Why is CRT good?

@TinyViolins Hm, all of those things, every single one, were ended over 50 years ago. Millions of black people in this country have been able move into the opportunities they wish to have and achieved great success.

There is a value in acknowledging history so we know what happened, but pointing out policies and events that happened 50 plus years ago is inauthentic and unhelpful.

The real issue is with the black underclass, not black people in the middle classes and above. What are the issues that impact them the most? Is it being unable to move to the suburbs? Or having children too young and out of wedlock? Or having contempt for academic achievement or goals? Or focusing too much on gang and honor culture and overreacting violently to childish insults and sleights?

I believe my questions reveal my opinion on the matter.

@SumKindaMunster Fine, let's just go back 50 years then and look at just redlining. Imagine your parents buy a house 50 years ago, pay it off in 20 years, build equity, and then have a place to retire. They get to save money for several years afterwards by not paying a mortgage, which can be used for inheritance, for college funds, or for financial investments. They use the money they save to build more money and can afford retirement.

That means their children can actually afford to go to college without taking on too much, if any, student loan debt. It also means that they can afford to go back home afterwards and take their time looking for quality jobs since rent payments are a non-factor. Eventually they will inherit the house and choose to live in it, essentially allowing them to live life without mortgage payments, or they could sell the house and use the proceeds as a down payment on a house of their own. Then they'll set their own children up in the same way or better than their parents did.

Now let's go back to the example and change things up, except this family is denied a loan for a house and has two options. 1) They can move to a worse neighborhood and buy a house there, or 2) they can live in an apartment.

If they choose to live in a bad neighborhood, that likely means that their children will receive a lower quality of education, have difficulties studying and sleeping with the sounds of planes, trains, sirens, and gunfire, and likely be surrounded by families that focus on achievement. Not only will this make it difficult to attend a university, even if they are accepted, they may struggle once they get in due to the poor education they had already received.

On top of that, without a bank sufficiently subsidizing a home purchase, it may take these families even longer to pay back a mortgage, and they will also have to deal with higher interest rates on these mortgages. This reduces their ability to save money over the long term, which decreases their ability to afford college tuition, to set themselves up for retirement, or to build wealth through investing.

Now by a stroke of fortune the child graduates college, but now they have sizeable student loan debt that they must work at repaying in order to dodge the interest rates. This likely means they can't afford to wait around for a high-quality job and must take the best you can find right away in order to avoid going further into debt.

Since property values tend to decrease in these neighborhoods, the house, upon inheritance, is likely not worth all that much. But you don't want to raise your kids in a bad neighborhood, so the amount of money received for the house will only serve as a modest down payment on a new house. And since you are loaded with student debt, it will be much harder to secure a bank loan for a house, and it will also meet you with higher interest rate which eats away more into your ability to save money and build wealth.

And since your parents couldn't properly save for retirement, you now have to support them financially, which impedes on your ability to save for your children's future, and they will also have to take on sizeable debt to pursue a decent, middle-class life.

This isn't just a hypothetical example I made up of a bunch of what-if questions. This was and still is a reality for racial minorities and particularly black Americans as a result of just one racist practice.

Compound that with the fact that the GI Bill after WWII insured that white veterans were able to get free college education and great rates on housing, while black veterans were denied this privilege. So white families could build even more wealth over time, as well as develop college connections, business connections, and ensure that their children got legacy status to get into more elite universities. These children could then navigate college much easier, have decent jobs set up for them afterwards, and pass the same privileges down to their children.

Wealth is generational. Donald Trump didn't build his fortunes and become President from scratch. His father helped paved the way so that he could become somebody important. You could argue the same thing for George W. Bush, whose grandfather got rich during WW2. And it's not just the case for these two, they're just prominent examples. I'm sure you have a buddy or two that ended up working for their dad's business

@TinyViolins That's life. All immigrants struggle when they first get here, that's part of the experience.

Should I spend my time contemplating the discrimination my Irish and Italian ancestors received here when they first emigrated? Should I note the hypotheticals that anyone could put forth and assume those hypotheticals are real and assume my life would have been SO much better had my ancestors received the fair and equitable treatment they deserved at the time?

Should I use that knowledge and belief to complain right here and now about the poor treatment my ancestors received, therefore I deserve additional benefits and compensation for it?

If no, why do other ethnic minorities deserve preferential treatment in your mind?

Also, I noted you ignored my questions about what is truly impacting the black underclass in this day and age. As well as the many, many social programs, funds and money put aside to address these supposed inequalities.

@SumKindaMunster You said that pointing out things that happened 50 years ago were unhelpful, and I just showed you how one single racist practice is driving the wealth divide in this nation. CRT is about teaching the legal history of America, and this is part of that legal history. The Fair Housing Act didn't pass until 1968.

I didn't answer your questions because my post was long enough just discussing one issue. I could write just as much on the other questions you asked and I'd waste even more time here.

It's not my job to educate you. You could easily find answers to these questions online if you wanted to. I'm sure you know how to Google.

I'm happy to come back later and start discussing some of these topics, but I have other things to do with my life.

@TinyViolins
And I responded by giving my own personal anecdote and asking how it compares to your personal anecdote.

Then you seemed to get upset and dismissed me.

I'm here if you want to pick it back up.

@SumKindaMunster Why do you believe the issue only applies to the “underclass” when even black college graduates have less median net worth than white high school graduates? When black people with an associates degree were more likely to be unemployed than a white person without so much as a high school diploma? When the unemployment rate for black college graduates is more than twice that of all other college graduates?

There’s a real danger in trying to paint with a broad brush when discussing these issues, because the “black underclass” doesn’t live in a vacuum. Many issues facing them often feed into and off of each other.

But historical data shows that problems with black unemployment, income and wealth, educational attainment, single parenthood, out-of-wedlock births, and incarceration have been going on for more than 150 years, back when racist legislation and practices like Black Codes, Jim Crow, segregation, and sunset towns would have directly led to many of these problems. That would indicate that there is at the very minimum a legacy effect, since it would otherwise be hard to pinpoint an exact date when these problems first manifested.

That said, trying to create this image of black neighborhoods being overridden with gangs is rooted more in stereotypes and biases than actual data. The actual stats indicate that half of all gang members in the US are actually Hispanic. Of an estimated 1 million gang members in the US (estimates vary), only about 300,000-400,000 are black, from a population of more than 40 million. That’s less than 1% of the black population. How big of a problem are gangs really? Black women fare the worst when it comes to income and wealth, while gang membership is overwhelmingly a male problem.

And even the “honor” argument is also heavily flawed when you have largely white or exclusively white groups like the Proud Boys fighting with Antifa, Patriot Front going after gay people and drag queens, Boogaloo members trying to start a race war. You also have several white bike gangs like Hells Angels, Mongols, Pagans, and Outlaws, but what do any of them have to do with white people living in poverty?

The same arguments of gangs, of brutishness, of violence and substance abuse were made against Irish, German, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants. Even Shakespeare made famous the Montagues and Capulets. Is it fair to say that gangs mostly arise to satisfy needs for money and power? If so, wouldn’t that explain why such activity is more prominent among the economically disadvantaged?

But to go even further than that, most gang members join when they are in their early teenage years. You could also say that social dominance dynamics play a factor, especially when school bullying and teenage menaces seem to be a universal problem at that age. Maybe it’s inevitable that when you combine a lack of positive attention with economic disenfranchisement and the need for young males to prove their masculinity, gangs are bound to form. I don’t think anyone really knows for sure.

Though given how most gang activity is local and concentrated to certain neighborhoods, one primary culprit you can look at is the local school system. Public schools rely on property taxes to get by, and since property values are much lower in poor neighborhoods, that means that they are often underfunded with overcrowded classrooms. Because of this, there is often a lack of attention from teachers, which may prompt young boys to misbehave in order to get attention. There is also a lack of funding for extracurricular activities, so there’s even less attention they could get from coaches or mentors. Maybe these teenage boys join gangs in order to satisfy social needs or desire to belong and be validated.

@SumKindaMunster Also, looking at education figures, while more than 30% of black adults do have a college degree, they are also overwhelmingly more likely to be severely in debt because of it. A 20-year longitudinal study found that the median black student loan applicant has only paid off about 5% of their initial balance, contrasted with white applicants who have paid off nearly 95% of their initial balance. Black people are also 5 times more likely to default on their student loan debt than white people. Black college attendees get crushed with student loan interest. A recent survey of more than 1200 black college graduates revealed that 2/3rds of respondents felt that their degree was not worth all the debt they acquired. Debt like this ruins personal credit and makes business and mortgage loans incredibly difficult to acquire. Maybe that goes a long way to explaining why this black underclass might not be so keen on educational attainment.

But it’s not impossible to get a good job without a college degree. So why don’t more members of the “black underclass” just apply for jobs and try to work their way up? There are numerous studies that show how applicants with white-sounding names were AT LEAST 50% more likely to receive a call-back for an interview than those with black-sounding names, even if their resumes were identical. Even if a white applicant mentioned having a criminal record, they were still more likely to receive a call-back than a black applicant without one.

So just like the gang stereotype, there is racial discrimination when it comes to hiring for a job. But it doesn’t just stop at the resume. Even when equally qualified black and white candidates were brough in to be interviewed, the white candidate was 2.5 times more likely to get the job. This is at least one reason why black people tend to be overrepresented in low-wage service jobs, mainly because it’s the only place they could actually find work.

But service jobs are often stressful, they pay very little, inconsistent scheduling makes it difficult to plan anything, and their long hours often mean workers won’t have much time to spend with their children. School hours are pretty consistent, retail hours are not. Imagine being a kid and seeing your single-parent wreck themselves like this. It’s not uncommon for single-parents to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. They work so hard, and for what? Maybe they decide to be rappers and athletes and drug dealers just to avoid falling into the same trap their parents did.

Teenage pregnancy rates for black girls are almost identical to those of Hispanic and Native American girls. The only thing these ladies have in common, besides uteruses, is that these are also the most economically disadvantaged groups out there. Risk factors for teenage pregnancy include, but are not limited to, single parenthood and a lack of adult supervision/attention, having friends and siblings who are sexually active, being in a low-income household/neighborhood, low self-esteem, and drug and alcohol use.

Hypothetically, let’s say there’s a teenage girl whose single mother must work long hours due to only being able to find low-wage jobs, so there isn’t much of a parental attention around. She feels lonely and isolated, so she gets into drugs and alcohol to fill the void and that makes her happy. Or maybe she notices her friends or older siblings start to date and that makes them happy. Either way, she’s in a vulnerable position. She knows there are things that make people feel good, so she wants some of that too. Eventually she gets a boyfriend of her own.

Whether it’s the lack of attention at home, the lack of sex-ed in her underfunded school, the feelings of loneliness and low self-esteem, or her very own lack of experience with life, eventually the sex she’s been having ends up getting her pregnant. Every relationship dynamic has its own unique challenges, so it’s not fair to impose one rigid standard for them all, but given how commonly these risk factors have been found in multiple studies, these are pretty reasonable assumptions. The lack of a father-figure or stable relationship in the household would mean that she never received a model or mental schema for how relationships are supposed to function or what kind of man she should look out for.

A person’s environment has massive impacts on how they navigate their adolescence and early adulthood; the kind of beliefs about the world or personal values they hold. If a person in an urban California city grows up to be liberal, or a person in rural Mississippi grows up to be conservative, does that really come as a surprise? If a person was born and raised in a heavily Christian community, what are the odds they’re going to end up Muslim?

I found this report while digging into the effect of the GI Bill segregation and generational wealth I mentioned earlier, and it paints a pretty damning picture for why black families have found it so hard to advance economically. I encourage you to give it a read, and if you have doubts about any of my claims, you could find those figures online too. There are probably some minor variances depending on which years or which studies you choose to look at, but that’s just how statistics function. It doesn’t really impact the overall argument.

https://tcf.org/content/report/bridging-progressive-policy-debates-student-debt-racial-wealth-gap-reinforce/

@TinyViolins So I appreciate the sincerity and effort that went into this reply. I can sense your interest and passion in the subject and clearly you feel this is important.

Unfortunately, I'm unmoved.

I feel like this is a canard and interestingly you touch on the real issue, which in my mind is class, not race. I see correlation, not causation.

Additionally, I have a real problem with how these issues are now being portrayed. It seems now middle class and lower class whites are being asked to bear the burden of black people's plight. That's not who needs to give and do more. It's the political class that needs to do more. This is class warfare disguised as a racial issue. It is misdirection. Democrats have championed civil rights for several decades, yet not much progress has been made in areas where they dominate and control the political system. You'd think they would be asked seriously to explain this, but they get away with the response that Republicans are worse and that is the end of it.

We're being asked to feel real sympathy for the plights of Colin Kapernick, Will Smith, or Venus Williams when they don't get a mulit-million dollar contract, an Oscar, or another championship tennis trophy, while also watching our children being called racists for merely being born a certain color and asked to give up more, while our opportunities dwindle, things get more expensive, and the angry voices get louder demanding we shut up, go away and die already....oh, but also pay more taxes to support everyone else.

Let me know when the pitchforks and torches come out and you are ready to string up the people actually responsible for this, I'll be there.

Otherwise, I am not interested. Sorry.

@SumKindaMunster It's not passion, it's facts. Everything I mentioned is backed by studies, statistics, and surveys. Not just one or two, but multiple figures that reinforce each other.

You asked me these questions and I gave you the most accurate answers available, yet your response fails to address a single point I made. You flippantly dismiss the entirety of the argument because it doesn't align with your subjective worldview, and then you deflect to several non-sequiturs and red herrings because the only proof you need for those is the capacity to have an opinion. You're using the exact same approach Flat Earthers use to confront accurate science. Regardless of what you believe, that's pure intellectual laziness.

My question to you is: why do you remain unconvinced when there is very unambiguous data showing how the wealth divide and discrimination practices are driven primarily along racial lines, not class lines? Even black college graduates have twice the average unemployment rate, which is something that the class argument alone would equalize.

How is the class issue something that will get resolved if many millions of black people are being denied opportunities to advance to higher classes, namely through government policies that imposed heavy student loans, restricted them from moving to better neighborhoods, denied them GI benefits that they rightfully earned, and leaves their schools chronically underfunded? I haven't even brought up the War on Drugs which sees black people getting arrested more than 3 times as often for marijuana possession despite it being a multi-billion dollar industry for white business owners.

It's one thing to have your beliefs, but it's quite another to have them in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. How is anyone supposed to take you seriously when you can casually disregard a mountain of research in favor of your own personal biases?

This is the reason why there is a push to teach CRT in the first place. As long as people keep ignoring the direct and disproportionate impacts of policy on minority communities, the issues will never get resolved. CRT isn't about black celebrities, calling people names, or anyone being asked to give up anything (which is the biggest and most egregious red herring of them all), it's about how policies have an impact on people.

Whatever is being taught to the contrary isn't CRT and at best is a misguided approach to highlight racial disparities. Otherwise they'll end up like you and believe whatever they read on social media to justify refusing to do anything towards solving the problems.

@TinyViolins
That's not really true. Did I address it point by point? No, but I responded relevantly, and acknowledged your passion and sincere interest in the subject.


Not at all, and I'm disappointed you are now resorting to personal insults and retorts because I chose to not engage you point by point on this.


Misdirection, and confirmation bias. There is a perversion in the scientific method when it comes to social issues. Instead of asking open ended questions, these type of studies have an answer in mind, then build the study around the answer they want to obtain. That along with poor sample sizes or biased samples, along with just the general acknowledgment that such things are pseudo science, they don't really determine absolutes, rather they provide general evidence that something might be true. If you choose to believe such things to the point of being emotionally invested into the subject, that is not my way.

I could ask you the same question.


There is a divisiveness to these teachings that tell me it is a dead end. The way forward isn't to highlight and scapegoat a certain demographic of society, and cast the blame on them, it is to look within our own selves and see the commonalities and goals we all have in common and working together to reach those goals.

I am totally disgusted and disinterested in the culture du jour that seeks to blame most of societies ills on any racial, religious, or gender demographic. Once again, the main divider is class, not race or gender.

@SumKindaMunster Responding to what you project my feelings to be isn't addressing a point. It's a strawman argument and it's disingenuous to claim that you're addressing anything relevant when you failed to touch on a single fact that was presented in my posts. The closest you came to actually being relevant was when you shrugged away the effects of redlining by claiming "that's life". As if it's normal for people to be systemically discriminated against on the basis of their skin.

It's not an insult when it's describing your actions exactly. It's not even that you didn't address the argument point-by-point, but that you failed to address the facts of the case at all. Your response exudes intellectual laziness for the simple fact that you ignored every single piece of data provided. Instead you deflect to the spurious (and baseless) argument that white people are being demanded to surrender something in order to correct government failures, and then bring up black celebrities as if that's the focal point racial inequality. This highlights that you are either incapable or unwilling to think about an issue on anything beyond the rhetorical level.

This entire exchange with you seems to be predicated on your belief that your subjective opinions and biases can be equated with fact-based conclusions and data-driven research. It is a textbook example of anti-intellectualism to disregard the entirety of social sciences because you, without a shred of proof to support your claim, decided that the experts either don't know what they're doing or do know and are intentionally misleading people. This is exactly the Flat Earther response to their debunked claims. How can you honestly sit there and criticize the methodology when you haven't even bothered to look up any of the figures provided?

Even if one or two of the studies were flawed, I deliberately looked at multiple studies on each subject to confirm that they reached the same or similar conclusions. I mentioned as much in my last response because I suspected correctly that you didn't have the intellectual honesty to give a careful look at the actual figures.

The difference between your approach and my approach to the matter is that I rely on facts and carefully controlled research, while you can only muster your heavily biased interpretations of what you see on social media. That's why you can't be taken seriously. It has nothing to do with your beliefs, but rather your ignorant refusal to bring forth any evidence to support it, or at the very minimum to dispute the claims against it. Colin Kaepernick has nothing to do with wealth and income inequalities among black people.

The divisiveness to the teachings is based on the facts that classroom educators are not researchers nor experts in any field. Since most of them only have an education degree or an undergraduate degree in liberal arts, they're not really qualified to conduct statistical analysis. Just like you, they're projecting their own biases onto the argument and conflating opinion with fact.

Speaking of qualifications, what exactly qualifies you to make the (once again, completely unsubstantiated) claim that the problems with race lie solely with class? Or to decide what exactly the problems are that differentiate class from race, as if class hasn't traditionally been divided along ethnic and racial lines?

An easy way to disprove your unfounded claim would be to look solely at Hispanics. They have higher teenage pregnancy rates, higher high school dropout rates, higher gang membership, and lower post-secondary education than black people, yet statistically have higher median new worth, higher income levels, and higher home ownership rates. By your own arbitrary standards of class, these factors alone should have a proportionate impact if race was not an issue.

Besides, none of my facts, figures, or arguments were rooted in the culture war narratives that play out on Facebook and Twitter, so bringing them up in response to my claims is by definition a red herring. They only serve to deflect from the conversation and shield your ego from having to confront conflicting information. If we're going to address a problem, it's better to do it with a fact-based approach, since it's far more reliable than your speculative presumptions.

@TinyViolins
Oh well excuse me for not responding in the manner of the Harvard debate club.

The fact is, you have chosen to believe a personally curated collection of facts and studies that you have decided are the key and the answer. Then you are demanding I go through your personal collection, point by point and rebut them for you.

Pass.

I'm trying to have a collegiate conversation here and exchange some thoughts and ideas.


Or as I stated and you ignored, perhaps the "studies" you are so enamored with are flawed, that's very typical for studies on social issues. It could very well be correlation, but you aren't going to consider that, you know what you know and there is no debating that.


So don't take me seriously then. It really seems to bother you that I'm not interested in listening to your personal opinion that you developed using confirmation bias, and finding studies that supported what you already believed. I guess that's because you are so emotionally invested in this world view.


But not you of course, you've done the work, looked at the studies and you know...."THE TRUTH" and it's your weary burden to be the only guy who sees how things really are. Gosh if only everyone would listen.


It wouldn't matter if I had a Masters in Social Policy you've already decided my qualifications.

And what are yours might I ask?



Of course this could also be used to disprove your conclusions, if this is true, why aren't we putting more money into lifitng up Hispanics? Don't they deserve it more since it seems they are suffering higher rates of the same issues you are so obsessed with for black people?


Go punch your pillow and scream about why everyone is so stupid and the world is unfair then.

Sorry you were so triggered.