To get to a level playing field, someone has to step down a notch. Welcome to the middle of the ladder, White Christian Males. If you’re not going to be rude about having to be taken down off your pedestal, we might all just be able to get along.

Make a big deal about it and, well, you’ll make it worse for yourselves.

@...the3g_ipwn: I think the point of the Civil Rights movement, is that when a person is unequal due to [i]heredity[/i], or something they have absolutely no means to have ever affected or controlled, they deserve special treatment to compensate for that. Why? I mean, it’s really a lot of people’s sense of justice. Someone with one leg who never had it from birth deserves special treatment just to be able to compete with us two-leggers.

Man, you must really like 1984.

When you’re talking about discrimination in the legal system, or the electoral system, that’s the only kind of equality we can deal with. Don’t tell me there’s only one kind of equal. There’s politically equal, equal in height, in gender, skin color, amount of money made, etc. It’s the equality in respective fields we must deal with.

We agree as a society that people are not physically equal, and thus make special concessions and considerations for those in your physical “group C”. This works well because it’s not a zero-sum game, like economics is.

In the same way, people are not economically equal, which as I said above, is a far trickier problem to solve. The reason that African-Americans (heretofore referred to as ‘blacks’, as complicated names create precisely the divisiveness you discuss) are born into poverty frequently, because poverty is by-and-large heredity. Thus, even long after the actual prejudice and hatred leaves us, you have a lasting legacy of poverty. To say that solving the former is all that needs to be done is ridiculous and naive, as well as cold-blooded and mean. We must pay for the sins of our father, and the legacies therein.

Now, as to what’s an effective way to do that, this is a matter of great dispute. But the fact is, in the same way that handicap people deserve special privledges, until the playing field is equal from birth, low-income minorities also need those things. Equality in ignorance of reality is dangerous and stupid.

The core idea of communism is power reserved for the means of production, i.e. the laborers, instead of residing in the people who don’t actually produce, i.e. the boardsmen. Equal distribution and production is just one facet of that. As much as you’d hate to, read up on your Karl Marx. He’s definitely not right (this is provable) but his ideas are worth consideration and at the very least drastically inform the opposite position.

I know you said people are not equal. But you’re also saying nothing should be done to remedy this, because your conception of equal is too wide and beyond the scope of this discussion. No one wants everyone to be born the same, with the same money, and the same parental structure. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about inequalities that exist in certain aspects of our culture.

Economic equality is not about everyone making the same amount of money or getting the same things. Economic equality is about everyone having an equal opportunity to partake in ‘economy’, i.e. labor and the buying and selling of goods. People born poor do not have this opportunity, or it is diminished in standard to the opportunities of the rich due to education, inheritance, etc. This is mitigated by two things: A high potential for upward mobility (which, though we have this in the United States, and better than many countries, it still fails due to education), and an essentially random distribution of rich and poor people.

The latter is what we’re talking about. Due to the past of prejudice and civil inequalities and racism, statistically black people are born poor. This means that poorness is inherited in their skin color with far more prevalence, which is not the way we want this economy to work. Presumably. Because it doesn’t work. Group C is trapped in Group C, with a greatly diminished opportunity to rise to A or B by virtue of something that should have nothing to do with their economic opportunity, their skin color.

Sure, the fact that they have a genetic predisposition to laziness does explain them remaining poor. But how does that explain the numbers of black men and women (statistically small compared to the rest of the group as they are) who are avidly hard workers, or the statistic disparity of black men and women who work menial labor jobs I would die before I finished, being a ‘hardy and hard working’ white man? Isolating a gene is hard work dude. Good luck with that.

A far more likely explanation is that the Apartheid and several other horrors visited upon the people of Africa (some of them on themselves, but the external provocations mainly) have deflated them to the hated subgroup out of just about any group of mixed race, be it city, country, or nation. Why is that far more likely? Because we can point to these horrors, we have documented them, and we know, due to the progression of heredity of economy, that the reverberations of these persecutions last a lot longer than the persecutions themselves.

I’m relying on documented facts and accepted psychology. You’re conjecturing evolutionary biology. I won’t go so far as saying you’re racist, but an anecdote from one person, black or white, does not suffice to prove anything. You’re generalizing based on your extraordinarily limited worldview, using that to rationalize cause. I’m looking at the facts that we do know and conjecturing something far more ascertainable than the individual motives of an entire race of humans.

Your pretention is amazing. The fact that you think ignorance of history can provide you anything, any kind of information, is startling. Since when has knowing anything about a subject made someone less qualified to talk about it? If you’re happy parading ignorance as a virtue, then there’s nothing more to say to you. As a matter of course, you don’t learn facts in high school, not in the sense of college, you learn about isolated incidents flavored with opinions, like the fact that Christopher Columbus discovered the world was round (wrong) or that he was anything but a nasty man who did horrible things to indigenous people because he very likely had syphilis eating his brain. I’d tell you it makes you sound stupid, but honestly I have the feeling you’d take that as a complement, not ‘soundin’ like them damn college folk’.

I never said blacks were lazy. The idea that their culture in America is pathogenic, overall, to their success is indeed well documented, however. And that culture is a result of their cultural treatment in the context of greater American society and history. The fact that they are statistically more poor is a result of the following:

Let’s say, optimistically, that everyone has an equal percent chance, upon birth, of climbing from Group C to Group B. Like, 10-20% (it’s less than half). However, your chance of falling back down the ladder is slimmer, say, 5%. (It’s easier to climb middle class than it is, realistically, with how humans behave, to lose everything and start over from scratch. Middle class families by and large remain middle class.) If a group starts off the ‘race’ all in Group B, at every point except the limiting point (at infinity), they will have a larger proportion of Group C members, due to their disadvantageous start, than another ethnicity that had a more uniform distribution between Group B and C. It’s basic math, and I can type it all out for you, if you’d like.

@...dieAntagonista: No, to an extent, you’re absolutely right. But statistics, especially statistics over a long period of time (knocking out the chance of high-variance randomness), do imply the existence of cause. Unless you find some sort of link between race and economic performance (as a factor of that race inherently, sort of like the ‘laziness’ example) you have to conclude that there is an ‘unnatural’ economic bias and, presumably, figure out what the cause of that bias is.

My posit is that it’s because poor propagates poor, for the reasons you state and many others. Black people started out behind in the race, after emancipation, and, treating them completely equally (as we almost certainly do a good job of now, but definitely not in the past), they’re STILL going to be punished for starting out behind, even today. Unless your reaction is “well, dog eat dog world”, like a Libertarian (which is, in a sense, valid), the desire to remedy this somehow and ‘catch them up’ to the race should appeal to your sense of fairness, at the expense of your sense of ‘equality’ (they have to be treated different, at least for a time, to make progress).

But you’re right, it’s not inherent to their race. ANY group of humans who experience racism experience the same pattern of the widespread proliferation of poverty, crime, and pathological pop culture.