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Originally Posted by JumpinJesus
As long as we sit back and discuss the problems of economics and race from a distance while refusing to get our hands dirty, then anything we say, while thought-provoking, is ultimately meaningless. Shesus is doing her part on a daily basis. She spent 2 years doing her own research on this very issue for her Master's Degree and goes into those very areas every day to do something to make a change. What are you doing?
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Indeed. Economic disparity between races is all too easy to "discuss." Sure, having knowledge of what the issues are that contribute to the problem is important...but there comes a time when it's important to say, "ok, I have a good idea what's at play here, now I'm going to do something about it." Sadly, not many people do that. I've done a fair amount of volunteering at various organizations which attempt to address the issue, and for a city as big as Chicago I find it sad when I see how few people volunteer to help out at places that are doing so much to help the underprivileged.
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Originally Posted by Supple Cow
Sure, I'll agree that many insitutions in this world are set up to be less friendly to some people than to others. That Economist article makes me cringe, though, because those statistics gives too many people the excuse to shirk responsibility for themselves (not to mention that I question the causes they suggest are at root). This is ultimately about a value system, and how individuals choose to build that system.
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No question about it, it's easy to be fatalistic about it, but The Economist doesn't ignore that point - it explicitly mentions it as one of the problems that exist. It's just not a problem the article focused on. Rather, the point is to illustrate that there are many things working against racial and economic equality in American society, and both the cultural and structural problems feed off of each other. It's not at all that people shouldn't try, just that it takes 50x the effort for someone to rise out of poverty than it does for someone to go from the "lower middle class" to the "upper middle class." Ultimately, I think the debate is a matter of semantics. Do we demand that underprivileged persons first "prove" that they are capable of a strong work ethic, or do we focus the majority of our energies toward removing the numerous structural barriers to success that they face so that they don't have to be super-humans to make it out of poverty? Personally, I think we have a great responsibility, as slightly privileged or highly privileged people, to put effort towards fixing those structural barriers. As I said, the structural and cultural issues feed off of each other, and these issues are still part of our legacy of slavery. Rather than expect people in poverty (who, when we trace it back along the generations, were typically not put into poverty by any fault of their ancestors) to be super-humans with super-motivation and super-intelligence, we need to make it so that normal humans with normal motivation and normal intelligence can earn a living wage, regardless of what class they were born into.
It's the chicken and the egg. As far as I can tell, structural inequality came first, and structural inequality needs to be addressed first if we, as a society, are going to have any real success on this issue. Naturally, the cultural issues should be addressed simultaneously, and part of that is doing things like teaching in underprivileged neighborhoods. Indeed,
my posts are not in any way meant to undervalue the importance of such efforts, or to imply that there are not also difficulties faced in them, but I'm uncomfortable getting too frustrated with the people who are born into poverty when there are such glaring structural issues that no one in government (or society as a whole) truly seems to want to address, especially since doing so would utterly destroy the myth of the American Dream.
(Incidentally, The Economist is a strong advocate of classical liberalism (which, in America, is generally perceived as economic conservatism. Think Milton Friedman.). For them to be lambasting America's so-called meritocracy says a great deal.)
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Originally Posted by shesus
I’m not sure if this is because the parents are afraid they’ll be abandoned when their children graduate or if they really don’t understand that the free education their child is supposed to be getting is the key to a better lifestyle.
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I suspect, in many cases, it's the latter. See below.
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I do have some students who want to succeed, as I said in the OP about 10. They want to be lawyers, doctors, or teachers. They are over-achievers strive for A’s and are the gems of my day in the rather bleak times. However, the value system for the majority is that education is unvalued.
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If I may make a rather sad conjecture, perhaps part of the problem is that, in the end, most of those overachievers will
still not succeed despite their normal-human motivation. Most people are aware of this, and it takes a super-human to not let such a depressing fact prevent you from also being motivated. Of course, this isn't an
excuse for lacking motivation, but it certainly contributes to the cause.