I imagine this is in part because 99% of the wealthiest knobs on the planet are among the pale.
If only it wasn’t so easy for those wealthy knobs to drive a wedge between poor people based on their skin colors, it might not be so hard to get them to be more equitable.
And yet, Reparations are more of a non-starter than ever.
Honestly…I think it could be argued that it should be a non-starter, or at least the conversation on reparations should be a careful one. Native Americans have received reparations in multiple forms over the years; they’re still among the poorest of the poor. Reparations to Native Americans have been a joke, honestly.
A sly politician could probably get it through as Federal funding for infrastructure, funding for improving poor Native American, black and Latino neighborhoods, extra funding for impoverished schools (lots of overlap there), and tax breaks for businesses building in those impoverished urban neighborhoods.
And I mean, look at some of the repercussions of doing it wrong in the past. Look at the recent Boing Boing piece about colleges discriminating against Jews; do they? Yes, absolutely. They also discriminate against Asians. But that’s a side effect of trying to make things more equitable for everyone. If a group is seen to be overrepresented, then of course, absolutely, the way to cure that is to set the bar higher for that group. Because really, if you want to get down to it, while anti-semitism and racism still exist in America, both those groups make up a majority of America’s wealthiest people. Nearly half the billionaires in America are old Jewish guys. Why do I bring it up? Because, honestly, we’re going to have to make sure to sell people on the idea that, no, we’re not out to punish each and every white American, from the wealthiest to the poorest. It’s hard for someone to grasp that they’re somehow at fault when, for example, their family might have fled from Germany in the 1930s, faced hardships for being German, and are now being told they’re guilty of being white in a country that benefitted from black slavery.
That last graf is a poor attempt to write up several of the excuses I’ve seen against reparations. Honestly, my mom’s German family changed their name, and that was the end of it…my grandpa even got picked to guard POWs.
Funny they only mention Latino and black families. As usual, Asian Americans are ignored, who are being actively discriminated in academia today in the name of “affirmative action”.
The message? You can get help while you are down, but you can’t get above us either. Odds are never in the favor of minorities, no matter how successful you are.
[quote=“anon15383236, post:3, topic:48160, full:true”]
And yet, Reparations are more of a non-starter than ever.
[/quote]Affirmative action is the best reparations program we’ve ever had, even if that’s not what people generally think of it as.
Yeah. And now that white people have forgotten that white women have been the biggest recipients, that’s becoming a dead letter too. Anyway, there are certainly better ideas for racial reparations out there. Not that I have much of any hope that they’ll get any traction, given how bad most white Americans are at seeing their real places in the general scheme of things.
I have to wonder what the graph would look like if you removed the 1% and the zero incomes? I suspect both of those are skewing the statistics.
The top 1% shouldn’t skew a median, which is what the article refers to. That’s why they use the median instead of the mean.
I don’t think that would affect the median. What I think we’re seeing here is the majority of white families owning a home, whereas a minority of black and Latino families do.
Black and Hispanics are way below Whites in weath, but where are East Asian and South Asians? Many, especially Black and Hispanic activists try to claim the disapraties between White and minority communities are result of White racism, if that were so it could be expected that wealth disparity would be the same accross the board. The the wealth of White Families would be 10 times that of every other group. If East Asian background and South Asia origin families have wealth and living standards comparable to White families, the premise that hispanic and black poverty is do to the Racism of Whites and national institutions would demonstrably ficticious.
Hey there, newbie!
Lemme guess – you’re one of them there “race realists”? Amirite?
I’m having a hard time spotting the flaw in the argument. Care to help me out?
Google is your friend, my friend! Start with “model minority myth,” maybe throw in “wealth disparities,” you’ll get the picture.
You can do it! 
The basic flaw is that it sees white racism as something positively directed at white people, rather than negatively directed at specific other people. It also ignores all of American history and the effect of certain government policies, particularly those related to home ownership as sources of inequality.
The study, I should add, doesn’t ignore these policies. It breaks down the exact sources of the inequality it’s describing, with length of home ownership being the primary factor. If you know anything about America’s history, you know that not only did the government virtually give homes away to white people (and only white people) in the post war period (and huge tracts of land in the western US several decades prior), it also made home ownership virtually impossible for Black people.
About affirmative action: reparations for mistreatment of minorities at the expense of another mistreated minorities (Asians) is wrong, no matter how close it is to being right. It’s a double edged sword, intended to keep minorities in place by giving token gifts, just to say it is trying to right things.
The idea that affirmative action is intended to hurt or “keep Asians in their place” is ridiculous.
Just a plain realist, if actual causes of disparitiesare not determined no one benefits, excepting the closet case anti-white racists.
The assumption that racism is equally applied to all populations and for the same amount of time in history is a major flaw.
You may not want to believe it, but it’s far from ridiculous. I’ve seen the effect of my university’s discriminatory policies against Asians first hand in California. A floodgate of opportunities for higher education opened for Asians when the cap for Asians were removed from the 90’s to the turn of the century. Affirmative action IS racism by another name - and for Asians who are constantly discriminated in this country it’s not even “reverse” racism.
Unfortunately, it’s still going on: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/11/20/365547463/new-affirmative-action-cases-say-policies-hurt-asian-americans.
It’s good to provide opportunities for disadvantaged minority. Just don’t do it by lowering the bar for some and raising the bar for another. There are better ways.
