Yes, it does.
When we treat people like criminals from the day their born, onward, they very often do become criminals. You can blame them if you want to, but we've been blaming them forever, and that doesn't seem to be helping. So maybe it's time to start taking some of the responsibility on ourselves, and to begin changing the way we treat these people. Whadaya think?
You mean the people we will not give any job to above minimum wage service work, and that we will then demand twice what they earn back in return for letting them live in poverty? With no possibility of ever raising a family, or going on a vacation, or even affording basic health care? Gee, I can't imagine why they aren't just jumping at that "opportunity" and kissing our privileged white behinds in gratitude!
When there is no reasonable solution to the problem, because others are holding all the levers of power, anger and resentment often builds until it manifests in violence. And blaming this all on those have the least amount of control or power over their own circumstances is both stupid and ineffective.
Freedom without opportunity is a very hollow freedom, though. One might even say it's a 'sham'.
I agree.
Amen.
Happily accepted. Please know that it's already forgotten, and I'm happy to chat with you any time, here.
I also sometimes let myself get hung up on a persona that I project upon the text of other posters here even though I'm trying not to. Digital text is a limited way of communicating and it's very easy to misread it or read into it, or in my case confuse posts from different posters. And you are right, I do tend to post in the negative, but I do believe that's mostly because I don't view the world through the same right-wing religious lens that pervades this site. So my perspective is going to be perceived 'negatively' relative to most of the other folks who participate, here. You don't strike me as being extreme, but you do strike me as being fairly conservative, from your comments. So I suppose I will naturally appear antagonistic to that stance. And in fact, I am fairly antagonistic of it. I'm a liberal socialist, after all, and am proud of it.
Anyway, don't sweat it, brother. And I hope you're having a good day, today.
Keep in mind, though, that you grew up in a place where the systematic humiliation and abuse was very deep and pervasive to start with. And in a place where the effort to change this was the most intense. So it's easier to see the progress there, now. I don't want to disparage that progress, because it's real, and it's good. But it's also the more outstanding exemplification. I grew up in the north, where the systematic abuse and humiliation was not so pronounced, but where is has also not much been addressed, and so it remains more or less as it has always been.The good news on the poverty front, relative to race, is that in 1966, a couple of years after Johnson declared war on it, about 42% of blacks lived in poverty. By 2012 that had fallen to 27%, if still twice the average for white Americans. So the War on Poverty has significantly impacted poverty among the most systemically disadvantaged group in the nation. (Who's Poor in America, Pew Research Center, 2014)
What many saw though was a strengthening in the black community. Oppression has a way of doing that too. It fostered a strong moral fiber that was missing too often in the privileged class, or diminishing, as it began to diminish in black communities post Civil Rights Movement success. Sadly, as peoples we seem to deteriorate morally and cohesively as we become more empowered and affluent. We become less God centered and more narcissistic.
Maybe that's the lesson of the rich young ruler. I mean that as a cautionary tale, not an argument for oppression.
No, they're remarkably better. In my part of the world and in living memory black children weren't allowed in better, white schools. They had discarded books and little opportunity for higher education and the success that comes with it. Now? Now you see black and white kids playing and growing together without race factoring for them. I've noted the larger landscape, politically and culturally, but you also have to realize it takes generations to reshape traditions within families.
So the kids that started with desegregation programs in lower Alabama as late as 1970 were from homes mostly without particular education and the sort of support, advantage and expectation that comes with it. Their grandchildren are now rearing a generation of kids with the first real vestiges of that tradition. If you were six in 1970 and had children in 1990 then your children would be about ready to send their kids into the system.
When you think of it in those terms what's happened is more remarkable and what's going to happen becomes more understandable. Keep watching. It's going to keep getting better.
Especially if you consider it completely in a vacuum, instead of within accurate historical context.
Uttering tautologous platitude's doesn't actually advance any discussion that I know of.
