Entry is a problem where? The last few decades has been a slow dwindling of nation wide open racism and there will never be a single identifiable point with which to reference any more than there would be a point at which it started.
Great. So we have "few decades" and "slow dwindling" it would appear with that you seem to acknowledge then that some lingering effect might remain that would influence people even as conditions improve. Now, I think there are really clear examples of progress made in the areas of rights and protections for African-Americans. The Voting Rights Act, The Civil Rights Act, Title I and their regulatory impacts on education and HUD were enormously successful in providing access to many of the institutions that whites have taken for granted. Why is this important to note? Those things happened in the 1960's! Well, it is a well established sociological fact that things like educational attainment and income and positively correlated with that of your parents. So at some point, this had an impact. There are other markers of where the culture was like
Loving v. Virginia but I'm more concerned with the readily available and easily agreeable institutional protections that were put in place to end the persistent and systemic discrimination that faced African-Americans in the previous 300 years of their existence in America.
Now, my parents were born in the 1940's and 1950's so literally 1 generation ago this discrimination was common place. What affect might this have had?
Well, to take just one example. There exists a persistent historical gap in homeownership between whites and African-Americans. A home is the biggest asset and the largest common vehicle through which to transfer wealth from one generation to another. Now, the gap (the difference between African-American and White homeownership) was roughly the same in 1900 as it was in 2000, but both groups had tons more homes. The gap widened in the post-war era to the 1970's as 1) African-Americans moved from the South to the upper midwest and Northeast and from rural to urban settings where homeownership rates are lower than in suburban and rural areas. African-Americans have very low income to wealth ratios (meaning, even though their income is middle class, their balance books tend not to be, they are not accumulating wealth at anywhere near the same rate as their white counterparts). Now I don't think there is a continuing racist conspiracy against African-Americans, but this crap matters. When your grandparents die, you can expect to have assets that will be divided up amongst your kin even if they weren't particularly wealthy. In the meantime, you had all the benefits that go along with homeownership and its accompanying positive correlations with solid life outcomes.
http://stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-income-table-2-5-median-family-income/http://www.nber.org/reporter/winter06/collins.html
You, so far, have not offered any goal or expectation as to when we should be seeing upward movement. Nothing about what you've put forth so far is even falsifiable because you haven't put forth a solution.
I don't know what you mean by "upward movement" but hell yes black people are doing better than they were 30, 50, 100 years ago. The recession has hurt them harder than almost anyone, but yeah they are doing better. Educational attainment, income, hell even the incarceration rate has declined in the past 10 years among AA.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/03/01/1656251/african-american-incarceration-rates-drop-report-finds/?mobile=ncIf you're going to blame poverty for all the problems in the black community than when does it get better? When does it even get the appearance of getting better? Doesn't poverty just continue endlessly here? Should we throw money at it?
Poverty and inequality is absolutely a real and growing problem in the United States. It is a really complicated problem, and there are a lot of proposals. I really don't have a solution to it, but I don't think it is inevitable within the United States at the current level. I think there are steps we could take to reduce it even if I'm not sure what the most effective steps would be.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_US_Gini_Coefficient_for_Household_Income_%281967_-_2007_%29.pngYou are doing exactly what leftists should be criticized for. You blame something external (usually white people) so as to absolve a group of any and all responsibility. You don't seem to even understand the fact that taking on guilt for something you aren't at fault for is a bad thing.
I never said that people should be absolved of personal responsibility. I definitely don't think a group should be blamed or absolved of blame. I do think that there is ample evidence that people other than myself were responsible for some pretty awful actions not only on the individual level, but also using the power of the state to enforce discrimination. I think that has a real effect (but is not the entire story). I don't feel personally responsible for things I didn't do, but in an amorphous sense, I think there should be a collective acknowledgement of the historical facts and to that end I think it is important to remember the good parts of U.S. history, but also the bad parts.
So let me hear your recipe about what should be done to help the black community. I've put forth a change in cultural to get rid of the detrimental aspects, you've put forth jack crap.
Are you asking the state to bring cultural change to a select class of the population, or just for people to do that themselves. I'm all for people changing for the better, so I'll sign on for that, but I'm not for the U.S. government leading a cultural revolution. I, again, am going to be pretty cautious about suggesting a "fix" because, you know, the world is pretty complicated. But I think poverty should be the focus, not race per se.
