Forum Lurker said:
I'm telling you it's a wealth thing because that's what statistics and history have proven. Why are blacks getting bad educations? You can't blame "separate and equal" anymore; it's because their schools are bad, and that's because the districts are poor and crime-riddled. Why do police officers assume that blacks are more likely to be involved in gang crime? Statistically, they're right. Why is someone with a black-sounding name less likely to be hired for a job? Simply the fact that I can say "black-sounding name" and be understood by even a handful of people should tell you that there's a very real cultural gap between blacks and every other group that's been in America for this long. How does this problem get solved? How do blacks cease to be poor, crime-ridden, and culturally divided from their neighbors to an intolerable extreme? Look at history. The Irish, the Italians, the Russian Jews, all of them have been at some point in time exactly where the black community is now. They were poor, they were considered by law and common wisdom to be a separate and inferior race to proper whites, and they were associated with organized and violent crime. You'll notice that these are no longer the case, and this is entirelybecause they assimilated and reached the middle class.
You're quite wrong about that, actually. Blacks in the US are tremendously segregated from whites, in terms of living in physically seperate neighborhoods. FAR more so than any other immigrant group to the US ever was. *Today*, residential segregation is still utterly huge in its extent, and it's diminishing only sloooowly because whites still don't like to live in a neighborhood that a bunch of black people are moving into. And whites have for quite a while had far more hostility to blacks (especially to blacks moving into their neighborhood) than towards any other immigrant group. Black assimilation into mainstream American society has been consistently blocked by whites, and the roadblocks put up in the recent past were far more than those any other immigrant group faced.
I mean, good grief, it's only been a few decades since legalized segregation and institutionalized racism gave most blacks little choice but to end up poor, poorly educated, second class citizens. So when the civil rights era came to a close, there was this population that mostly lived in communities that were highly segregated, very poor internally, and had a poor educational base. So then what happens? Decades of clawbacks to social programs. Decades of the "war on crime", i.e. brutal but ineffective police repression of poor communities. And of course a continuation of the US system of school funding, where poor communities have poor schools, causing the better off parents who have the ability to live elsewhere to do so, helping contribute to a steady brain drain that keeps the area poor.
As for racism, it's not strictly linked to poverty. People will always look down on identifiably different groups who have lower status than themselves, but this doesn't always show itself as vicious racism. I mean, good grief, the US became considerably less racist during the civil rights era, and it wasn't because black people suddenly became richer, it's because it became socially unacceptable to be a blatant bigot. Recently there's been a _reversal_ of that trend. During the 1990s, with poverty actually dropping because of the economic boom, and with crime rates declining, racism and xenophobia *rose* in the US. Opinion polling found a marked increase in people expressing sentiments that were xenophobic in general (not just racist but also sexist, anti-immigrant, etc). Over the past two decades there's been a significant rightward shift in some aspects of American culture, a reactionary backlash combined with a rise in the influence of the religious right... and it has brought with it a noticable increase in racist attitudes that is quite independent of trends in poverty and crime.