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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
I do, but I don't see why a solid clinical analysis can't be applied to the cultural issues. Granted, it's soft data, but cultural stuff is always soft.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Here's where I perhaps step on a huge third rail. I think one can assess cultural behaviors and conclude that, controlling for oppression, a group is shooting itself in the foot a bit.
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This is not true. Black culture was specifically built as a reaction in almost every way to disadvantage and white oppression. Only food available are the throwaway parts? Make pigs feet and ham hocks. Suffer all day every day? Create spirituals, jazz, blues, rock and roll, hip hop. Forced into poverty and denied home ownership? Show off what you can
when you can (clothes, jewelry, your car)--in fact, let everyone know that you actually have something in order to fight the presumption that you are black and therefore worthless and have nothing. Told you're nothing, dirt, second-class citizens? Brag about yourself a la Ali. Can't get a job? Create your own opportunities selling drugs. Punished for any type of push back? Create code language and slang to keep whites in the dark. White people co-opt what you're doing because it's forbidden and therefore cool? Abandon it immediately, making the next thing even more cool. Etc.
Black culture is completely shaped by black people's circumstances.
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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
My analogue there would be the Catholic Church. Catholics as a whole are held back by a very regressive religion. It teaches loathsome things, like one must reproduce regardless of economic concerns, one should not worry about this life as the next is more important. These insidious teachings are geared to control people. I'd never draw a 1:1 between this and what blacks have suffered, but I'd say a study of Catholics might show how one studies a cultural group and teases out where the oppressive control mechanisms (the institutional predation) ends, and the cultural behaviors reactive to it become superseding causes.
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Catholicism is not a culture. Anyone can be Catholic. And although Catholics are looked down upon by certain people, they are not really at a disadvantage anymore. The analogy fails further because it is voluntary. Comparing the two things doesn't work unless you want to focus strictly on the religious aspects of both groups which have similar positives and negatives. But then you're just comparing religious people.
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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Catholicism's diabolical control mechanisms can be blamed to a point. But at a later point, many Catholics started to "game the system" and find a way around it, or just left. (Yours truly never joined. I wouldn't even pay fealty to it as a child, finding it abhorrent in second grade.)
If certain negative cultural behaviors persist despite clear evidence they are doing no one any favors, and actually holding people back (and I would say this applies too frequently to Catholic culture, where many people are content to remain of modest class and part of an often middling community), at a certain point, some responsibility falls on those of the community.
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This is where you're wrong (at least when it comes to blacks as a race). Any one person can be held responsible for poor choices. But if you live in a racist system that has put you in a situation based on the impact of centuries of racism, what leads a group to act collectively to their detriment is the disadvantage forced on them (and I'm not even going to get into whatever detrimental examples of behavior are attributed to blacks that whites do not also engage in--that's a whole 'nother topic). And that's racism.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
That could be teased out in data. Fluffy data, subject to debate, but necessarily assessed to address the issue in whole.
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I'm not quite sure what "fluffy data" is, but the people who want to talk about how one race acts to their own detriment are almost always racist and their "fluffy data" is completely anecdotal.
Anyway, I'm out. Away on vacation soon, so I may not respond.
TM
