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Notes -
In his latest link roundup, Scott links to (a pre-print?) of a paper claiming to show that "Black families who were enslaved until the Civil War continue to have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than Black families who were free before the Civil War".
Here is Scott's commentary:
[1] Here Scott talks about "the trend to bar scientists from accessing government datasets if their studies might get politically incorrect conclusions"
I'd be very interested in learning what you make of the study and how you think it links to Scott's conclusions. What evidence would it take to convince you that the "cycle of poverty" hypothesis is true / explains a large portion of the black/everyone else disparity across a number of different life outcomes?
They'd have to address the other side of the equation - groups of immigrants that came with nothing to their name, but ended up doing ok, or even above average within a generation or two, or lottery winners who reverted back to their old socio-economic class within a generation or less.
Slave states treated (white) people with nothing to their name very differently from those enslaved black people, both before and after slavery ended.
So? We're well past the point of the Civil Rights Act, and since then there are non-white minorities who arrived with less than black people had at the time, and who are now doing better than white people on average.
People treat those non-white minorities differently from slaves' descendants too! Second-generations Nigerians are intensely easy to tell apart from people who've lived in Georgia for the past 250 years, and they are treated differently as much as they both arrived in the US very differently.
Well, we went from states treating the differently (which implied laws being on the books) to people treating them differently. And since you brought up Nigerians, who have the same skin color as African Americans, meaning the remaining differences are probably cultural, at this point I have to ask, how is this different than the standard conservative argument about culture?
We needn't be so anal about language to keep writing the longform 'people in X and Y states', I don't think. The people of Alabama and South Carolina treated black people differently from others than they did in 1860, and they do it in 2022 as well. Nigerians are black in the same way that both Indians and Arabs are brown: the difference is really really easy to see. Furthermore, what Africans got to America in the past fifty years aren't close to a random sample; they are extremely disproportionately people who were well off enough to chance migrating to America in the first place.
I wasn't trying to be anal, I think there's a huge difference between people people looking at you with suspicion because of your skin color, and living subject to Jim Crow laws.
Can you make a specific argument on how the mechanics of the cycle of poverty would work here? Racist people from Alabama treat African Americans badly, which explains why they're doing so poorly, but are happy to see Nigerians zoom past them?
So you are saying there isn't a single non-white group that arrived poor, and who is doing better than whites nowadays? If I find one will you change your mind on the cycle of poverty?
That's.. Kinda it, yeah. The Nigerians mostly aren't moving to the south, and when they do mostly don't get caught up in the sorts of dynamics southern black people do. Pretty much.
No, and that's so far off the mark from what I wrote that I've no idea how you could read into it that way. What the hell, man? The Africans who migrated to America over the past fifty years, disproportionately, were among the most well-off and affluent people within their own societies. The same did not hold true for the slaves carted off that way. A skilled Nigerian worker migrating for a nation more than eager to receive skilled workers is going to have extremely different outcomes from someone whose ancestors were still slaves in the 1800s and whose (white) neighbours, by and large, wish they were anywhere but near them.
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