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To be fair, I bet autocorrect is the issue here.
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I was watching the Hanukkah celebrations at the White House yesterday. While there are plenty of things you can point out as disappointments over the last eight years, that is one classy family. While Trump goes on and on about the nameless people of other countries and backgrounds who he has “fantastic” relationships with, Obama honoured specific people and pointed out the many contributions Jewish people in general have made. There have been many examples of this over the years, and despite the ugliness of the opposition against him (led by Trump and others like him), he has remained dignified and never stooped to their level. No affairs, no scandals. Michelle has similarly used her position to speak clearly on many issues and do good.
I’m not American, but I will miss them a lot, and would even if I was optimistic about the next president. It’s not nearly as much as is badly needed, but at least some progress was made. But this year, it looks like what appeared to be the start of a movement toward progress was actually what many considered to be an extreme that needed to be corrected.
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Ok, I will. Honestly, I would love to find some way to better understand the issue.
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That’s the thing though, there’s no inevitable teleological vector of progress in society and there’s always room for persons to fuck up any progress made, leaving us worse than we began.
In all sincerity, you should take into account that all these “in your experience” anecdotes do not invalidate someone else’s direct life experience in their skin.
I do my best to try and understand and I think I succeed more times than not, but as a fellow white dude I’d rather work with what people live and try to figure out actual solutions versus parroting talk radio “personal responsibility” narratives.
What you “see” and the narrative you carry on is divorced from reality.
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You know the marshmallow experiment? It turns out it didn’t prove what the researcher thought it did at first. What it actually proves is that children who are growing up in circumstances in which they can trust the adults around them, and know that there will be more of something later on so it’s worth waiting a bit, are able to trust what the adult tells them and wait a bit. The children growing up without that kind of stability in the world around them, they follow the old adage “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. It has nothing to do with self control. It has to do with accurately perceiving one’s native environment.
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I am not really a right wing talk radio sort of person. Much of how I see the world is shaped by my Dad’s experience, which was about coming from real starvation type poverty. That does not invalidate someone else’s experience. I am likely coming off as callous, when it is really about being a little frustrated about not really understanding. And that started in Junior High School sitting in a classroom with kids who literally laughed and cursed at the teachers when they asked for attention or participation.
Academically, I have been able to see things from several difficult perspectives. I interviewed Shoah perpetrators and collaborators until I could at least understand how they could have fallen for the disaster of the Third Reich. Not sympathy, but some measure of understanding. I have also been to a bunch of places in the world where people would literally do anything to be afforded half the opportunity that the most disadvantaged person in the US has available to them.
So it is frustrating to not be able to bridge the gap to understand what was happening with those kids years ago, and the kids that my daughter goes to school with who are on the same path. I don’t really think it has anything to do with race, because I work with too many African immigrants who do not seem to have encountered insurmountable barriers to success here.
I really don’t have any answers. I have questions. And I do not understand all the intricacies of the issue. But I am trying.
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Have they, like so many African immigrants, come here with higher educational status, and perhaps with more healthy savings as well, than most black Americans have? The selective immigration process means that African immigrants as a group even outdo native-born WHITE Americans. African immigrants and African Americans may strike you as worthy of comparison just because they’re both black, but in the context of this discussion, they’re really apples and oranges.
This whole discussion consists of you isolating and focusing on individual effort versus others telling you that social context is an enormous influence on individual effort. Maybe some people are simply blind to context?
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How exactly are you trying to understand and empathize with any aspect of the African-American experience?
All I see is dismissal and handwaving from you.
I would imagine that your family business works with legal immigrants who had the money and ability to emigrate, correct?
Your focus on “the good ones” and using them as the evidence of “the bad ones” is not somehow evidence or your purity of thought.
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I do not claim “purity of thought”, whatever that means.
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