman, I actually thought about this a lot before posting, including a goodly number of the points you raise here. I understood your comment about the “selection process” vis-a-vis Asian immigrants and the effect that presumably would have on their education level, etc. etc., particularly given that that selection process is relatively recent historically compared to when African Americans were brought over in slave ships. But that disparity would be as compared to the non-Asian-American population as a whole, not simply African Americans. (Or, as you say, as compared to the Chinese population or any other native population in any other country you want to choose.)
You say Africans who were brought over as slaves weren’t screened for their ability to do well in math and science. But do you really think it would’ve mattered if they had been, given everything that happened in the 200 to 300+ years since their arrival? I know you don’t, and perhaps you meant that comment as a proxy for all of the differences between the two groups, how it is they got here, and their experiences after they arrived. Or maybe the comment was just clumsily written.
But that was the line (and what seemed to be the thought) that bothered me. Perhaps I got snagged on it unnecessarily.
As for Bill O’Reilly, it goes without saying (or should) that he was making a stupid, unfair and completely unthought-out comparison. I don’t credit anything that clown says.
Actually, if for whatever bizarre reason, the slaves had been selected for their intelligence in any field, and then employed in that field and allowed to develop that intelligence, then, yes, I would expect the relic of that initial population to excel in that field.
Something somewhat different happened with the European Jewish population. There’s a reason that Gold(man), Silver(man), and other monetary names are common in this population, and it’s because the Christians refused to engage in lending and left that “dishonorable” profession to Jews. They were pushed into providing a service that was considered necessary but immoral. But the community or culture, as a whole, accumulated wealth and gained institutional knowledge of finance as a result.
This isn’t the same as selecting human beings based on certain traits or abilities, but it shows how a culture can transmit wealth and knowledge from generation to generation if given the opportunity.
It’s wrong to be too simplistic about these things, which racists are prone to do. It’s a combination of a host of different factors. Initial population is very important, but so are the conditions those populations face over time. It’s very important that immigrant groups be allowed to bring resources at the outset and then pool assets for the common good. They need to build capital and knowledge and expertise over time, and if these things are denied and systematically frustrated, the results will not be happy.
Quote: “Actually, if for whatever bizarre reason, the slaves had been selected for their intelligence in any field, and then employed in that field and allowed to develop that intelligence, then, yes, I would expect the relic of that initial population to excel in that field.”
Fine. Of course, you’ve added in “and then employed in that field and allowed to develop that intelligence,” which changes, oh, pretty much everything.
But since we’re basically in violent agreement, we might as well move on.
you asked if it would have made any difference.
Well, if that initial selection process hadn’t been reinforced, then obviously it wouldn’t have made any difference.
If we took every Chinese kid who is coming to this country to study at our top universities and put them in a cotton field then whatever advantages they might have had at the outset would be wiped away in a couple of generations.
You have to ask yourself why you are asking this question in the first place.
Quote: “You have to ask yourself why you are asking this question in the first place.”
I do? It’s really very simple: you seemed to be singling out a supposed non-screening of enslaved Africans for aptitude in math and science as if that has anything to do with anything. IMO, it doesn’t, not given everything that followed.
Then you suggested what I understood your comment to mean was bizarre — and I don’t actually disagree with that. But you’re the one who said it, not me.
And now I should ask myself why I asked the question in the first place?? Nice.
yes, O’Reilly is an asshole.
in other breaking news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Not just today — it’s the daily wanker gang:
Wow! Stewart did allright there.
Best John Stewart ever, IMHO. His obvious disgust with the RWNJs was pitch perfect and authentic.
And right on cue, white people on my black friend’s FB wall in response to the video:
“Ah, nice to see we’re still blowing this part of the story up when we still have to assume one side of the story is true to get to this point. Heaven forbid we acknowledge there’s two conflicting accounts of what happened that afternoon.”
“If this was a black officer shooting an unarmed white man, it would have never made the news.”
Quote John Stewart right back at them:
White People Of Alabama
Sure, they’re everywhere, but I seem to notice them much more from friends from the South…
Also I went to this guy’s page just for the fuck of it. It’s Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Praise White Jesus. By which I mean a few of his likes are “Support Phil Robertson”, “C.S. Lewis” and some pastor videos.
Speaking of people with a “victim mentality”…
Straight projection.
If you listen to them, you’ll notice that the real victim is the cops, Israel, and of course, white people.
I would mention three things: racism, poverty and drugs. Oh and did I mention racism and the cops and civic leaders who enforce it and allow unequal education and the employers who find reasons not to hire young African-American children. If you don’t account for those things, you have not accounted for much. And you have allowed a sub culture of addiction to run rampant.
I hope that the events of the past couple of weeks will move some white people to at least listen when others tell how they experience life in our society.
I guess I shouldn’t count on O’Reilly being one of those folks.
For the record, it seems there wasn’t much religious instruction either until the Great Awakening in the mid-18th century, and then it wasn’t provided by masters but by missionaries.
Something that I don’t see mentioned very often at all (I’m sure there are lots of people here who know the bibliography much better than I do) is the effect of slavery on white culture. Aren’t the centuries of that a direct cause of the differential way the society as a whole treats black people in particular? And isn’t that difference, for instance in the informal segregation maintained in every American city decades after it was supposedly abolished, part of an explanation of trivial but worrisome differences like black people’s average test scores?
“I’m very much in favor of being forward-looking at not wallowing in the pain of the past, but there are reasons why African-Americans have lower educational attainment and less stable families than other immigrant groups.”
This is why the key mistake of comparing “black Americans” to “Immigrant Americans” is important. Children of African immigrants, as I recall, do well in comparison to 3rd or more immigrants (and the grandchildren of African immigrants do basically the same as people of slave ancestry). Meanwhile, Hmong and Laotian immigrants and their descendants do awful in terms of education, which gets buried by grouping them in with Chinese or Japanese immigrants and their descendants. In other words, “Asian Americans ” and “black Americans” mask some pretty important things.