Political Roundtable - Part VI

[nate33]

Black people have been a huge burden on the profitability of rich white people for decades.

This statement totally blows me away...given that many rich white people have wealth that is the direct result of HUNDREDS of years of the forced and free labor of black people. It's almost comical that you would now turn around and claim that the sons and daughters of the slaves on whose backs much of this country's wealth was built are now a "burden" to the sons and daughters of the slave masters.

If black people are indeed a burden to rich white people, maybe that's the "chickens coming home to roost."

You miss my point. Yes, white slave owners certainly profited off the labor of black slaves. And maybe there is a cosmic justice of some sort that whites are now paying a lot of money to blacks via welfare. (Although, the currently living white people didn't profit from the currently living black people, but let's put that aside for now).

My point is that white people today do not have a financial incentive to keep blacks in poverty. The vast majority of white people would be much better off if more black people were out of poverty and not committing violent crimes. This whole theory that inner city black poverty is a secret plan hatched by white real estate owners is absurd.

[Wes_Tiny_Abe_]

image deleted

Unless something is done about illegal immigration, this entire Black/White debate is going to be irrelevant 20 years from now when the illegals and their offspring outnumber everybody and take over everything.

Really? Why does this dude even post here again? Reported...

When was the last time you were in the DC area?

[Dat2U]

Nate33 may never of heard of the Jim Crow laws that were in effect 100 years after slavery but i guess that may be a foreign concept to in the eyes of many repugs.

Jim Crow?? Pshh.. literally 3-4 years ago, as I recall, Wells Fargo was forced to pay damages for proffering predatory loans to low income minority communities in Baltimore.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/us/07 ... .html?_r=0

Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

Jim Crow didn't go anywhere. These same racist practices have simply taken on different forms and continue to be protected under the law.

Give me a break. The whole "predatory loan" issue is pure propaganda. 20 years before that, Banks wouldn't loan to poor black people because they were a credit risk. (Banks didn't do this out of racism, they did so because they're really good at dispassionately evaluating risk.) Democrats instituted the Community Reinvestment act that basically forced banks to loan to high risk blacks under the threat of government sanction. The government expanded Fannie Mae to reduce the risk exposure of banks. Then, when the real estate bubble predictably collapsed, those high risk loans blew up. THAT'S WHY THE BANKS DIDN'T WANT TO LEND IN THE FIRST PLACE!

The banks were damned when they didn't lend, and damned when they did.

What garbage. As someone who has family in both mortgage lending & real estate & dabbled in it myself and WITNESSED what has been going on for years... this post is complete trash. I've actually worked & known of mortgage lenders in Montgomery & PG County that were aggressively pushing african american borrowers into crap loans due to amount of money that could be made. No doc loans, balloon payments, excessive fees...sneaking points out the back. Double digit interest rates... even despite the fact many of these folks had good credit.

[nate33]

That's pretty much what a Tea Party rally is.

This post is gross.

What exactly in my post is gross. Are my facts wrong? Did I make any unfounded leaps in logic? My premise, totally supported by the facts, is that blacks are doing a lot more harm to whites than the opposite. Do you disagree? Why? The crime stats overwhelmingly support my premise. I'm willing to discuss why these problems exist and what should be done about them, but I've had enough with the Blame Whitey argument that persists throughout the media and on these boards. Whites did not cause this. Whites are usually the victim. It just never gets reported that way.

For someone I thought was pretty smart, the myopic nature of your posts is shocking. I guess in your world, see no evil, hear no evil really rings true.

Myopic? I submit to you that the current mainstream media take on things is myopic. They look at two or three incidents of police violence by white cops on black citizens, and blow it up to the point that we get massive riots and violence. That's myopia. If you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, you will see that there is no statistical evidence of systematic white-cop-on-black-suspect abuse, that, in fact, the truth is the opposite. As I posted a few pages back, white people get killed by cops at a higher rate relative to their violent crime rate than blacks.

Myopia is the focus on one or two dead black people when hundreds are dying each month because of the black-on-black violence that persists in every major city with a significant population of blacks. This black-on-black violence is partially caused by a broken welfare system that creates a cycle of hopelessness and dependency.

[nate33]

What garbage. As someone who has family in both mortgage lending & real estate & dabbled in it myself and WITNESSED what has been going on for years... this post is complete trash. I've actually worked & known of mortgage lenders in Montgomery & PG County that were aggressively pushing african american borrowers into crap loans due to amount of money that could be made. No doc loans, balloon payments, excessive fees...sneaking points out the back. Double digit interest rates... even despite the fact many of these folks had good credit.

Explain to me why banks could profit more on crap loans made to poor, ignorant blacks than to poor, ignorant whites.

Don't get me wrong. I don't absolve the banks from the mess. I've been pretty consistent in my blame of the banks. They set up the "too big to fail" system by promoting the pooling of loans and dumping off the risk to the government via Fannie Mae, and then bribing unscrupulous congressmen (mostly Democrats) to bail them out when the spit hit the fan. The banks were definitely evil and corrupt in all this. But were they racist? Were they picking on black people or merely on poor people and ignorant people of all races?

[Induveca]

Nate, the answer is people of all races. Some of you people should visit both northern and southern Florida. Had zero to do with race.

People of every ethnicity fell victim to the housing balloon and overzealous agents all over the US. Same with the dot com IPO boom.

[Chocolate City Jordanaire]

HOW?

Every since slavery most black men haven't been able to raise their families. Bill Cosby played Heathcliff Huxtable. Not many dads like him exist.

I had a great dad (definitely not a perfect dad). Military officer who nurtured from when he was in his 50s until he died at age 84. Before that he provided and stayed married to my mom for over 25 years. I literally saw him redirect a white man who yelled at me and my mom. He did so without gunplay or violence, despite having been a combat veteran with two tours in Vietnam.

If not for his example and my mom's constant prayers I would be putting the I in ignorant.

nate, slavery destabilized black families and stigmatized black men, particularly.

My thought about the "hero mom" who beat her son was "Where is his dad?"

Nate33, I wish you could be a big black man for a week.

CCJ, I hope you keep challenging me on my arguments. I appreciate our back and forth on these issues.

While there can be no doubt that slavery destabilized black families, it is my understanding that black families had largely recovered within the next 75 years.

According to Thomas Sowell:

• In 1950, 72 percent of all black men and 81 percent of black women had been married.
• Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates were higher than those of whites.
• Prior to the 1960’s the unemployment rate for black 16 and 17-year olds was under 10 percent.
• Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining, and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income.
• In 1965, 76.4 percent of black children were born to married women.

So in the 50's and into the 60's, the black family was doing pretty well by many measures. But since then, this is what happened:

Illegitmacy Rates

Welfare encouraged the economics of poverty. Family court encourages baby mommas to just bank the child support and kick the baby daddy to the curb. Laws like what attorney William Murphy spoke of a few nights ago have promoted rampant incarceration of black men in inner-city settings. Bling culture and reality shows encourage what used to be considered profligate lifestyle. Black men and black women I truly believe have an aversion for one another, for the most part.

All my OPINIONS. Of course I could be wrong.

Nate33, you expand my thinking as well. When I typed I wish you could be a big black man for a week I also thought about how might I perceive the world if I grew up in your shoes and looked like you?

When I was a HS senior, I got to go to Boston. My band teacher was from Millis, MA. All white community. His friend was a band teacher there. Right during heated forced school bussing demonstrations in Boston, each member of our HS band roomed with a local family. (Friendly was about 65/35 white/black then--pretty diverse!) Later, those same (all white) kids visited us at Friendly. A couple white youth stayed at my house in Fort Washington (right off Allentown Road).

The experience was a great one. I never had fresh baked bread. The family had a wood stove, and they had logs for fire. I was very accustomed to being around whites. They must have been cool with me. I don't recall much, other than the HS mischief friends and I engaged in in Boston.

I recall those things and the HOT 25-yr old strings teacher who changed her dress on the charter bus. Teacher in panties and bra, right in front of me. Ms.A was something that I will never forget...

My band teacher used to ask me if I got high. Dude was my all time favorite teacher. He understood me.

I also think he was banging Ms A!

I wish I weren't so square and naive back then.

Back to the black family -- great stats and charts, nate33. Personally, I think around he time prayer left schools and people became so "enlightened" in the 60s, stuff went bad for family in America. I recall when my mom became a GS worker at the Library of Congress (in 1972 or 73). Prior to that she was a stay at home mom. She began to challenge my dad once she had money and some autonomy. (But she stilled cooked and acted like a traditional housewife.) Black women have been able to adapt and parlay their work ethic and IMO easier acceptance by whites and corporate America into more lucrative positions.

I think most black women view anything but black male athletes, entertainers, and upwardly mobile men as "scrubs". On the flip side, women of all races are much more apt to use sexuality to advance themselves and not raise a family.

Only the ones from real stable, nuclear families want the "white picket fence".

Underclass folks have all kinds of baby daddies. I married one. Just my very biased opinion...

[Chocolate City Jordanaire]

I believe it's all about money. It's so much easier to do well when your parents did well.
It's so much harder to do well when your parents did not do well. So many virtuous as well
as vicious cycles. And there is a ton of institutional racism that has nothing to do with white
people consciously plotting in their own minds or with other white people, about how they
can keep 'the other' down. There is a great dearth of empathy in terms of understanding
the full life experiences of other people, especially those of a different race. African
Americans are still clawing to catch up from starting 250 years behind white Americans
in the struggle to be economically successful.

I agree, totally, jim.

Money is the problem now. Not racism. Hell, I think most whites show blacks all kinds of respect. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Sports icons, actors, a President, a neurosurgeon turned politician....it's not like African Americans have no voice.

The folks with no money are the ones not empowered. Only when an affluent dark person drives in the "wrong neighborhood" (where few blacks live and much profiling exists) is it about race.

Even then it's generally a cop with little money targeting someone with money who he perceives must have stolen the car or been involved in narcotics distribution. That's a money/jealousy thing as much as a race thing.

Most systematic problems boil down to money IMO.

[popper]

Good discussion. We know that black individuals have succeeded in this country beyond measure. They have risen to the top of every profession and occupation be it politics, medicine, business, entertainment, science, etc.

IMO we should concentrate on what personal attributes, family environments, and external institutional configurations combine to offer the greatest opportunity for the greatest number. I’m confident the conclusions we draw will apply to every race.

P.S. Baltimore and Detroit and cities like them will never die mainly due to their proximity to deep water ports and waterfront property. The outskirts will go dormant and even disappear from time to time but the downtown core’s just keep ticking. At least that’s been my observation.

[dckingsfan]

I believe it's all about money. It's so much easier to do well when your parents did well.
It's so much harder to do well when your parents did not do well. So many virtuous as well
as vicious cycles. And there is a ton of institutional racism that has nothing to do with white
people consciously plotting in their own minds or with other white people, about how they
can keep 'the other' down. There is a great dearth of empathy in terms of understanding
the full life experiences of other people, especially those of a different race. African
Americans are still clawing to catch up from starting 250 years behind white Americans
in the struggle to be economically successful.

There is definitely something to do with that...
1) Money gives kids more time to develop and get through school
2) Parents with money are more likely to understand how to get their kids through school

The great equalizer would be our school systems - but they aren't very good really.

[dobrojim]

Black people have been a huge burden on the profitability of rich white people for decades.

This statement totally blows me away...given that many rich white people have wealth that is the direct result of HUNDREDS of years of the forced and free labor of black people. It's almost comical that you would now turn around and claim that the sons and daughters of the slaves on whose backs much of this country's wealth was built are now a "burden" to the sons and daughters of the slave masters.

If black people are indeed a burden to rich white people, maybe that's the "chickens coming home to roost."

You miss my point. Yes, white slave owners certainly profited off the labor of black slaves. And maybe there is a cosmic justice of some sort that whites are now paying a lot of money to blacks via welfare. (Although, the currently living white people didn't profit from the currently living black people, but let's put that aside for now).

My point is that white people today do not have a financial incentive to keep blacks in poverty. The vast majority of white people would be much better off if more black people were out of poverty and not committing violent crimes. This whole theory that inner city black poverty is a secret plan hatched by white real estate owners is absurd.

The currently living white people, many of them at least, have hugely benefited from from a system
where others did not enjoy the advantages of family wealth and all that that brings. You also spoke earlier
of how many generations have passed since slavery but a more pertinent question would be how many
generations have passed since the end of legalized institutional racism. Some would argue that
we still haven't gotten even to that point considering what's described in the New Jim Crow by
Michele Alexander.

[dobrojim]

I believe it's all about money. It's so much easier to do well when your parents did well.
It's so much harder to do well when your parents did not do well. So many virtuous as well
as vicious cycles. And there is a ton of institutional racism that has nothing to do with white
people consciously plotting in their own minds or with other white people, about how they
can keep 'the other' down. There is a great dearth of empathy in terms of understanding
the full life experiences of other people, especially those of a different race. African
Americans are still clawing to catch up from starting 250 years behind white Americans
in the struggle to be economically successful.

There is definitely something to do with that...
1) Money gives kids more time to develop and get through school
2) Parents with money are more likely to understand how to get their kids through school

The great equalizer would be our school systems - but they aren't very good really.

Public education would be a much better equalizer if it was more equal. Poor neighborhoods
don't often have outstanding schools. Parents there are also in a worse position to make sure
their kids perform well. Kids are unmotivated by the reality of their circumstances.

Meritocracy is a great ideal but we are far from anything approaching that. And those who
have enjoyed the advantages have little comprehension of the circumstances of those who
have not. And they often have even less desire to understand and admit that they enjoyed
those advantages. It's a lot more comfy to think you got it good because you're smart and
you earned it.

[dckingsfan]

I believe it's all about money. It's so much easier to do well when your parents did well.
It's so much harder to do well when your parents did not do well. So many virtuous as well
as vicious cycles. And there is a ton of institutional racism that has nothing to do with white
people consciously plotting in their own minds or with other white people, about how they
can keep 'the other' down. There is a great dearth of empathy in terms of understanding
the full life experiences of other people, especially those of a different race. African
Americans are still clawing to catch up from starting 250 years behind white Americans
in the struggle to be economically successful.

There is definitely something to do with that...
1) Money gives kids more time to develop and get through school
2) Parents with money are more likely to understand how to get their kids through school

The great equalizer would be our school systems - but they aren't very good really.

Public education would be a much better equalizer if it was more equal. Poor neighborhoods
don't often have outstanding schools. Parents there are also in a worse position to make sure
their kids perform well. Kids are unmotivated by the reality of their circumstances.

Meritocracy is a great ideal but we are far from anything approaching that. And those who
have enjoyed the advantages have little comprehension of the circumstances of those who
have not. And they often have even less desire to understand and admit that they enjoyed
those advantages. It's a lot more comfy to think you got it good because you're smart and
you earned it.

Actually that is my point as well - the schools aren't good enough to foster a meritocracy - in fact the opposite. Bad schools then give an even greater advantage to those with means.

I would also say access to opportunity is another issue. Being able to listen to your professional parents at the dinner table is mentoring - and they are much more likely to get good internships for their kids - more mentoring.

[DCZards]

Actually that is my point as well - the schools aren't good enough to foster a meritocracy - in fact the opposite. Bad schools then give an even greater advantage to those with means.

I would also say access to opportunity is another issue. Being able to listen to your professional parents at the dinner table is mentoring - and they are much more likely to get good internships for their kids - more mentoring.

On top of that well-to-do families are able to give their kids summer time experiences, including camps and vacations, that are enrichment/educational experiences. All of this only helps to grow the academic achievement gap.

[nate33]

Alert! Alert! Another Narrative Collapse looms!

It turns out that 3 out of the 6 cops involved in the Freddie Gray affair were black.


So let's review. 3 black cops. 3 white cops. 1 black police commissioner. 1 black city mayor. Yet these riots were caused by white racism.

[Induveca]

I believe it's all about money. It's so much easier to do well when your parents did well.
It's so much harder to do well when your parents did not do well. So many virtuous as well
as vicious cycles. And there is a ton of institutional racism that has nothing to do with white
people consciously plotting in their own minds or with other white people, about how they
can keep 'the other' down. There is a great dearth of empathy in terms of understanding
the full life experiences of other people, especially those of a different race. African
Americans are still clawing to catch up from starting 250 years behind white Americans
in the struggle to be economically successful.

I agree, totally, jim.

Money is the problem now. Not racism. Hell, I think most whites show blacks all kinds of respect. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Sports icons, actors, a President, a neurosurgeon turned politician....it's not like African Americans have no voice.

The folks with no money are the ones not empowered. Only when an affluent dark person drives in the "wrong neighborhood" (where few blacks live and much profiling exists) is it about race.

Even then it's generally a cop with little money targeting someone with money who he perceives must have stolen the car or been involved in narcotics distribution. That's a money/jealousy thing as much as a race thing.

Most systematic problems boil down to money IMO.

CCJ dead on. Back when I had an expensive car I got pulled over all the time. Once a cop even threw the license into my face with force. Kept my head down and carried on.

It was a jealous light skinned Cuban guy.

[dckingsfan]

I thought Stephen Moore's editorial, President Obama, Are You Listening? - hit home on why poor neighborhoods have an uphill fight on education.

[dckingsfan]

Especially this quote: "Public education has traditionally been the great equalizer in America. The tragedy today is that the decline of public schools is one of the leading contributors to generational cycles of poverty."

[Wizardspride]

Alert! Alert! Another Narrative Collapse looms!

It turns out that 3 out of the 6 cops involved in the Freddie Gray affair were black.


So let's review. 3 black cops. 3 white cops. 1 black police commissioner. 1 black city mayor. Yet these riots were caused by white racism.

So you're saying cops (regardless or race) can be corrupt?

I agree.

[Wes_Tiny_Abe_]

Obama pardoning millions of illegals is not going to help the black's current situation at all.
It's only going to make things worse.