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I came across today a movie trailer today which is/was The American Society of Magical Negroes. It really showed me how much the elite black class is grifting. The story apparently revolves around black people using magical powers to keep white people from chimping out and attacking black people. I'm not going to sit here and say black don't have grievances in America and against whites, but I don't think this whole type of thinking helps blacks. It makes it clear to me (and many other instances obviously) that the black elite and black academics define themselves against whiteness. Like they can't imagine blackness without white people in America. An America with no racism against blacks isn't possible to them, and the DEI and all that kind of stuff is necessary to keep them safe. This leaves many kinds of positions for more or less grifting that are basically only open to blacks and leave them a position to cry about racism and also benefit from it handsomely in terms of salary.
Working in Silicon Valley has given me the opportunity to work with a bunch of Nigerians that make insane salaries and live luxurious lifestyles. One thing I've noticed from them is that they don't think about the black/white distinction the same way. At my current company, the director of security is a Nigerian and half of the staff is Nigerian. Obviously they are hiring their own ethnics at a preferable rate, but I haven't seen one of them be part of the "Black at XYZ Company" groups or really care about that. They actually seem to be pretty happy with the current state of affairs in the US an have integrated pretty well.
I'm going to sound like a boomer conservative here, but it seems to me black elites in America seem obsessed with keeping the race divide front and center and their bloated salaries are a direct benefit to them. I don't think that black performance or lack thereof has anything to do with racism. I've never met a single normie person that is anti-black and hates them. I myself am pretty racist and HBD minded and I don't hate blacks at all. I find ghetto criminal blacks to be a nuisance and I don't like that, but even I would have to admit the vast majority of blacks are just normal people who want to live their lives and be happy. When I lived in Chicago, other than a few really unsafe areas I didn't mind walking around majority black neighborhoods.
It seems to me that there is an elite black class that was raised on the Civil Rights movement that can't move on. Their world view of racism is hopelessly outdated and most people would be fine hiring blacks and living near them. However, as currently constructed there is an elite black class that wants the status quo because they benefit from it Being a civil rights activist and a socila justice advocate is beneficial for these people instead of telling blacks they can succeed or fail on their own merits and to just be normal Americans.
As a non-American, the blacks have no one to blame but themselves. No, I am not being unnecessarily harsh on them or anything of that sort. Why the fuck does someone have to "make it out of the hood"? Just literally walk out of the hood. There are for hire signs everywhere and just start working a minimum wage job. Done, you're out of the hood! If you are not braindead, sit for the SAT, and then go to community college -> a state university, student loans are a thing, right?
If a group of people can't make it in the US of all places, there is NOTHING, NOTHING you can do for them.
And of course, grifters gonna grift. Is their grifting feeding the cycle? Probably, but its probably a coup complete problem at this point.
Uh, you don’t take the SAT to go to community college- you register with a high school diploma or a GED, everyone with one of the two gets in. As an American familiar with the systems that exist to help upwards mobility, that just took me out of believing your rant. An associates degree from community college is affordable, even on loans, if you live with your parents the whole time(if you borrow to cover living expenses it’s still crippling because cars and apartments cost the same whether you’re going to Harvard or a community college).
My "rant" has no personal details so you can believe it based on its object level claims. Also sorry for not having your countries high school completion certificates memorized im pretty sure you know about other countries specific documents as well. In simpler words, who gives a shit? u know what I meant.
Too much heat--better to step away from the conversation than let others get to you.
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The problem with "just literally walk out of the hood" is something that applies not just to African-Americans, but poor people of various stripes around the world: family. One of the major reasons given for why poorer people have poor spending habits is that if you are known to have any money available, your kin will come to prevail upon you as to why they need some. If you "make it big," every auntie and half-sibling and unemployed cousin is going to come begging for a little help. Unless you're willing to simply cut ties with your entire family — not an easy ask for anyone (save maybe the most atomistic of WEIRDs) — your success is mostly going to be eaten up by your extended clan, often making it not worth the effort.
Plus, there's also violence affecting family as well. You can work your way up, get into a top university, get married, become a respected judge or an english professor, live in a nice LA neighborhood, send your kids to private school… and then, one day, your nephew back in "the hood" in Philly has pissed off the wrong bunch and now has to come live with you for awhile.
To get out of the trailer park my dad joined the Marines and has since lived at least 10 hours away from his hometown in the rust belt, returning to visit maybe once a decade. Other than his mom, the one functional aunt, and intermittent periods of contact with/enabling of some cousins (including a cousin who came and lived with us Fresh Prince style for a few years) who lost their dad he has almost nothing to do with them.
It was an ugly disappointment coming from the white trash bullshit from my mother's side (See, even if you escape it's possible to wind up jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.) to find out for myself that dad's side of the family is pretty much the same thing with more drugs and prison sentences, all the way down to both sides having a cousin named K who lost custody of her kids due to drugs.
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I never saw Fresh Prince from Uncle Phil’s perspective like that. A superb illustration of your point!
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This makes me wonder if the WASP superpower really was the nuclear family, in which the only "close" family to which you owe substantial loyalty is your parents, children, spouse, and maybe siblings. This is often criticized as being excessively atomistic and promoting anti-social attitudes around individualism and intergenerational social responsibility, but the contrast as described above seems like it has even worse tradeoffs.
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I’ve heard this expressed pithily as “one of the worst things about being poor is having to live alongside other poor people.” It sounds cruel and god knows there are plenty of rich arseholes but my friends from genuinely deprived backgrounds seem to have to endure a huge amount of interpersonal drama with family, from people needing to be bailed out (literally) to female relatives or friends needing help after getting beaten up by abusive boyfriends or spouses or friends stealing from them. Even if not all poor people have high time preferences and low willpower, the large majority of people with high time preferences and low willpower end up poor, and make life miserable for others in their community trying to escape.
Years ago I had reason to hear a one-hour job overview, from the head of security of a vast consumer goods warehouse. Security...they're worried about stealing stuff, right? Somewhat, but mostly it was the employees creating a giant, ongoing soap opera.
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There is also, I think, a psychological addiction many people have to familiar environments, so a person who grows up around the physical and emotional chaos of poverty will in some way continue to crave that chaos in their life even if they have the will power and conscientiousness to move themselves out of that environment. It will be a constant struggle for them to not fall back into the "comfort food" of the bad life decisions that were normal during their formative years.
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One of the worst things? It is absolutely by and large the worst thing if you're living in the west. There is like no comparison at all.
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Yes, it was likely different when 95% of people were ‘poor’ and only 5% had any money at all, but in the developed world where ‘poor’ generally refers to the bottom 20% you’re going to see very high correlation with low conscientiousness, high time preference etc.
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I think this is probably much easier said than done. You know how it's pretty easy for the average kid of 7 or so to learn a new language, but it's much harder for most adults?
If you grow up in the hood, by the time you develop any sort of adult-style self-awareness, you might already be fucked because you just spent your most formative years getting conditioned in really unproductive ways.
Add on top of that there is the violence that is common in the hood. It's probably pretty hard to focus on productivity if you regularly hear gunshots when you're lying in bed at night. I think that high levels of exposure to violence also tend to put people into a near-permanent fight-or-flight mode in which it is difficult to focus on any future further ahead than maybe tomorrow.
I think that some social justice activists are really doing the wrong thing by making it seem like it's all the fault of the white man, when in reality many of the problems of black communities are mainly caused by other black people.
However, I'm not going to blame some kid who grew up with a single mother in a violent inner city neighborhood for not having the sort of psychology and life skills that the typical kid who grew up in a healthy family in a safe neighborhood will tend to have.
I think you're making his position a little too strong. First, he never said it was easy. Secondly, there's no guarantee of success for anything you do in life, but you try and seize the opportunities that are available to you, and if they aren't there, you do your best to create them. That's the formula for every community out there.
Like you, I wouldn't fault a kid who grew up in the hood for being the kind of person he is, beset with all the influences he grew up around. I fault him for not trying to do something about it. It's the same reason I roll my eyes when I see people complaining about "the economy" and how "poor" they are, but it's a really odd thing to have observed. I've never seen a self-described "poor" person who 'didn't' have a smartphone. These are the kinds of people who live to the maximum of their income, and have worse "lifestyle" inflation than the economy has "monetary" inflation. When you're eating your meals from a crockpot, working 2 jobs, and are paying your bills before you pay for anything else, you then have a 'right' to complain about how bad things are. I feel bad for impoverished communities who are casualties of the system despite their best efforts. But I have zero sympathy to give whatsoever for the ones that don't even try.
A smartphone with internet access is table stakes for societal/economic participation these days, and doesn’t even cost that much, especially if you buy it used. Have you been to a third world country lately? Even poor tuk tuk drivers got smartphones.
Which is not to say the people you describe don’t exist. Just that having a smartphone isn’t a great identifier for them.
Regardless of how hard you’re trying, it’s legitimate to complain that the economy is worse now by giving you less in return for the same amount of effort as you’ve put in before.
Your life isn't going to end without blowing your payday the latest and greatest.
Not if complaining about it comes at the expense of your willingness to participate in fixing it, which let's be serious here for a moment, most people don't. Most people are spectators in their own lives as the days pass them up. They are not people who become vested in taking command of their own existence and do something to improve what's lacking in their lives.
That may well be the case, but is there a strong correlation between people who complain and people who work to improve their circumstances? Certainly some amount of people scrimp and save more, or work a second job, in order to adjust to changing economic circumstances, all the while complaining that this is now necessary for them to survive.
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I'm poor (particularly right now), and I don't own a smartphone — just a $8/mo. "Obamaphone" subsidized flip-phone that's something like a decade old.
I see someone watches Jesse Lee Peterson.
Poor people of course exist. Most of the people living the high life in the urban cities who burn their paychecks within a day of getting them are going to have a hard sell of it, in tying to convince me.
Never heard of him. I'm just disabled and living on various government handouts (and currently fighting with Social Security over my SSI due to issues from the COVID days, along with them counting among my assets a bank account that literally doesn't exist).
I'm going through a massive haggling of my own with the government at the moment. It's quite sad how the law protects criminal behavior from being exposed by those who would seek to do the right thing.
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Who said anything about it being easy?
I'm making an observation about the micro, not the macro. And macro observations should not be prescriptions. Statistically most people can't actually lose their weight, however that is terrible advice for an individual.
In the US it is feasible for one individual to make it out of the hood, is it realistic? No.
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Usually this is because adults don't need it. If I throw you in china or korea without google translate - you will learn fast. I know this because my father learned two languages at the age of 55 in the 90s when his job wanted for him to live in a different country.
A lot of adult immigrants who would really benefit from speaking good English struggle with it, though. Latinos can get by fine in most of the Southern US, but if you’re a 50 year old Cambodian or Turk or Russian you’d benefit a great deal from fluency in terms of both jobs and daily life, and yet those people often never learn good English. Before she died my 103 year old great grandmother still spoke in pretty broken English with a strong German accent after like 80 years in the US. And she wasn’t a SAHM, worked various retail and clerical jobs in the 60s and 70s but had limited progression because of language, would definitely have benefited from fluency.
I agree that extremely motivated people dropped into a totally foreign culture are forced somewhat to survive (although many do so barely to the level where they can buy food and work - if necessary - the most basic job) .
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I don’t disagree, but it’s important to remember that Trumpists seethed when Kevin Williamson suggested that poor whites in shithole parts of the US do the same thing and said their suffering was their fault if they didn’t.
Many poor people can move for more opportunity but choose not to.
Trumpists are the same as hood Blacks. They are populists who lack principles, their policy positions are motivated by the wellbeing of their group and not society as a whole. Majority low IQ stock both of them.
However one is paraded as massive sociopolitical issue whilst the other is not, so perception/discussion will be downstream of that.
I wish the sorts of characters you're referring to in these groups were motivated by the wellbeing of their group(s), because that's at least a perspective you can negotiate with. If that is their motivation, they're observably doing a terrible job of promoting it. Instead, I think Hanania gets it right in describing them as an oppositional culture.
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Thereby showing that what's going on here is not a "black" problem but a "pampered westerner" problem. The US is legitimately the easiest place in the world to "make it big", and no, Europe isn't better, there is less inequality but the upper ceiling is so much lower that it's legitimiately harder to get paid the same amount in PPP dollars there than in the US.
Why do you say "but" when those are the same thing?There is less inequality in Indonesia than the US, but it's much harder to get paid US$30,000 PPP adjusted in Indonesia than the US.
Whereas if it were easier, higher achievers would tend to earn more, increasing inequality. What am I missing?
Not necessarily. Consider two societies. In A people either earn $100k or $50k or $20k, each is equally likely. In B people either earn $150k or $160k and each is equally likely. In this case everyone in B earns more than everyone in A, even though B has a lot lower inequality and it is a lot easier to make $160k in society B than society A, despite A having greater inequality.
You can also have the opposite situation, Consider B' where everyone either earns 15k or 16k except for one person who makes $50k. B' has basically the same level of inequality as B (if the population size is large, the single person making 50k won't change total inequality by much) and this level is lower than the level of inequality in A. However it's still a lot easier to make at least $50k in A (2/3rds of the population does it) compared to B' (only one person does it), despite B' having lower inequality.
I have underestimated the complexity of the question and your preparedness to consider it in detail. I idly wonder whether there are any real-world circumstances that would make those distributions likely, but I'm not willing to press the point.
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I think the point is that western societies have enough of a de facto floor that inequality is mostly driven by the ease of reaching an upper middle class salary.
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The UK is particularly bad here. At this point I’m no longer shocked by how much American friends make compared to British friends in similar jobs, often 2-3 times as much.
Thankfully high finance is one of the few places where we still have our compensation tied to US levels instead of UK wages. The tax rates and what we get in return for what we put in (less than what a normal earner gets) still make me seethe with rage though.
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