[xpatplayer]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteveryt...tions-are/

Quote:

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a thing at The Atlantic making the case for reparations.

For some, reparations to African Americans for enslavement and state-sanctioned apartheid (more benignly known as “Jim Crow”) is a shocking case to make. I am a sociologist whose training has been, in part, with economists like Sandy Darity at Duke University and Darrick Hamilton at The New School. For Darity, Hamilton, and many other serious scholars of race, history, and inequality, the matter of reparations is anything but novel or shocking. Neither is it hyperbolic. There are real programs, with feasibility studies and implementation suggestions, and they move far beyond Coates’ call for a spiritual reckoning of the body politic. If you have never heard of them, that is likely by design. Few powerful persons or institutions have ever been willing to seriously put a reparations program before the American people.

But I wager that you have heard a lot about how education and opportunity can be, through hard work and moral fortitude, the path to greater equality for African Americans. In many ways, when the formerly enslaved asked first for a national program to redress the forced, free labor that made the United States the nation we know it to be, they were given schooling instead of redress; opportunity instead of compensation. It is an attitude that persists in our policy and our cultural lexicon. When the demand is for justice, we are most likely to respond with an appeal, instead, to fairness. And in no institution is that more clearly evident than education. There’s just one problem: It’s not good enough.

When I teach my inequality course to undergraduates, I spend a lot of time on periods of wealth creation in U.S. history and how fundamental enslaved labor was to its distribution. Even my econ majors tend to walk away saying there’s really no redress for inequality that does not begin and end with wealth redistribution. The issue is almost never if reparations is a solution but only if it’s a solution white folks can live with. So, there’s that.

I like Coates’ addendum on his blog. He gives some love to the academics and teachers who slog through survey courses that likely end with many of the conclusions drawn by my students: if we do not use power to redistribute capital there is no racial justice or equality. I like it when teachers get some love.

I like it because I identify as a teacher and also because I’m a bit of an education zealot. I’ve talked about how fundamental public libraries and teachers and those annual scholastic book ordering drives were to my childhood. Because education seems to have worked out fairly well for me and because I am not shy about being a fan of librarians on social media, people are often surprised by my explicit political position that education is not and should not be a social policy solution to inequality. I do not think that higher education “access” is that laudable of a goal. For almost twenty years now there has been a hyper-focus on increasing college “access.” In that time we have produced thousands of University of Phoenixes and exactly zero Harvards. Access is not a panacea.

I am mostly uninterested in political rhetoric about education being the “new” civil rights movement. The old civil rights movement waged a battle for citizenship through school legislation because that was the nearest available political tool. The landmark civil rights case, Brown versus the Board of Education, was initially conceived as a means for justice, not its end. I also think that narrowly focusing on college completion is not a good thing. The job market is volatile for African Americans in the best of times and these are not the best of times. During difficult economic cycles, black workers and students should benefit from the flexibility of moving in and out of college as their life circumstances allow. Without that flexibility, every educational moment becomes a zero sum decision: “If I leave school this semester to take that job or care for a family member, I probably will never be able to return.” We’re poorer as individuals and groups when people least likely to get a call back because of a “black” name or negative credit check or criminal conviction have to make a decision to take a job or opt out of college forever. In short, I’m a heretic about almost every fundamental populist education belief we’ve got.

As the world was waiting for Coates’ case for reparations, Janelle Jones and John Schmitt at the Center for Economic Policy Research were releasing a policy paper on black college graduates and the labor market. In “A College Degree is No Guarantee”, Jones and Schmitt examine the labor market conditions for black college degree holders pre and post Great Recession.

Their findings are only a surprise to those who ain’t living it.


This is not what justice looks like. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)
Jones and Schmitt essentially put forth a forensic accounting of every knee-jerk ideological inequality policy prescription that too often asks of education what education simply cannot do.

When you start talking about poverty and race, inevitably most folks fall back on the usual tropes: blacks should care more about school, go to college, increase their graduation rates, choose the right majors.

Jones and Schmitt’s report looks at black folks who have done exactly that, all of it. They cared enough about school to graduate, go to college, complete a four-year degree and stay in step with their non-black age cohort members (they focus on graduates ages 22-27). A few key findings:

- In 2013 (the most recent full year of data available), 12.4 percent of black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed. For all college graduates in the same age range, the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent.

- Between 2007 (immediately before the Great Recession) and 2013, the unemployment rate for black recent college graduates nearly tripled (up 7.8 percentage points from 4.6 percent in 2007).

- In 2013, more than half (55.9 percent) of employed black recent college graduates were “underemployed” –defined as working in an occupation that typically does not require a four-year college degree. Even before the Great Recession, almost half of black recent graduates were underemployed (45.0 percent in 2007).

- While some college graduates are finding financial success in the labor market in jobs that don’t typically require a college degree, a growing share have had no such luck. Instead, they are working in jobs that don’t require a four-year degree and don’t pay more than $25,000; this is especially true for young black graduates.

- Black recent college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors have fared somewhat better, but still suffer from high unemployment and underemployment rates. For example, for the years 2010 to 2012, among black recent graduates with degrees in engineering, the average unemployment rate was 10 percent and the underemployment rate was 32 percent.

No matter what black college grads do, as a group they are the most sensitive to every negative macro labor market trend. (The report has comparative data.) They are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, and hold low quality jobs even when they have STEM degrees. I point out that last bit because apparently STEM will save us all or something.

How can I revere education as I do and refuse to accept it as the gospel that will save us from persistent, intractable inequality?Actually, it is precisely because I revere education—formal and informal—that I refuse to sell it as a cure for all that ails us.Degrees cannot fix the cumulative effect of structural racism. In fact, over five decades of social science research shows that education reproduces inequality. At every level of schooling, classrooms, schools, and districts reward wealth and privilege. That does not end at college admissions, which is when all that cumulative disadvantage may be its most acute. Going to college not only requires know how that changes from institution to institution and year to year, but it also requires capital. There’s the money to take standardized tests and mail applications and make tuition deposits. But there’s also the money that levels differences in individual ability. An unimpressive wealthy student can pay for test prep, admissions coaches, and campus visits that increases one’s shot at going to the most selective college possible. If education reinforces the salience of money to opportunity, it is money and only money that can make educational “opportunity” a vehicle for justice.

Reparations can do what education cannot do.

When we allow education to be sold as a fix for wealth inequality, we set a public good up to fail and black folks who do everything “right” to take the blame when it goes “wrong.”

Coates has a written a thing about reparations. Ostensibly, it is about the pattern of systematic extraction of black labor, wealth and income to the benefit of institutions that operate to their exclusion. It is a story with a history but one that is not a relic of history. Conservatives may be guilty of rejecting outright their basic faith in fair pay for labor when the issue is labor done by brown people. But white liberals are just as disingenuous when they rhetorically move reparations back in time as redress for slavery when there are countless modern cases of state-sanctioned racist oppression to make the case for reparations.

Like housing and banking, education is a modern debate that sounds like it is a 19th century one. Reparations are about slavery but also about Jim Crow and white violence’s effect on intellectual property and islands of segregated want in a land of plenty. There remains an entire generation of African Americans alive and well who were legally consigned to segregated schools, neighborhoods, and occupations. The black college graduates with weaker starting positions in the labor market are the children and grandchildren of that generation. No matter how much we might believe in the great gospel of education, it is an opportunity vehicle that works best when coupled with justice and not confused for justice.

Here is the Atlantic article she quotes: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/arch...ns/361631/

Not race-trolling here, but I have a few questions:

1. Is it 'justice' when you punish a group of people for their ancestors' deeds in order to help another group?
2. Why are we still so focused on acts of racial violence that happened over 50 years ago?
3. Is this an attempt by the elites to divide the American population?

While I feel terrible for my black brothers in poverty, I blame feminism and not racism. Single motherhood and 'You Go Girlism' has arguably done more damage socially than Jim Crow did economically. I would like you to read these articles from RoK before commenting, since I am livid at the intellectual elite for blatantly attempting to divide the American people and believe that we need to understand the issue better:

http://www.returnofkings.com/2090/how-bl...our-future
http://www.returnofkings.com/7504/how-bl...as-created
http://www.returnofkings.com/3475/racism...est-friend

Please keep the discussion civil and avoid being racist. I believe that this thread can yield a very productive discussion.

[Switch]

That is just silly. I'll make the same argument that I make against affirmative action:

How does this make any sense: "let's make things equal by not making things equal." Exactly. It doesn't make any sense.

Making up for slavery which ended almost 150 years ago is impossible. Yes, black people were horribly mistreated and did not have equality in this country for its first 500 years.

However, black people have had equal rights, in addition to affirmative action for the last 50ish years, and that has somehow made things worse.

Things will get worse before they get better.

The first step would be to get rid of the welfare system. This is not even a racial issue. White kids whose parents are on welfare will likely end up on welfare. When so many black kids are living off of welfare, the odds of them escaping poverty are extremely low.

Cutting welfare would also encourage traditional family roles, because black women would realize that it is very hard to survive on your own, especially without the help of the government. They would be forced to find black men who are successful to help support them. This would lead to more black men trying harder, because if black women stopped gravitating to poor gangster thugs and more toward successful professionals, black men would try to become successful instead of gangbangers because their pussy stream got stopped.

The second step would be to overhaul the education system. The current system is funded by property taxes, so schools in poor areas are worse than in rich areas. If poor kids had access to the same educational opportunities as middle class kids, the odds of them moving up are much greater. Look to France and Finland for inspiration.

Something has to change within the poor black communities themselves. A culture that discourages education amongst the youth and also discourages fatherhood is bound to fail, and so far it has. Black people who have escaped the hood and made a life for themselves IMO are some of the brightest and hardest working people in our country, and it's a shame there aren't more of them. Just my $0.02.

[Truth Teller]

I would contend that slavery was partially repaid in the blood of men during the American Civil War.

[eradicator]

(06-03-2014 09:30 PM)Switch Wrote:  

That is just silly. I'll make the same argument that I make against affirmative action:

How does this make any sense: "let's make things equal by not making things equal." Exactly. It doesn't make any sense.

Making up for slavery which ended almost 150 years ago is impossible. Yes, black people were horribly mistreated and did not have equality in this country for its first 500 years.

However, black people have had equal rights, in addition to affirmative action for the last 50ish years, and that has somehow made things worse.

Things will get worse before they get better.

The first step would be to get rid of the welfare system. This is not even a racial issue. White kids whose parents are on welfare will likely end up on welfare. When so many black kids are living off of welfare, the odds of them escaping poverty are extremely low.

Cutting welfare would also encourage traditional family roles, because black women would realize that it is very hard to survive on your own, especially without the help of the government. They would be forced to find black men who are successful to help support them. This would lead to more black men trying harder, because if black women stopped gravitating to poor gangster thugs and more toward successful professionals, black men would try to become successful instead of gangbangers because their pussy stream got stopped.

The second step would be to overhaul the education system. The current system is funded by property taxes, so schools in poor areas are worse than in rich areas. If poor kids had access to the same educational opportunities as middle class kids, the odds of them moving up are much greater. Look to France and Finland for inspiration.

Something has to change within the poor black communities themselves. A culture that discourages education amongst the youth and also discourages fatherhood is bound to fail, and so far it has. Black people who have escaped the hood and made a life for themselves IMO are some of the brightest and hardest working people in our country, and it's a shame there aren't more of them. Just my $0.02.

I think you are overestimating poor women and their ability to make good decisions. Many would just starve if they cut off all government programs. No one should starve. You point is "if we cut entitlement programs like welfare, then those single mums will no longer need welfare because they will suddenly start making better choices and not get pregnant with dead beat dads".

That sort of logic is preposterous. No one should go hungry, especially children.

[rekruler]

This is a fascinating topic. Put aside for a moment the whole ideological discussion of whether reperations are justified. The main question I would have is: who will pay these reperations?

There are 2 possibilities, the way I see it:

A) The "reperations" are funded from general government tax revenue. IE, taxpayer money (money from everyone regardless of race) is distributed to American blacks. In effect,John Hodges Smith (or whatever), great-great grandson of a slaveowner and klansman will pay for the evil of American race relations, as will Renming Wang, a recently arrived Chinese grad student.

B) There is a special tax levied only on certain people. This would be the "blood crime" scenario. White Americans oppressed blacks, thus whites will pay for the crimes of their ancestors. Here is when shit gets really fucked up. How do they determine who is white? Do Arabs pay? What about recently arrived Polish immigrants? Are Americans descended from eastern European Catholics who were victims of the KKK going to be forced to pay reperations to other victims of the KKK (blacks)?

I think it's best we not go there.

[Dr. Howard]

ridiculous idea, but if it does happen the money will be burned in a few months and the people it was intended to help will be no better off. See the numerous land claims and environmental disaster settlements for the native people of canada for an example.

[NY Digital]

^^ Eradicator, no one goes hungry in this country.

There are homeless shelters everywhere. If you're homeless or you're down on you're luck, you will not die of starvation.

That's not what welfare is.

That's not to say I think the system is perfect. But it needs to be improved.

[El Chinito loco]

Articles like this always studiously avoid looking at other minorities as a comparison because then their whole central argument starts to fall apart. For example this says that african-americans are more vulnerable to economic down turns because of generational racism. Well guess what, _all_ minorities across all ethnic groups were reported as being more vulnerable to recession in the U.S. A lot of it was down to the fact that a lot of minorities are overwhelmingly working in vulnerable sectors of the economy. Does this mean it's because of institutional racism? Maybe but it's not the whole story. There is definitely a glass ceiling the higher you go but things like equal opportunity hiring was supposed to remedy that.

I'd say the greater problems are due to the aforementioned lack of education and bad management of money too. Things likes savings rates and consumer spending (with the former being really low and the latter being really high) are terrible in various minority neighborhoods. You don't have social mobility if you're constantly in debt.

[LeBeau]

Didn't the Chapelle Show already film a case study on this?

[Kabal]

I would sign-off on any reparations amount Coates or any other apologist for black underachievement would propose, under one condition:

You have to account for the fact that not every American is the descendant of purely in situ European or African Americans; not everyone fits into this nice binary system. For instance:

1. Modern-day Black Americans have on average ~15-20% European admixture
2. There are people of recently-arrived European heritage
3. There are people of recently-arrived African heritage
4. There is a large population of people of Latino origin
5. There is a large population of people of Asian origin

Etc.

If you cannot properly account for this, no reparations will be had. I hope while you have been busy hamster-wheeling over narratives, you were brushing up on your arithmetic and population genetics, and have been maintaining a genealogical datebase.

You can have your pound of flesh if you want it that badly, but you cannot have a drop of blood.

Oh, and if you can somehow do the proper accounting for genealogy, and once your desired reparations are paid out: America will no longer entertain any more excuses and workarounds for black underachievement.

No more blacks getting +230 points on the SATs versus whites for college admissions; no more blacks getting +280 points on the SATs versus Asians.

No more affirmative action for employment, either.

No more "disparate impact."

No more whining and playing the race card.

Choose wisely.

[rekruler]

For example this says that african-americans are more vulnerable to economic down turns because of generational racism. Well guess what, _all_ minorities across all ethnic groups were reported as being more vulnerable to recession in the U.S. A lot of it was down to the fact that a lot of minorities are overwhelmingly working in vulnerable sectors of the economy. Does this mean it's because of institutional racism? Maybe but it's not the whole story. There is definitely a glass ceiling the higher you go but things like equal opportunity hiring was supposed to remedy that.

I disagree. Asians are a minority, last time I looked. They are the richest racial group in the United States and are dramatically overrepresented among most of the elite institutions in this country, be it the universities, silicon valley, or finance. When it comes to the most elite universities, they are overrepresented several times over. "Institutional racism" my ass.

[Avon Barksdale]

Old, funny, relevant

[Celtic]

You don't cure injustice with more injustice. If you take the tax dollars of the sons of white steelworkers whose families have lost their jobs from globalization and spend them on the sons of black lawyers, you have made the government an agent of injustice and I do not think people would stand for that. We have de facto reparations via reparations, explicit reparations where tax dollars from one race to another might tear this country apart.

The whole history of humanity has been of groups conquering each othering and opressing each other. The way to stop this is to stop having the government opress groups and stop favoring one group for the other and allow for opportunity for all.

[Days of Broken Arrows]

(06-03-2014 10:07 PM)rekruler Wrote:  

For example this says that african-americans are more vulnerable to economic down turns because of generational racism. Well guess what, _all_ minorities across all ethnic groups were reported as being more vulnerable to recession in the U.S. A lot of it was down to the fact that a lot of minorities are overwhelmingly working in vulnerable sectors of the economy. Does this mean it's because of institutional racism? Maybe but it's not the whole story. There is definitely a glass ceiling the higher you go but things like equal opportunity hiring was supposed to remedy that.

I disagree. Asians are a minority, last time I looked. They are the richest racial group in the United States and are dramatically overrepresented among most of the elite institutions in this country, be it the universities, silicon valley, or finance. When it comes to the most elite universities, they are overrepresented several times over. "Institutional racism" my ass.

Interesting you bring up Asians. Should the Japanese-American families who were interred during WWII get reparations? If you give it to blacks you are setting a precedent. And these families lost years of wages because of this, plus it created a lot of mistrust against the entire nationality that lasted for at least a decade.

How many kids of these families didn't get to go to college because they had to work to make up for the lost income of their parents? How many ended up assisting mom and dad in the tailor shop instead of becoming accountants or doctors? Food for thought.

[Samseau]

1. There were 17 million whites during the time of the Civil War. Around one-third of those whites lived in the south.

There are 200 million whites in America today. Impossible to hold 200 million people responsible for the actions of ~5 million. Most of the whites in America (myself included) only came here in the last 100 years.

2. There is no more money in America for reparations. Pretty soon this place will be broke no one is going to give a shit about the poor.

[El Chinito loco]

(06-03-2014 10:21 PM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:  

Interesting you bring up Asians. Should the Japanese-American families who were interred during WWII get reparations?

They did get reparations but it was a pretty insignificant amount (25k each) 30 years or so after.

[Samseau]

Will the Muslims give reparations to the Christians they sacked over the last 1300 years?

[Truth Teller]

(06-03-2014 10:23 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

1. There were 17 million whites during the time of the Civil War. Around one-third of those whites lived in the south.

There are 200 million whites in America today. Impossible to hold 200 million people responsible for the actions of ~5 million. Most of the whites in America (myself included) only came here in the last 100 years.

2. There is no more money in America for reparations. Pretty soon this place will be broke no one is going to give a shit about the poor.

Totally agreed. My family immigrated here in the late 19th-early 20th century. Hell, my great-grandfather fought in three armies during WWI to come to the US.

There were ~5 million whites in the South prior to the Civil War. However, according to the 1860 Census, roughly 5-7% of all whites owned slaves.

[Feisbook Control]

Many of the "white trash" in America are descended from people who were forcibly transported to America up until the War of Independence (after which time they were sent to Australia).

It was common at the time to round up the urban poor in major British cities and send them to the colonies, usually under false pretenses. Cromwell made it an art form in Ireland. There were also the Highland Clearances later, which led to a lot of immigration.

It's absurd to think that whites, as a group, did not suffer under colonialism also.

[Tuthmosis]

The RVF is still paying reparations to IRT for his various bannings.

[bacon]

I thought Obama becoming the President would put a collective end to white guilt among liberal whites so to not publish articles pushing for reparations in liberal mags like Atlantic.

[Truth Teller]

(06-03-2014 11:38 PM)Feisbook Control Wrote:  

Many of the "white trash" in America are descended from people who were forcibly transported to America up until the War of Independence (after which time they were sent to Australia).

It was common at the time to round up the urban poor in major British cities and send them to the colonies, usually under false pretenses. Cromwell made it an art form in Ireland. There were also the Highland Clearances later, which led to a lot of immigration.

It's absurd to think that whites, as a group, did not suffer under colonialism also.

Yeah, that's actually how both Georgia and Australia were founded.

[xpatplayer]

(06-04-2014 12:00 AM)bacon Wrote:  

I thought Obama becoming the President would put a collective end to white guilt among liberal whites so to not publish articles pushing for reparations in liberal mags like Atlantic.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is black. He's using white guilt and neo black-pride to call for reparations. However, the people who published it were most likely white liberals.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Sign HCE up for reparations from the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire.

[darklightdispatch]

Multi-culturalism doesn't work or even make sense, really. A culture is defined as much by what it is not as what it is. You can't have a genuine multi-culture any more than you can have a multi-gendered person.

All the different European groups in the U.S. got along (eventually) because of relatively similar appearance, customs and traditions. I don't see the majority of black Americans wanting to become whites with dark skin, which is what the liberal plan essentially is (affirmative action, employment quotas.) Assimilating them into mainstream whiteness. Instead of government and academia trying to mush all the disparate groups in the U.S. into one big mess, we should let tribalism happen. Encourage as much group independence as possible.

With things the way they are now, the better-performing groups will always feel animosity towards having to support the less successful ones. And the less successful will always feel envious and hateful towards those they perceive as having more of the pie.

There's no way to ensure that everyone gets an equal outcome without total government intervention in every aspect of life (which would destroy productivity and, consequently, the flow money needed to keep the project going.)

I know it's not going to happen, but the best thing would be to let each group succeed or fail on its own merits. Fuck institutionalized togetherness. If that means breaking the country up into different ethnic states, I say go for it.