The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

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AgnosticBoy
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The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

Post #1

Post by AgnosticBoy »

Minorities, esp. BLM, would have you believe that the police are the problem. They are not. Everything about investing in good education and community can be done without abolishing the police. Blaming the police is just scapegoating.

Do a few bad cops make all police bad?

Can we fix the societal ills of minority population without abolishing the police? Why have plenty of Blacks found success in spite of current police funding?

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Re: The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

Post #91

Post by Bust Nak »

AgnosticBoy wrote: Tue Aug 25, 2020 7:25 am I would finish your scenario with the person eventually making a full recovery, as in being able to walk into success. That's the goal. But acting as if you can never walk again or make excuses for not trying...
Why would you presume people of color are not trying?
esp. when you're doing things yourself to injure your own leg, is on YOU (Blacks...e.g. black on black crime is not racism but keeps blacks down).
There is an inconsistency here, many Black people have lifted themselves up and out of poverty despite being victims of black on black crime, why does this count as being "kept down" but racism doesn't count because many Black people still found success?

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Re: The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

Post #92

Post by AgnosticBoy »

Bust Nak wrote: Tue Aug 25, 2020 8:09 am
AgnosticBoy wrote: Tue Aug 25, 2020 7:25 am I would finish your scenario with the person eventually making a full recovery, as in being able to walk into success. That's the goal. But acting as if you can never walk again or make excuses for not trying...
Why would you presume people of color are not trying?
It's more like not enough are trying and instead they'd rather complain.

There is plenty of opportunity to VOTE and to get an EDUCATION, but we know that both of those are lacking in the Black community. If only they knew the benefit of education and voting, which again gets back to education, then more Blacks would take advantage of both things.

koko

Re: The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

Post #93

Post by koko »

Bust Nak wrote: Tue Aug 25, 2020 4:58 am
That's self promoting stats from the institutions themselves, what about charts and figures posted here on average earnings group by educational level, not related to any one particular institute? Are those fake too?

Yes it is self promotion but it was published by the state's education and legal departments. That's why so many people like myself were fooled into wasting our life's savings in their worthless degrees. I sure would like to have that money back.

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Re: The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

Post #94

Post by Mithrae »

Back to the parts of post #79 I didn't get 'round to earlier...
historia wrote: Sun Aug 23, 2020 7:53 pm
Mithrae wrote: Mon Aug 17, 2020 7:39 pm But even if we were to assume that systemic racism against Japanese people continued to this very day
Wait, why is it necessary to "assume" this? If we are taking the concept of systemic racism seriously -- and, if only for the sake of discussion in this thread, I think we should -- then, by definition, it affects Asian Americans too.

Consider, for example:
Mithrae wrote: Mon Aug 17, 2020 7:39 pm It seems quite difficult for laws to prevent unacknowledged, informal biases against hiring black people for more lucrative positions, for example; as Bust Nak and I have shown, that's been an ongoing form of discrimination for decades, right down to the present.
That same Harvard study you and Bust Nak referenced earlier shows an identical experience for Asian Americans.
Which study are you referring to? The meta-analysis I referenced in post #24 and in a subsequent post doesn't mention Asian Americans at all. A 2017 paper by Kang, DeCelles, Tilcsik and Jun suggests that "a distinctively African American or Asian name, lead[s] to 30% to 50% fewer callbacks," but from a quick glance none of their citations for that claim (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004; Oreopoulos, 2011; Gaddis, 2015) seems to show an equivalence between black and Asian American results, although Oreopoulos does discuss immigrant disadvantage via "applicants with foreign experience or those with Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and Greek names." The graphs provided by AgnosticBoy in post #43 suggest that among those with a bachelor's or higher degree black and Hispanic Americans attain significantly lower median incomes than white people, whereas Asians actually do considerably better; the report linked through his post #42 and the further graphs available from his link in #43 suggest that this pattern of black/Hispanic disadvantage and Asian success holds true in the more specific comparisons both of those who had completed their bachelor's degree twelve months prior and among those with a master's or higher degree. It's difficult to see how Asians could be consistently earning more than white people with identical educational attainment, if they suffered identical hiring discrimination as black or Hispanic people!

The assumption that if systemic racism exists it must still affect all non-white groups alike seems utterly unsubstantiated, and indeed rather absurd given the very different histories, demographic and sociological compositions, and perceived 'differentness' of those groups. White racism has frequently if not almost always placed people of African descent at the bottom of the imagined hierarchy, with east Asians not far behind white Europeans themselves (or perhaps equal or even above them). Even Adolph Hitler said "I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. They belong to ancient civilizations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilization to which we belong. Indeed, I believe the more steadfast the Chinese and the Japanese remain in their pride of race, the easier I shall find it to get on with them."
historia wrote: Sun Aug 23, 2020 7:53 pm Back to your point:
Mithrae wrote: Mon Aug 17, 2020 7:39 pm But even if we were to assume that systemic racism against Japanese people continued to this very day, their success in overcoming it would be the success of a non-representative demographic skewed towards those already more likely to succeed on the basis of existing family wealth, intelligence and prior education/skills. Obviously that wouldn't automatically translate into a valid assumption that black Americans can easily follow suit.
Again, your argument here appears to be based in large part on a faulty historical analysis. But, even if we grant the overarching point, this is not critical to my argument.

I am contesting Tcg's sweeping assertion that "education is not a solution for systemic racism." In challenging that claim, I merely need to show that it can be a solution, not that it has to be "easy" or that there aren't other (potentially better) solutions.
I think you've now shown that Jewish and Japanese Americans did indeed overcome systemic racism, but your characterization of TCG's point seems more than a little disingenuous: He said that "We should not forget, especially in light of the claims being made by this O.P., that education is not a solution for systemic racism. Yes, higher education on average helps individuals earn more money during their lifetimes, but as we have been reminded by Zzyzx, higher education increases the wage gap between whites and blacks." There seem to be three pretty clear points being made there:
- Disputing the OP assertions that lack of education is the problem and policing is not
- That higher education does indeed increase earning potential, but
- That data shows higher education has not closed the black/white income gap

Claiming that you are not bound to show that education is the solution seems to totally ignore the context of both TCG's comment and the thread in general; you aren't bound to do so, but pretending that you are challenging TCG's comments merely by illustrating education as one possible pathway to success would be disingenuous at best. Taking that single phrase you snipped from his post and characterizing it as a "sweeping assertion" worthy of challenge also seems to completely ignore that second point above; one which you obviously heartily agree with but must downplay or sideline in order to portray his comments as unnuanced and objectionable. But most importantly, the simple fact is that we currently have decades' worth of data on financial attainment for black people who've earned bachelors, masters or higher degrees... and it simply hasn't closed the income gap. Your suggestions that it ought to do so simply because it has done so for some other groups simply do not stand up to the demonstrable reality of the situation, which TCG clearly highlighted in that post and AgnosticBoy inadvertently emphasized later on!
historia wrote: Sun Aug 23, 2020 7:53 pm
Mithrae wrote: Mon Aug 17, 2020 7:39 pm It's not that education "uniquely wouldn't work" if it were attained at the same rate as Asian immigrants, for example; it's the fact that you haven't yet produced the magic wand which will make this theoretical concept a reality!
Before we rush ahead to policy prescriptions, I want to first deal with Tcg's argument -- such that it is, he ran away from the debate without explicating it -- that education doesn't even address the problem in principle.
These kinds of insults really are beneath you my friend; especially since TCG never said "in principle" - that seems to be an addition of your own to mitigate the fact that in practice education has not closed the gap for black and Hispanic people - and even if he did, I'd already spent two or three posts explaining (what I thought was the fairly obvious point) that even if/when it can be done, overcoming barriers of racial discrimination isn't the same thing as solving the problem. By this point it seems clear that AgnosticBoy has nothing of substance to offer and is just trying to use 'education' as a smokescreen behind which to blame and vilify black people for their supposed "scapegoating" and "excuses": If you too are shying away from any kind of substantive proposals while arguing the same position, that's not exactly a good look.
historia wrote: Sun Aug 23, 2020 7:53 pm
Mithrae wrote: Mon Aug 17, 2020 7:39 pm
historia wrote: Sat Aug 15, 2020 6:37 pm Even if individuals harboring personal racial animus toward an ethnic group are "seething under the surface," once a group has gained access to institutions and resources that put them ahead, U.S. law and improving social attitudes make it increasingly difficult for racists to hold back that group. That is effectively a solution.
That seems to be a remarkably blase attitude towards the inequality of opportunity being discussed here, the fact that black Americans would need to work and learn harder even to draw alongside the national averages.
You seem to be reading more into this comment than is intended. I'm simply noting that the economic and social gains made by, for example, Asian and Jewish Americans, have been real and persistent, and therefore are not easily reversed.
Highlighting the possibility that black Americans could perhaps, in theory, learn and work harder than white Americans in order to scrape out equal results and calling that a 'solution' adamantly, persistently, without further policy elaboration and to the point of insulting and mischaracterizing the comments of another poster... you can surely see how that comes across as being indifferent at best to the very real discrimination and disadvantage which black Americans face.

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Re: The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

Post #95

Post by Bust Nak »

AgnosticBoy wrote: Tue Aug 25, 2020 9:20 am It's more like not enough are trying and instead they'd rather complain.
And you've come to this conclusion because there are lots of failures and complains?
There is plenty of opportunity to VOTE and to get an EDUCATION, but we know that both of those are lacking in the Black community. If only they knew the benefit of education and voting, which again gets back to education, then more Blacks would take advantage of both things.
It doesn't bother you that while there are plenty of opportunities, there are still less opportunities in the Black community?

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Re: The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

Post #96

Post by Bust Nak »

[Replying to koko in post #93]

You are still talking about figures for particular institutions, I am asking about figures of wages, not associated with any particular institutions but by education level, are those fake?

koko

Re: The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

Post #97

Post by koko »

Bust Nak wrote: Wed Aug 26, 2020 5:04 am [Replying to koko in post #93]

You are still talking about figures for particular institutions, I am asking about figures of wages, not associated with any particular institutions but by education level, are those fake?


Equally fake. Government statistics mean nothing. I go by what I see in real life. Not by what I see in text books. I have encountered dozens of people like these:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... ts+in+debt


Good luck in trying to tell them how lucky they are to have such worthless college degrees.

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Re: The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

Post #98

Post by Bust Nak »

[Replying to koko in post #97]

Or I can tell them that their experiences are not typical. I see your dozens and rise you a hundred people I've encountered with higher education, in better paying jobs than the national average.

koko

Re: The Police are the problem

Post #99

Post by koko »

Yusef Salaam: 'Trump would have had me hanging from a tree in Central Park'
Arwa Mahdawi
Wrongly jailed for gang rape – which inspired Trump to call for the death penalty – Salaam has poured his experiences into a novel about hope, justice and race



Image



If Donald Trump had got his way I wouldn’t be speaking to Yusef Salaam right now. “Had his ad taken full effect we would have been hanging from trees in Central Park,” Salaam says matter-of-factly. “People wanted our blood running in the streets.”

You’ve probably seen the ad in question: it’s infamous. In 1989, a white investment banker was raped and left for dead in Central Park. Five black and brown teenagers, including 15-year-old Salaam, were charged with her rape. Two weeks after the attack, before any of the kids had faced trial, Trump took out a full-page advert in multiple New York papers calling for the death penalty. His inflammatory stunt is credited with prejudicing public opinion and contributing to the Central Park Five – now known as the Exonerated Five – going to prison for something they didn’t do. The boys’ story was retold last year in the Emmy-winning Netflix drama When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay.

The advert taken out in the NY Daily News by Donald Trump in 1989.
The advert taken out in the NY Daily News by Donald Trump in 1989. Photograph: New York Daily News Archive
Salaam spent almost seven years behind bars; he had his youth ripped away from him. However there is no bitterness in the slim, softly spoken, 46-year-old man I’m talking to: you can come out of prison better, not bitter, he likes to say. Salaam, who is speaking to me from his home in Georgia, completed a college degree in prison and, when he got out, dedicated his life to educating others about what he calls the “criminal system of injustice”. He has 10 children (“It’s a blended family”), a successful career as a public speaker, a record of policy reform, and a lifetime achievement award from Barack Obama. Now he and the Haitian-American author Ibi Zoboi, a National Book award finalist, have teamed up on a young adult book partly inspired by his experience. Punching the Air, a novel-in-verse, explores institutional racism and the school-to-prison pipeline through the eyes of Amal Shahid, a 16-year-old black Muslim boy who is wrongfully incarcerated after a fight in a park leaves a white kid in a coma.

Punching the Air has been a long time in the making. Salaam first met Zoboi, who has joined our video call from her New Jersey home, in 1999; they were both taking classes at Manhattan’s Hunter College. Salaam had been out of prison for two years and was grappling with how to get back into the world: “I would tell anybody and everybody about what happened to me and how Trump rushed to judge us.”

Yusef Salaam, left, is led away by a detective after being arrested in April 1989 for allegedly attacking a jogger in New York.
Flashpoint … Yusef Salaam, left, is led away by a detective after being arrested in April 1989 for allegedly attacking a jogger in New York. Photograph: NY Daily News via Getty Images
Zoboi spoke to Salaam at length; she was the editor of the college paper and wanted to report on how Trump had had a hand in his conviction. “To this day, that was the longest conversation I’ve ever had about Trump,” she says with an unamused smile. “I refuse to engage now.”

Part of the hesitation in telling my story in full back then was a fear of who would vilify me
Yusef Salaam
Zoboi didn’t end up writing that story. Salaam was still wary of the media; still wary that people would rush to judge him. “Part of the hesitation in telling my story in full back then was a fear of who would vilify me,” he explains. Salaam may have been out of jail but he was still officially labelled a sex offender; he wouldn’t be fully exonerated until 2002, when a prisoner called Matias Reyes confessed to the Central Park rape. “My mother had this experience where she was coming home from work at Parsons University when the case was going on — she’s a professor there, teaching fashion. She’s walking to the train station and a cop car goes past with the megaphones blaring: ‘That’s her! That’s the mother of that dog Yusef Salaam.’ So I’m knowing about things like this. And now here I am free again — but I’m free in body and mind without the truth having come out yet.”


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Two decades later Zoboi and Salaam reconnected at a literary festival, where Salaam was promoting a self-published book of poems. Zoboi pitched him the idea of telling his story in the form of a young adult book and Punching the Air was born. The decision to tell his truth via fiction wasn’t about “a desire to tell it from a safe space”, Salaam says, but to universalise it. “The system wants you to think that what happened to me was an anomaly. A mistake. But I’m not the only one, there are countless others. We wanted to tell the story of how this is not an anomaly. We wanted to tell ‘the story of the two Americas’; what it’s like to live in a world where you may not make it home because of racism and systemic oppression.”

While Punching the Air is not an autobiography, Amal is very much based on Salaam. Zoboi and Salaam would spend hours talking and Zoboi turned those conversations into poetry. “We needed to capture the raw emotion of this boy,” Zoboi explains of the decision to use free verse. “Sometimes with prose you get muddled in all the other details that don’t matter in that moment. But when you pare down the language to make a list poem or put words in a certain shape to convey a certain mood, it’s much more powerful. Poetry gets to the heart of the matter and we needed to capture the heart of this boy. Because it’s not just a story about race, or about a crime. It is, first and foremost, a story about a human being; about a child, about a boy.”

Ibi Zoboi.
‘Right now there’s a lot of guilt’ … Ibi Zoboi. Photograph: Joseph Zoboi
It’s also a story about who gets to be a boy; who gets to make mistakes. Research shows that African American students are nearly four times as likely to be suspended from school as their white counterparts for exactly the same behaviour. “What we want the readers to take away from the book is that some people get away with mistakes and some people get punished severely for those mistakes,” Zoboi says.

Amal is a gifted artist who gets into a good school, but there is no room for error for a kid like him: “I’m thinking it should’ve been called / Zero Tolerance Academy, or / No Second Chances Charter School / or Prison Prep.” His white art teacher, Miss Rinaldi, doesn’t see the real Amal, just the stereotype of an angry black boy. “I failed the class / She failed me,” says Amal. Miss Rinaldi serves as a character witness for Amal in his trial and it is her mischaracterisation of him that ends up sending him to prison. She is, Zoboi explains, what young people these days call a “Karen”.

There will be a lot of Miss Rinaldis reading this book, Zoboi notes. “Librarians and teachers: those industries are dominated by white women. And I find that so ironic given the crime that Yusef was accused of committing. I don’t think Yusef could have imagined, back in 1999, it’d be like, you know what? We’re gonna write a book and a lot of white women are gonna read it. And that guy who was responsible for convicting you? He’s going to be president.”

We want people to ask: how did I fail the young black people in my life? It's about being accountable
Ibi Zoboi
“It’s important,” says Zoboi, “that we have some sort of reconciliation between white women and black men. Right now there’s a lot of guilt. There’s a lot of coddling in the classroom – it’s a dynamic founded on guilt and not empathy. Reading this book out of guilt is not our hope, right? You know: ‘Poor thing, you’ve experienced such injustice. I’m so angry. I want to cry.’ That is not how we want readers to read the book. We want them to ask: how did I fail the young black people in my life? In what way was I a Miss Rinaldi in my students’ lives? It’s not about guilt, it’s about being accountable for being part of a system.”

Aunjanue Ellis as Sharon Salaam and Ethan Herisse as as Yusef Salaam in When They See Us, which dramatised the Central Park Five story.
Aunjanue Ellis as Sharon Salaam and Ethan Herisse as as Yusef Salaam in When They See Us, which dramatised the Central Park Five story. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
With issues like defunding the police becoming mainstream talking points and the Black Lives Matter movement going global, Punching the Air feels particularly timely. However, as Zoboi notes, it has always been painfully relevant. They could have written the book in 2012 when Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, was killed. They could have written the book in 1999 when Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo was fatally shot by four New York City police officers, who were all found not guilty. It may feel like we’re on the brink of change at the moment, but history warns us not to expect too much. “We have lived long enough to see change not happen in a big way,” Zoboi says. “Because Salaam and I are parents, we have to be hopeful for our children. At the same time, change is going to be incremental not monumental. Small steps. And this book serves as one small step.”

How has social media changed things? Salaam was convicted before there were hashtags, before viral videos shone a light on police brutality. “The worst part about social media is that we hoped that, as we told our stories, the oppression would stop,” Salaam says. But it hasn’t. “Social media has allowed us to be more aware but it doesn’t seem that awareness alone makes anything change,” Zoboi adds. “It seems like the more awareness we have, the more pushback there is. It seems like white supremacists have doubled down because of our awareness.”


This isn’t to say that we should give up hope. Amal means hope in Arabic. And while rage and frustration simmer through Punching the Air it is, ultimately, a hopeful book. If there is one thing Salaam wants readers to take out of the story it is “to never give up hope on themselves. To understand that you were born free and that you were born mattering.” But what about Salaam himself? As the 2020 election, and the possibility of another four years of Trump looms, is Salaam hopeful? He is quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “My experience has taught me to prepare for the worst,” he says, “but to hope for the best.”

Punching the Air is published by HarperCollins on 1 September.





further proof that cops and Trump are the problem - neither has been punished for the crimes committed against these innocents ~ in fact, those cops are happily retired on fat pensions while Trump continues to promote hate and division in this society

koko

Re: The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

Post #100

Post by koko »

Bust Nak wrote: Wed Aug 26, 2020 9:37 am [Replying to koko in post #97]

Or I can tell them that their experiences are not typical. I see your dozens and rise you a hundred people I've encountered with higher education, in better paying jobs than the national average.

I can do the same having known dozens of high school dropouts who became auto mechanics who eventually made more money than the average school teacher. My brother dropped out of college after a year, became an electrician, earned more than twice as much as your average school teacher in a year, and today enjoys an enormous pension.

When I graduated from high school, the first job offer I got was to work as a drug dealer - an offer I declined. Being from the ghetto, I have come across a handful of drug dealers who earned very good money and went through life without having worked a day in their lives.

Life has strange twists. If you are from a suburban background your experience will be greatly different from that of someone from a ghetto poverty background like me. Education may well be beneficial to people like you. It sure as heck did not benefit me one bit as I am one of those people who fell within the college educated group that endured the $1.7 trillion debt. When ghetto kids see me and learn of my pathetic experience they drop out of school and the endless cycle of ghetto misery continues unabated.

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