The Police are not the problem, lack of Education is

[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?

[koko]

I appreciate the fact you have not personally benefited financially from your education. But there is no reason whatsoever to imagine that your experience is typical of the millions of college graduates in the United States.

Again, the MAJORITY of my classmates had precisely the same experience as I did.

I appreciate the fact that many of your classmates did not personally benefit financially from their education. But there is no reason whatsoever to imagine that their experience is typical of the millions of college graduates in the United States.

Not 'many'. The MAJORITY.

Even if every single person you've ever gone to school with had an identical experience to your own, they still would not amount to more than a tiny fraction of one percent of the total number of college graduates in the United States.

You cannot extrapolate from such a small, non-random sample of people to college graduates as a whole. Therefore, this kind of anecdotal data doesn't even begin to call into question the statistics above.

While it is true that some blacks have made it out of poverty by getting such an education, there are just as many (whether black or white or Latino like me) who went from a working class to poverty class because of education and the debt it caused. This is something that society refuses to acknowledge even though there is plenty of proof to verify what I've just written. Perhaps you and historia have never come across people like that.

Nobody is "refusing to acknowledge" that some people don't benefit financially from a higher education. Clearly, such people can and do exist.

The statistics mentioned above don't say that everyone who has a college degree is guaranteed to make more money. Rather, they say that the average income of people with a college education is higher than those with only a high school education.

Your claim that these statistics are a "blatant lie" and part of some government conspiracy to enrich banks is ridiculous and irresponsible. As Neil deGrasse Tyson has said, "To assert conspiracy is to believe what you want when you are missing data to fully support what you want to believe."

The school was closed because hundreds had the same experience. Hundreds of schools are closing nationwide because tens of thousands have had the same experience. Student debt is over $1.7 trillion because hundreds of thousands have had the same experience. Many of those no longer in debt committed suicide.

Still want to believe all that useless education is of value? I well remember listening to 2 Hispanic kids who knew who I was. Both were using profane language when they were describing the uselessness and stupidity of an education and resolved to sell drugs as a livelihood. Obviously they knew of my pathetic experience and did not want to go through anything like that. Sadly I never saw them again and assume that drugs ended their lives. That's ghetto life for you. Too bad people like you will never see anything like this unlike me who sees it every day here in the ghetto.

Clearly I will not be able to convince you of your error. But note that it is mythologies like those which kill people every year. I'll leave it at that.

[Mithrae]

The fact that Asian and Jewish American communities were once lower class and now have a higher per capita income than (non-Jewish) whites is not my opinion, it's a fact.

Perhaps you can explain how that happened if education is not a solution for systemic racism.

Calling it a solution for systemic racism seems like quite an overstatement.

I appreciate you taking up Tcg's argument, Mithrae, since apparently he is unable to do so.

But, before I address the rest of your post, perhaps you can answer the question I posed to him: If not through education, how did the Asian and Jewish American communities overcome systemic racism to now have a higher per capita income than (non-Jewish) whites?

Education obviously is very valuable for success. But is there systemic racism against Jews and Asians currently? If not, when did it end and how does that timeline compare with their financial fortunes? For example, was there systemic racism against Jews in America even after WW2, or even after Israel became the favoured middle-eastern ally of the US? According to Wikipedia it's only been in the last 40 years that Jews have consistently been the richest or second-richest ethnic group; it may be that they did not overcome systemic racism at all, but flourished once most of the hurdles had come down.

It's easier to imagine that widespread racial biases against Asian people may have persisted for longer. On the other hand in post #5 I hinted at the possible role of immigration policy in the success of Asians; after family the second-biggest category for permanent migration to the US is employment (currently at least), which obviously skews heavily towards people who are already wealthy, well-educated or highly skilled. In 2017 around half of immigrants to the USA from the Middle East and southern/eastern Asia held bachelor's or higher degrees (48 and 53% respectively) compared to only a third of people born in the USA. With immigration policy skewing the Asian-American population towards higher-skill, higher-intelligence, higher-education and higher-wealth individuals (and hence their children) it would be questionable whether their success indicates overcoming systemic racism either, even if we suppose that there is still systemic racism against Asians.

Neither example seems to demonstrate that it would even be plausible that education alone can enable black Americans to close the gap, since the histories, circumstances and biases are quite different. But even granting that it is plausible - surely if black Americans buckled down to learn/work twice as hard as white Americans they would achieve equal outcomes before too long - that potential to materially overcome racial barriers wouldn't be the same thing as a solution for the problem which would presumably be still seething under the surface.

[Tcg]

I appreciate you taking up Tcg's argument, Mithrae, since apparently he is unable to do so.

Utterly bored and uninterested in the argumentation being presented is vastly different than the Ad Hominem "unable to do so."

Addressing logical fallacies is pure tedium.


Tcg

[Mithrae]

[Replying to Tcg in post #63]

Curiously, you 'thanked' Bluegreenearth's much ruder ad hominem against me in another thread. Bit of a cheer squad mentality at work there?

[koko]

Many interesting posts on this and other threads. Amazing how so many white suburbanites somehow seem to know what the "solutions" are to problems in the ghetto even though none of them are minority or live in a ghetto. Funny how they don't seem to come up with solutions to farm or rural problems or attempt to tell those people how to run their lives.

The Federal Department of Education gets over $68 billion in tax dollars every year while the Dept of Agriculture gets $146 billion or more than twice as much. There used to be an old story that pouring money into a problem won't solve it. I guess that's a lesson people refuse to learn.

[historia]

I appreciate you taking up Tcg's argument, Mithrae, since apparently he is unable to do so.

Utterly bored and uninterested in the argumentation being presented is vastly different than the Ad Hominem "unable to do so."

The gentleman doth protest too much, me thinks.

[historia]

Hundreds of schools are closing nationwide because tens of thousands have had the same experience.

Tens of thousands of student amount to one-quarter of one percent of all American college graduates.

Your argument doesn't account for 99.97% of all college graduates, which is why it is nonsensical.

Still want to believe all that useless education is of value?

This is yet another stawman argument.

But note that it is mythologies like those which kill people every year. I'll leave it at that.

None of this addresses the accuracy of the statistics mentioned above, which is what you were challenging. Your argument fails.

[historia]

If not through education, how did the Asian and Jewish American communities overcome systemic racism to now have a higher per capita income than (non-Jewish) whites?

Education obviously is very valuable for success.

Agreed.

But is there systemic racism against Jews and Asians currently? If not, when did it end and how does that timeline compare with their financial fortunes? . . . it may be that they did not overcome systemic racism at all, but flourished once most of the hurdles had come down.

Your questions here seem to center on the definition of 'systemic' (or 'institutional') racism, so let's define terms:

Institutional racism refers specifically to the ways in which policies and practices of organizations or parts of systems (schools, courts, transportation authorities, etc.) create different outcomes for different racial groups.

Because U.S. law prohibits discrimination based on race and religion (among other things), 'systemic' or 'institutional' racism is understood to be less perceptible than overt forms of inter-personal racism. For that reason, it is often described (as above) less in terms of what it is and more in terms of its perceived effects -- that is, different outcomes between different racial groups.

To that end, if an ethnic group has equal or better outcomes -- in, for example, health, wealth, income, and other factors -- than those of white Americans, they have, by definition, overcome systemic racism.

Jewish and Asian Americans have, on average, better outcomes. So how were they able to overcome systemic racism?

With immigration policy skewing the Asian-American population towards higher-skill, higher-intelligence, higher-education and higher-wealth individuals (and hence their children) it would be questionable whether their success indicates overcoming systemic racism either, even if we suppose that there is still systemic racism against Asians.

A fair point, especially if we are looking mostly at south Asians.

But consider Japanese Americans, who are not a predominantly immigrant community -- nearly 3/4 are native born. They suffered some of the worst legal discrimination of any ethnic group in the United States (Asian or otherwise) in the 20th Century. And yet, they too have a have a higher average income and lower unemployment rate than whites. (They also exceed the average for all Asian Americans.)

Jews in America are also not a predominantly immigrant community, of course.

If not through education, how did these two communities overcome systemic racism to now have a higher per capita income than (non-Jewish) whites?

Neither example seems to demonstrate that it would even be plausible that education alone can enable black Americans to close the gap, since the histories, circumstances and biases are quite different.

But if "education obviously is very valuable for success," as we already agreed, why would improved education somehow uniquely not work for black Americans? How have Nigerian Americans, for example, been able to be so successful? And what about Hispanics?

But even granting that it is plausible - surely if black Americans buckled down to learn/work twice as hard as white Americans they would achieve equal outcomes before too long - that potential to materially overcome racial barriers wouldn't be the same thing as a solution for the problem which would presumably be still seething under the surface.

But more to the point, historically the success (or stereotype of success) of Jewish people has ended up becoming and to this day remains a major source or vehicle of anti-Semitism. We know that many people have a tendency to lash out irrationally and often violently when they believe their 'rightful' or traditional place of dominance is being usurped. Even if we were happy to say that black Americans should simply buckle down and put in twice the effort of white Americans in order to close the gap, how confident could you be that it would really be a solution; that there would be no backlash? A tiny minority population such as Jews managing to claw their way to success is one thing - and not without some backlash even then - but does it therefore follow that black Americans could do the same without first addressing the underlying issues still perpetuating the disparities? Seems to me that it is at least as if not more important to uncover and address the attitudes which make it an uphill battle to begin with, to keep reminding people that while we've come a long way there's still a ways to go.

But, again, there is a difference between inter-personal racism and systemic racism.

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.

The election of birther Trump being perhaps a case in point (and hopefully not a taste of worse to come!).

The fact that 40% of the American electorate didn't think Trump's racially divisive rhetoric disqualified him to be President of the United States is certainly a major set-back for American politics and racial relations.

[koko]

Hundreds of schools are closing nationwide because tens of thousands have had the same experience.

Tens of thousands of student amount to one-quarter of one percent of all American college graduates.

Your argument doesn't account for 99.97% of all college graduates, which is why it is nonsensical.

Still want to believe all that useless education is of value?

This is yet another stawman argument.

But note that it is mythologies like those which kill people every year. I'll leave it at that.

None of this addresses the accuracy of the statistics mentioned above, which is what you were challenging. Your argument fails.

"nonsensical"

The majority of people don't get mugged or shot dead on the street. To most rational thinking people that still doesn't make it an acceptible practice.

For years many people insisted that pro athletes just had to go to college before they turned pro. That somehow they would be better athletes and better people for doing so. People like myself always said this is wrong. We pointed out to athletes from Europe who play pro soccer, basketball, bike racing, tennis, and other sports who earn a fortune and never waste so much as one minute in college. Being a former athlete/coach myself, I have personally known a dozen athletes or more who made the mistake of going to college rather than the minor or developmental leagues. Sadly their skills eroded while others who were wise and entered those leagues turned pros and made much money. Today, increasingly, tv and radio commentators are now saying that athletes should forego college as it is a dead end that will destroy, not build, their careers. Just today we had a tv report which said that 4 out of 5 of the best paying jobs in our state (Minnesota) do not require college. That is great news especially in view of the fact that we have had several colleges recently close here because their degrees are absolutely worthless.

Still want to believe the nonsense you are spewing? Go ahead. Persist in your myths. Send kids to college, let them build up hugmongous debts and live lives of utter despair. Who knows? Maybe a few just might commit suicide. But if they do, remember that their blood is your hands, not in mine. There is something kinda funny where a privileged suburbanite like you tells someone who lives in a ghetto in dire poverty that somehow more education is so "beneficial". I wonder if the irony has been lost on some of the readers here.

[Mithrae]

But is there systemic racism against Jews and Asians currently? If not, when did it end and how does that timeline compare with their financial fortunes? . . . it may be that they did not overcome systemic racism at all, but flourished once most of the hurdles had come down.

Your questions here seem to center on the definition of 'systemic' (or 'institutional') racism, so let's define terms:

Institutional racism refers specifically to the ways in which policies and practices of organizations or parts of systems (schools, courts, transportation authorities, etc.) create different outcomes for different racial groups.

Because U.S. law prohibits discrimination based on race and religion (among other things), 'systemic' or 'institutional' racism is understood to be less perceptible than overt forms of inter-personal racism. For that reason, it is often described (as above) less in terms of what it is and more in terms of its perceived effects -- that is, different outcomes between different racial groups.

To that end, if an ethnic group has equal or better outcomes -- in, for example, health, wealth, income, and other factors -- than those of white Americans, they have, by definition, overcome systemic racism.

You're not answering my questions/objection; you haven't shown any policies and practices in place which Jewish Americans overcame to achieve success. That there was systemic racism against Jews in the earlier part of the 20th century I'm sure we can agree on, but in the 1940s during the war with Nazi Germany and afterwards as the full extent and horror of the Holocaust was uncovered, anti-Semitism became radically unacceptable for most Americans; and in the late 1940s the Jewish state of Israel became at first a nominal and eventually the foremost ally of the USA in the Middle East. Are you trying to argue that there was still systemic racism against American Jews in the 1950s and 60s, which they overcame by education? If so, you'll need to show some kind of evidence to support that claim. Otherwise the fact that Jews became one of the wealthiest ethnic groups in the late 1970s could merely suggest that they flourished after the hurdles had come down.

With immigration policy skewing the Asian-American population towards higher-skill, higher-intelligence, higher-education and higher-wealth individuals (and hence their children) it would be questionable whether their success indicates overcoming systemic racism either, even if we suppose that there is still systemic racism against Asians.

A fair point, especially if we are looking mostly at south Asians.

But consider Japanese Americans, who are not a predominantly immigrant community -- nearly 3/4 are native born. They suffered some of the worst legal discrimination of any ethnic group in the United States (Asian or otherwise) in the 20th Century. And yet, they too have a have a higher average income and lower unemployment rate than whites. (They also exceed the average for all Asian Americans.)

Native-born children of an earlier-generation immigrant population skewed towards more highly-intelligent, -educated or -wealthy people are still on average going to be more intelligent, wealthy and educated themselves due to genetic, material or behavioural inheritance/influence. According to Wikipedia, as early as "1907, the Gentlemen's Agreement between the governments of Japan and the United States ended immigration of Japanese unskilled workers, but permitted the immigration of businessmen, students and spouses of Japanese immigrants already in the US." Immigration from Japan was essentially halted in 1924 and when it resumed in the 1950s it was presumably under a similar framework of prioritizing wealthier and more educated folk and their immediate families. Again according to Wikipedia there were almost 283,000 Japanese immigrants from 1950 to 2000 - many of whom would go on to have children and grandchildren - against a total Japanese population in 2000 of 773,000, so it seems likely that the fraction of Japanese Americans descended only from immigrants in the period of unskilled migration prior to 1907 would be very small. Racial discrimination against Japanese people presumably peaked during WW2 and continued well beyond it: 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.

Neither example seems to demonstrate that it would even be plausible that education alone can enable black Americans to close the gap, since the histories, circumstances and biases are quite different.

But if "education obviously is very valuable for success," as we already agreed, why would improved education somehow uniquely not work for black Americans? How have Nigerian Americans, for example, been able to be so successful? And what about Hispanics?

You quoted most of my post #58, but snipped the observation that "Higher education in useful areas may well remain out of reach of the majority of people to begin with; around one third of Americans have a bachelor's level education." Even among the skewed sample of immigrants from the Middle East and south/east Asia, that fraction only rises to around half. Asserting that the more representative population of black Americans can readily exceed the national average rates of higher education enough to overcome the hurdles of discrimination is not a claim to be blindly accepted, and the examples of Jewish and Asian Americans don't seem to provide a valid point of comparison. Possibly quite the opposite is true; issues such as higher rates of exposure to the neuro-toxin lead from petroleum and leaded paint in older, unrenovated inner-city housing was probably a major contributor to the fact that, at least in the 1990s, African Americans had significantly lower average results from IQ testing than white Americans. Even when that IQ gap gets closed, the district-based school funding system prevalent in America ensures that there is a substantial bias in favour of predominantly-white districts, by implication making it harder for non-white (especially black) Americans to keep pace right from the beginning. 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!

But even granting that it is plausible - surely if black Americans buckled down to learn/work twice as hard as white Americans they would achieve equal outcomes before too long - that potential to materially overcome racial barriers wouldn't be the same thing as a solution for the problem which would presumably be still seething under the surface.

But more to the point, historically the success (or stereotype of success) of Jewish people has ended up becoming and to this day remains a major source or vehicle of anti-Semitism. We know that many people have a tendency to lash out irrationally and often violently when they believe their 'rightful' or traditional place of dominance is being usurped. Even if we were happy to say that black Americans should simply buckle down and put in twice the effort of white Americans in order to close the gap, how confident could you be that it would really be a solution; that there would be no backlash? A tiny minority population such as Jews managing to claw their way to success is one thing - and not without some backlash even then - but does it therefore follow that black Americans could do the same without first addressing the underlying issues still perpetuating the disparities? Seems to me that it is at least as if not more important to uncover and address the attitudes which make it an uphill battle to begin with, to keep reminding people that while we've come a long way there's still a ways to go.

But, again, there is a difference between inter-personal racism and systemic racism.

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. As I believe I've already stated, even if a group managed to struggle to overcome barriers to success (which you haven't really shown a viable example of, though no doubt it's possible) that's not really the same thing as a solution to that problem; it's side-stepping or jumping over the hurdle, rather than actually dealing with it.

The election of birther Trump being perhaps a case in point (and hopefully not a taste of worse to come!).

The fact that 40% of the American electorate didn't think Trump's racially divisive rhetoric disqualified him to be President of the United States is certainly a major set-back for American politics and racial relations.

Not even so much his election, which could be put down to lukewarm support for Clinton and strong opposition to the 'political establishment,' but his ongoing >40% approval rating despite continuing inflammatory racial rhetoric over the years is troubling... not that this year's Democrat ticket looks like being a whole lot better with "clean and articulate" Biden and (I've heard rumoured) "keep 'em locked up for the funding" Harris.

If 20-40% of Americans harbour racist attitudes such that even the presidency is considered a viable platform for their expression, that may not be 'institutional' racism but would surely seem to be a systemic malaise. Your appeal to "U.S. law and improving social attitudes" only goes so far, especially since improving social attitudes seem to have done a bit of a back-flip after people saw a black man in the white house. 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. If ever it seemed that black Americans were threatening to struggle past the barriers against them to achieve equality, there's no obvious reason why subtle forms of discrimination such as that couldn't become even more pronounced and put them 'back in their place.' Examples such as the stereotype of rich and greedy Jews or the election of Trump seem to confirm that kind of backlash mentality, the reactionary sentiment against a threat to a socially-dominant group's perceived rightful place.

So again, even if we were happy to say that black Americans should simply learn and work and struggle that much harder to achieve equality, that still wouldn't necessarily equate to a long-term 'solution' or plan to successfully overcome the barriers against them; there's little or no reason to assume that there wouldn't be a pushback equal to or greater than whatever progress might have been made.

More emphasis on education undoubtedly is worthwhile; but you haven't offered any real reason to suppose that education alone is a plausible route to overcoming black disadvantages, and even less so that it should eclipse efforts to produce real solutions by exposing and countering actual racism and systemic disadvantages.