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You know who else under performs? Southern white proles. One might go so far as to invoke cultural contamination from the poorest, mostviolent subculture in the US. It's less black culture that's the problem, and low-class borderer culture, which black Americans had thrust upon them.
You could say, "of course Asians in California do well; they assimilated to the culture of California." And "Of course Jews do well; they assimilated to the cultures of New York and European intelligencia." And "Of course Black Americans do poorly; they assimilated to poor Southerner culture."
You'd think, being that it's acceptable to bash Southern culture, this would be an acceptable path. It sounds like blaming racism, but it's really blaming The South, which is even better to some. Jazz, Blues, Rap, Hiphop, etc are distinctly Black in origin, but drug-addled criminality, low test scores, under-aged polyamory, and parents in and out of prison are not.
We got a problem though - white households in Mississippi earn about $50K per capita. That's below the American average, but not catastrophic, almost double what the Mississippi black population earns, and well above quite a few European countries. I pick Mississippi because it's the poorest American state, but the same basic pattern replicates across the South. White Southerners aren't as rich as white Minnesotans, but they actually do pretty well relative to any other standard.
White southerners are a mishmash of traditionally wealthy-working class groups/small business owner groups(Cajun diaspora, white Mexicans- both occupy a similar cultural niche to Koreans in LA in parts of the rural south), educated northern transplants, the descendants of southern elites, and the actual southern white proles who historically sharecropped alongside the blacks and now live in trailer parks instead of tenements.
There’s not a great way to separate out the latter group, but I doubt they outperform blacks much at all.
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This immediately fails if blacks have even worse outcomes and norms than southern Whites, or non-black southern minorities. If the culture sucked for everyone, but blacks are worse again, once more the dread wolf Racism rears his head.
You’d need to somehow compare them to the white descendants of the free antebellum poor(so white subsistence farmers and sharecroppers). And these people exist, but they’re hard to separate out.
It seems equally plausible to me that black culture is screwed up because of influence from planters, not rednecks, and that the similarities to poor southern white culture are more or less incidental. That is, adopting the culture of a landed elite when you yourself are neither landed nor elite is probably a bad idea.
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