Originally posted by: jonks
All these "well my family succeeded" stories are nice, but pretty much irrelevant to the experience of growing up poor and black in crime-ridden inner city america. There is simply no immigrant analogue that will reproduce the experience on par with the legacy of slavery and jim crow that remain in this country.
lol you gotta be black if you're seriously going to subscribe to that shit.
it's a circle that has come around fully multiple times, and is completely self-fulfilling these days.
Do the inner city blacks WANT to improve the racism and stereotypes against them? Doesn't seem that way, because if I was a store owner, it would have nothing to do with skin color. If someone shows up wearing clothes like they are a thug, they aren't getting the job most likely. They could be white. Hell, they could be asian or middle eastern. Hell, even Jewish. If someone dresses like a thug, they are telling me they don't give a shit.
There's inner city life, which is harsh, and then they're living up every stereotype there is, so you can FIT IN and relish the inner city life. Most of the kids in the inner city do exactly that. They make claims they want to get out, and one day will succeed. They are pushing it off and living in a dream, because the way they keep going about daily life, they're doomed to stay in the ghetto.
The parents seem not to care. Either there are the honest parents who want to do right for their kids but don't put any effort into it and never realize the freedoms they give them are screwing up their opportunity to ever break out on their own.
Hell, a lot of it is honest parents who remember their childhood in the inner city, but if they are somewhat older and have older teens, they may not even understand what is going on for real on their own streets, and don't keep their kids in the clear, because they accept what the kids are saying as fact and never catch up until its too late. I've watched that a few times, and that is definitely not limited to inner-city life.
And then there's the welfare abusing parents who still keep pushing out kids (or maybe they did actually stop after 2 or 3), and either let there kids do whatever, or have no oversight or authority over them.
The broken homes are the worst though, especially once the kids get old enough that the single parent no longer hires someone to watch over them while they work, maybe even more than one job too. With the older, now free kids, trouble happens a LOT if the environment provides the opportunity.
As soon as kids are allowed to succumb to the thug life, outlook for breaking out of the ghetto changes to slim through never-going-to-happen.
It takes a certain kind of parent to keep kids out of trouble. For the ghetto, it's almost an impossible task. For the most part, parents in middle-class neighborhoods can get away with giving a little freedom to the kids. It is expected the kids will get into some mischief but hopefully raised appropriately to never venture into anything terrible. And it tends to work, because the environment provides little since other kids will be equal in level of mischief.
In the ghetto, a kid could be controlled tightly except for a few times, where they get introduced to what really goes on, and the kid is going to want to impress certain peers. Maybe its a girl, maybe its other kids he thinks are readily accepted and praised by peers in school... it's a social thing where kids don't want to be outcast or rejected through failure to live up to the standards of a peer group. Find the wrong peers, and it often isn't really peer pressure, but self pressure, and the troubled ones quickly accept their path. Those mistakes just keep snowballing.
So essentially, it'll take extremely amazing parenting skills, and the ability to properly drill a child into accepting complete responsibility (over something), and accept full authority by you and have complete respect (two-way). But really, it's hell. Because even then, you gotta make sure the kid doesn't incorporate too much of the street image, and speaks clearly (at least around adults, then it's at least certain he
can talk that way away from his peers), because his appearance and his verbal delivery will often be the determining criteria for jobs.
Oh, and don't assume many places don't hire people just because they are from the ghetto. Remember how poor education is within the inner city for most cities, and the drive for education is minimal. Plus there are those who never seek a job until suddenly they have to, which often comes at the same time as dropping out of school.
All of this is a negative alone, because, [warning tangent ahead] sorry... fuck affirmative action.
That shit pisses me off, just another thing allowing those in the ghetto to stay that way with no qualms. Hire the qualified individual. Remove the damn ethnicity questions. We try and push color so much, but all it does is encourage the continued separation based on color and ethnic background. Seriously, we're all fucking human. All share the same specific DNA. Human adaptation and genetic separation across the surface of the planet, over the span of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, resulted in different outside physical appearances. We are a petty species who has to put everything and everyone into groups, no matter the effect. Fucking retarded.
But affirmative action. God damn bullshit. If I ever own a business. I don't care what they look like if they are the most qualified individual. If I have equally qualified individuals then I'll use preference, probably would be how they talk, how they express themselves, how they dress if a uniform isn't involved, etc. But sorry, qualifications matter. I don't care if that meant I ended up having an all-black workplace, or all-asian, or all-white. If those are the people who came to me with the highest qualifications, that's all that matters. Putting someone into a position just to look like I hire all groups (what groups?) equally, why? What if that means I am putting work efficiency at risk, among other things.