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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5124 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 5, 2023

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This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I don't know what qualifies as mainstream to you. McWhorter has long beaten the drum of HipHop culture and its precedents uniquely harming Black youths; his argument being that the cultural credit given to Black kids for being "authentically" Black promotes and perpetuates cultural stereotypes. He argues that white kids consume rap with a degree of ironic distance knowing it is a fantasy, as I cannot be a Black gangbanger any more than I can be an Elf in Tolkien. Black kids experience this popular form of fantasy as the authentic Black self to strive for.

There is also the argument, made forcefully by Clarence Thomas and simply by Sean Turner here with respect to HBCUs, that affirmative action in the mainstream/white community harms the Black community by siphoning off its leaders. Whites skim off the talented tenth and leave the rest to rot without their own natural leaders. Talented Blacks get diversity handout jobs at Goldman or Cravath or some federal department rather than building business in the community, talented Black students go to Harvard to be mediocre instead of being on campus leaders at Howard, attractive and accomplished Black men marry white women. Integration, and the popular fetishizing of diversity and Black inclusion, served to undermine rather than build the Black community. It took a thousand years of ghettoes in Poland and Ukraine to build the Yiddish community, Blacks never got that chance.

McWhorter has a regular New York Times column and Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court Justice. They're about as mainstream as one can get even if their views are unpopular in many circles. By "mainstream" I'd say at minimum would never appear in the Times as a legitimate counterview.

Talented Blacks get diversity handout jobs at Goldman or Cravath or some federal department rather than building business in the community

It'd be hard for me to imagine what I'd do if were a talented black man, but if I try and imagine myself having two options - go to Goldman for a job (that I suspect may not be entirely due to my talents, but offers good pay and an opportunity to advance if I work really hard) or try to make a local business in the community, while dealing with local drug lords, crime, poor population, and just in general possibility of being a victim of random drive-by shooting - I must say I'd be severely tempted to go to Goldman. It's probably not good "for the community", but I have only one life, and I do not plan to be a martyr. Would it be fair and realistic to expect significant number of actual talented black men to be martyrs "for the community"? I mean, if they do, all power to them, but can we expect that, or complain fairly if that doesn't happen?

It took a thousand years of ghettoes in Poland and Ukraine to build the Yiddish community, Blacks never got that chance.

Jews living in those communities had a very rich and colorful culture, but usually were dirt poor and didn't have any prospect of better lives, and felt pretty bad and also pretty hopeless about it (notice any similarities here?). What changed though was the parallel movements of Haskalah and Zionism. Basically no Jews now live that way anymore. Some went on to become secular Jews and assimilate, to certain measure (much less easy of an option for a black person, for obvious reasons), some went away to found Israel, some went to America. I'm not sure which lessons that teaches us with regard to black people - their situation is different in many aspects.

I think the complaint, such as it is, isn't directed primarily at Black men who take advantage of AA, it is at white institutions for instituting AA. The soft version is sociological, oh well this is gonna happen what can you expect with these incentives. The hard version is conspiratorial: The Man saw Martin and Malcolm and the Panthers and got scared of a Black state like Hoffneister dreams of; and their solution for preventing it was affirmative action.

And no Jews live like that primarily because most of them were murdered, and the rest left. I agree that the ghetto was a site of hopelessness, but constraint creates conditions for community. I'm not arguing in favor of discrimination substantively, I'm offering a unique argument for why the Black community suffers these kinds of problems. And one reason is that the permeable barrier of discrimination draws off its leaders, undermines its families, accentuates dysfunction and steals off its best.

I saw the burnout rate in those really idealistic black guys who did Teach For America after college rather than jump straight into a good paying gig. That program ate those guys up and spat them out: just threw these upper-middle class black guys into the worst ghetto schools imaginable because they can handle it, right? Don't think any of them had even dealt with being called oreos before.

I would 100% take the "as a queer black man, I bestow the title of Anti-Racist on this company" sinecure.

I've read about half-dozen of articles to the tune of "I was a starry-eyed young teacher bubbling with enthusiasm to help under-privileged children and fix the system, now I am a burned-out cynic with depression and I didn't fix anything and don't think it's possible". They certainly feel like there's a pattern.

Yeah but didn't the decline of the black family occur before the rise of gangster rap? The Moynihan report on the decline of the black family is from 1965 and gangster rap seems like a late 80's early 90's phenomenon.

Integration and the loss of the 'talented tenth' could be a piece of it but you just can't exclude deindustrialization. Small business wasn't the force that forged the black middle class, it was the desegregation of northern industry during WWII. The black family declines basically as soon as industry starts fleeing urban centers for greenfield sites and the sunbelt.

Hip-hop or proto-hiphop was a thing before it was widely known among the whites, I believe.

Sure, but the economic angles are pretty standard mainstream takes. OP asked for outre opinions.

I'd also argue that the problems of mainstream white culture rewarding Black criminality with social cachet is a phenomenon that predates HipHop, probably dating at least to the 60s and 70s in a lesser form.

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