StrangeSox

QUOTE (Reddy @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 12:42 PM) you don't care, which makes you awful. some of us do, which makes us better people. i can live with that. duke intentionally misread what I said there to make a dumb, bad-faith argument

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 12:42 PM) Which is fine, do that, but also realize that simply throwing money at the problem isn't going to fix the problem. How's that public housing thing working out? Or food stamps? Those programs have declined over time right? Because giving people things causes a change in mentality/ways of life? Oh no wait, it doesn't. And it never has. Public housing and food stamps are not sufficient to remove structural racism and the legacy of generations of oppression and forced poverty or the broader structures in our society that lead to so much poverty and wealth disparity across race, you're right.

shut up edit: "got itself caught up in" lol, nice attempt at passivization there edit2: this country's "cross to bear" for generations of slavery and legal racism was to...stop slavery and legal racism? Doesn't seem like much of a cross, unless your phrasing is unintentionally revealing your views of civil rights legislation

Ugh our IP/tech laws are so terrible

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 12:19 PM) And where are the role models? At home? Nope. At school? Nope, they don't go (see the CPS wanting to close a bunch of schools because of a lack of attendance). The "role models" are in the streets, where these kids learn early on that money and street cred comes from a life of drugs and crime. This is why this is cyclical and self-reinforcing and why you need to look at and address what led that previous generation "to the streets" in the first place. Which is why even if legal racism was outlawed a few decades ago, there are still enormous lingering effects.

"The Librarian of Congress banned the practice of buying a cell phone and unlocking it last October. Now the window in which it was legal to do so will close on Saturday, Jan. 26. " some kind of cite would have been nice. Who or what is the Librarian of Congress and what authority do they have to ban anything?

In unrelated news, New Mexico Bill Would Criminalize Abortions After Rape As 'Tampering With Evidence' It remains a mystery as to why Republicans can't win a majority of the female vote.

It's not even just about poverty, though. Across all educational levels, african-americans are out-earned by their white counterparts. Hard to argue against the existence of structural racism when you see things like that imo.

My apologies for unfairly assuming you meant school voucher programs. I know there have been registration protests at schools like New Trier in the past, and that absurd case of a mother in Ohio being sentenced to multiple years in prison for intentionally registering her child at the wrong school.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 11:47 AM) This is the largest factor in all of this, regardless of anything you said before it. You aren't going to change much in the short-term to begin with. If you are going to do this change and change people's minds and ideas, it's going be over the course of 2-3 generations. To implement changes and ideas and to expect anything to change within even 5 or 10 years is crazy. You are talking an entire shift in demographics here. If you can apply principles to improve this sort of thing, you are talking about monumental change. The same is true with working to eliminate structural racism/sexism/etc. s*** don't happen overnight!

"School choice" is usually voucher programs, which means subsidizing private schools with public dollars and diverting resources away from public schools. If that's not what you meant, sorry! I don't know of other proposed "choose your school" policies that aren't voucher programs.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 11:20 AM) Running stairs is awesome for you. Stabilizers, strength, toning, and cardio. It can be hard on your knees, but it's so, so, so good for you. And I'm obviously talking about actual stairs, not just stair steppers. pretty sure my stairs would collapse

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 11:34 AM) You could put a brand new state of the art school in the middle of the Austin neighborhood, fill it with the best teachers in the country, and it wouldn't change a thing. This myth of the lack of financial resources is a liberal pipe-dream that's decades in the making and it's continually shown to be false. We spend more money per student than anyone in the world and we have little to show for it. We don't spend that money proportionately. But the larger problem there is poverty itself and its causes, so building one new well-resourced school isn't going to change much in the short-term. Probably over a few generations it would.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 11:35 AM) But don't give them a choice to go to another school... Yes, let's not privatize our school system.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 11:22 AM) I still find this idea of structural racism to be ludicrous. Structural racism sounds as if the system is rigged. It was, 100 years ago, and it f***ed up the future prospects for a lot of minorities leading to the problems we have today ("Free the blacks!! Oh, but we don't want to live next to them. Put them over there and they can fend for themselves.") The system today, however, is not "structured" such that it's racist. If we're talking about problems with labeling or putting these things into context, i think this is equally problematic. Minorities are a disadvantaged because of past policies, not current ones. You're projecting your own definitions of what structural racism is and how it arises onto the term. It isn't referring solely to legal structures or governmental policies but culture/society as a whole. You can say "institutional" instead of "structural" if that helps clarify between something that's actively and deliberately "structured" and something that arises out of a huge web of things. But you're pushing things back quite a bit by saying "100 years." The absolute most you can go back is 40-45 years, which means millions of people who lived through that period. If minorities were disadvantaged for literally hundreds of years in this country (including colonial times), removing those legal disadvantages isn't going to eliminate an awful lot of built-in structural/institutional/social racism instantly or even within a couple of generations.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 11:11 AM) I don't watch Colbert, so I wouldn't know. Poll taxes and literacy tests were "colorblind." Advocating for a "colorblind" state when there's still structural racism is advocating to cement that structural racism in place. You don't have to agree that there is structural racism, but that doesn't mean you can distort what that quote was actually saying.

The "do this" there would be to not treat it as a problem because of "black culture" or "poverty culture" because that only reinforces the structural problems that lead to and perpetuate poverty. I took issue with that one line in your post but agree with the rest. Maybe I even read too much into it due to the ongoing convo I'm reading elsewhere, but I think you concede too much if you allow the framing to shift to 'problems with black culture' even if you acknowledge the sources. In the sentence after that, you even explain what's a core problem with treating it as a problem of "black culture," that the poverty was forced on a group of people for an overwhelming majority of our country's existence. So, to whatever extent "black culture" 'glorifies' crime and drug use, it's a reaction to the poverty. The problem then isn't 'black culture' but the societal structures that result in so many black people being in poverty. You're right that I have a better grasp on "what not to do" than on explicit solutions.

QUOTE (Jake @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 10:17 AM) Some things that come to mind for me: -Mandatory keyboarding class in high school They've eliminated cursive writing from the curriculum in many schools, but they haven't replaced it with mandatory typing classes which should start in elementary school.

QUOTE (Jake @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 10:43 AM) So can we say "poverty culture" and get on with solving the problem? No, you're still at the same place. Poverty didn't arise from "poverty culture," and there's an awful lot of different people in poverty in this country and across the world, and there's many people not in poverty who share in the same cultures. It plays right back into that same feedback loop.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 10:34 AM) Or Torii Hunter. Bias and sub-conscious racism occurs. Yes, a white cop is more likely to be suspicious of two blacks. If a black cop is just as suspicious of two blacks doing it, is it racist, segregated, or even biased then? What if it is a latino cop? It'd tie back into structural racism, expectations and absorbed stereotypes. That quote I posted was speaking more of that structural racism and not any one individual's racist thoughts. It's not exactly about individuals consciously out to "get" minorities, though there is undoubtedly some of that. Why police patrol certain areas and the effects that disparate policing has are complex issues that I'll admit I don't have much information on.

QUOTE (Jake @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 10:30 AM) There are certain aspects of what you might call "black culture" (I know, reductive) that contribute to the disproportionate crimes rates and even some of the poverty problems. This is bulls***, gonna quote someone from another mb:

The China Study was pretty much bulls*** IIRC

What if they see a black tenured Harvard professor trying to get into his own house? eta: though classism enters into the crime disparities, too.

Monsanto is literally the devil.

QUOTE (Reddy @ Jan 24, 2013 -> 10:21 AM) sure, but if that food is less nutritious and potentially dangerous... well... not really worth it now is it? my question is why does the FDA refuse to test GMOs? Is it a refusal or a legal inability?