I'm still trying to figure out what "whiteness" is and why I should care. The conversation was so surreal that it made me step back and wonder just what it was we were discussing in practical terms.
If I had to name the one thing that motivates me, it's that I want life to be better for children. I want more of them to have opportunities to have fun in sports, do well in school and have less stress in their lives. When I coached Little League, for example, I would take the fatherless boys to professional hitting and pitching lessons. Almost all of them were terrible players who became good players after a lesson or two. The difference it made in their self-worth was huge. Unhappy became happy.
If that's your goal, more success-fed happiness for kids, where does whiteness come in? In all my years doing this, I never saw any traces of racism anywhere, but I saw a lot of fatherless children in pain.
Population statistics are by their nature crude measures of what it's like to be a member of one of the bars in a histogram, but I would argue that they will work as a rough proxy when looking for causes. Dig this graphic from BlackDemographics.com.
I'm sorry, but after looking at this, I still don't get the whole whiteness and white supremacy panic. Kids growing up with a single mom are hosed and after that, I really don't care and don't understand why I should. From that table, it looks to me like traditional families have the disposable income and probably the spare time to help their kids succeed.
Pardon the descent into Godwin territory, but the whole thing has a strong Nazi feel to it. Instead of Jews, it's whiteness as the mysterious, all-powerful force oppressing der Volk. The only difference I can detect is that the modern, race-obsessed progressives don't have any real ambition. Instead of wanting to militarily crush whiteness, they just want to scream it into submission. It's a difference of degree, not kind.
Feel free to take me to task in the comments for that analogy. It's been leaping out at me more and more as I read about whiteness paranoia freakouts in our universities. When I start thinking about the practical aspects of the thing, it really seems Nazi. If I was an 8-year-old boy and I woke up every day in a world permeated by "whiteness," I don't think I'd be affected nearly as much as if I woke up every day in a household without my dad. When you care more about race than children, I think there is something dreadfully wrong.
4 comments:
Well, I have to say that I'm not quite clear what point you are trying to make with that table. I mean, for each marital status category, it clearly shows a "black tax" of between 13% and 20%. And absent any other explanation for the difference, it is reasonable to think that it is due to employers preferring not to hire blacks for better-paying jobs. Which sure looks like an indication of some degree of racism by *somebody*.
And since one of the most common reasons given for people getting a divorce is "money troubles" (most lists have it running a close second after "infidelity"), I can see where getting paid less could also contribute to the lower marriage rate, which compounds their problems.
$65K isn't money troubles. As for the difference, I don't see racism there, either. Look at the college degree choices and you'll see the cause of the income gap. Unless you're going to say that the public schools and university system, both owned and operated by progressives who are screaming about whiteness are racist, then where do you go?
The table was a proxy for what I really wanted which was a income distribution chart by race and then one by marital status. I think from that chart, you can quickly see that the percentage of kids growing up in traditional families who live in poverty is minuscule and the percentage from single mom homes is pretty big. Behavior trumps race.
Finally, it's not usually about divorce. The parents aren't getting married in the first place so the economic excuses don't work. The illegitimacy stats show that conclusively. Yeah, divorce is a bummer and plenty of my boys came from that, but money problems are typically symptoms of other problems. Money is a indicator of behavior, not it's own source.
Also, that is median income.
All it takes is, oh, a subgroup being nearly twice as likely to be in the military, very likely to retire, and the ones who retire are both likely to be married and because they're moving a lot the spouse is much less likely to be in a really high income job.
"Join the military" is a really popular way out for the guys who are responsible and have a drive-- and those are the guys who are likely to retire, too. (Kinda 50/50 on if they get out at 20 or if they go until they aren't allowed in anymore, but the income is still going to look a lot lower than it actually is.)
That's before known issues like family traditions of defrauding aid programs, which also don't count for income-- either don't report your income, or don't legally marry your spouse. The only groups I know that have organizations targeting them to teach these techniques are aimed at the inner city, which is going to be racially imbalanced, but you can find third generation welfare leaches pretty much anywhere.
Abusers abuse.
Don't look too hard for the groups teaching how to exploit social welfare programs unless you've got a good tolerance for people screwing up their kids for life for money. The least nasty is gaming to get an ADHD diagnosis, and putting them on drugs for it, because that gets you a stipend.
Thinking about this a bit more, I'd offer two other points.
I've worked with fatherless boys of all races. They all had similar pathologies, independent of race. You could put statues of the entire pantheon of Confederate generals in their local park and it would mean nothing compared to the fact that they all knew in their hearts that their daddy didn't love them and had abandoned them. Think about what a huge hole that leaves in your life and then tell me that the problem is some inchoate, ambient "whiteness."
Second, the places complaining about "whiteness" have all been owned and operated by progressives for decades - schools, universities, inner cities and so on. If there is such a thing as whiteness and it really does cause big problems, then the root cause must lie with the progressives themselves.
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