[trentnix]

I struggle to buy this line of thinking that, somehow, the epidemic of single-parent (and no parent) households among blacks (or any ethnic or economic group) is the consequence of discriminatory systems or conspiracy or racism. Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now than when the government was enforcing Jim Crow, when schools were segregated by force, when the Ku Klux Klan was not only active but had active members sitting in Congress, and when academics openly claimed that non-whites were inferior to whites and proposed eugenic 'solutions'. Those horrible blights on American (and Western) society have mostly been buried yet the numbers of black children growing up without a father has exploded. Whatever contribution systemic racism, institutional racism, conscious bias, unconscious bias, etc. (which I concede are real things) have on health of the family unit within black American culture, something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction.

Additionally, I'm suspicious when I hear the 'system' being blamed because it's a convenient scapegoat. Stuff like our code didn't work not because our programmers wrote bad software, but because our process is broken. Those FISA warrants that were granted because FBI agents and lawyers lied need to be fixed with 'better safeguards'. Or those banks get taxpayer bailouts and nobody goes to jail because there wasn't sufficient regulation to prevent systematic fraud and excessive risk-taking. Nobody has to be embarrassed for their own behavior or held responsible for their own actions when the nameless, faceless system gets the arrows.

If you want to talk about real privilege, it's the privilege of growing up in a healthy family unit. The greatest advantage I've ever received was a loving father and mother who were there to provide support, instruction, and discipline. All children - everywhere - deserve and desperately need good, loving, present parents. It breaks my heart that's become the exception and not the rule.

[carapace]

There was that crack epidemic started by the CIA.

As the wikipedia article says, "The subject remains controversial."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...

> From August 18–20, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published the Dark Alliance series by Gary Webb,[10][11] which claimed:

> > For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. [This drug ring] opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles [and, as a result,] the cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America.

[gerbilly]

> Additionally, I'm suspicious when I hear the 'system' being blamed because it's a convenient scapegoat.

People should be equally suspicious when someone argues the system is in inherently fair, because it is often used to insulate ourselves from injustice.

It suggests we don't have to worry about inequality or the messy interventions that would be required to eliminate it.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

[bsanr2]

>Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now

How do you figure? Is it easier or harder to fight discrimination in, say, employment when, "We don't hire negroes," is stated upfront, compared to when black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons?

>something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction.

Again, how do you figure?

[trentnix]

>How do you figure? Is it easier or harder to fight discrimination in, say, employment when, "We don't hire negroes," is stated upfront, compared to when black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons?

Everywhere I've worked professionally I've had black coworkers. Everywhere I've hired considered and hired black applicants. I've had black supervisors. I've had black colleagues. I've had black reports. And this is true of virtually every professional environment I've interacted with, at least here in the South.

This most certainly wouldn't have been the case in 1950. And that confirms that such discriminatory systems aren't more powerful now than they were in generations past.

Really, I think claims to the contrary are absurd on their face.

[bsanr2]

I don't think you fully answered either of my questions. I appreciate that your limited personal experience is closer to what we would like to see, at least in your telling of it.

I still await your further thoughts.

[trentnix]

It appears I can't answer your questions to your satisfaction. I live in the deep South. I provided my (not limited) experience and exposure to professional environments as evidence. And that experience, and the application of Occam's razor, tells me your claims that bias and racism is more effective now that it is comparatively invisible is absurd.

[bsanr2]

You could answer this question:

>Is it easier or harder to fight discrimination in, say, employment when, "We don't hire negroes," is stated upfront, compared to when black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons?

And expound upon this assertion:

>something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction.

[trentnix]

>You could answer this question:

>>Is it easier or harder to fight discrimination in, say, employment when, "We don't hire negroes," is stated upfront, compared to when black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons? You are begging the question. Of course it's easier to fight enemies who are out in the open, distinct, and widespread. And it's harder to fight enemies that are well-camouflaged. But it's also harder to fight enemies that are partially imagined, distorted, and sometimes nonexistent.

I take issue with your insinuation, as I tried to illustrate in my anecdote, that discrimination where black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons, is widespread.

>And expound upon this assertion:

>>something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction.

It's pretty simple, really. If one concludes that discrimination isn't as prevalent as it was decades ago and has diminished as time has passed while also noticing that its attributed consequences are more prevalent, then it's reasonable to assume something else is to blame.

[_hardwaregeek]

The infamous Lee Atwater (advisor to Reagan, Bush 1 and chairman of RNC) quote comes to mind:

> Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

I'm not saying the people within the government are more racist than before. But the systems that the government put into place in the 60's through the 80's were specifically designed to be racist in effect without appearing racist in intention.

If you reduce funding in segregated schools, then when desegregation happens, you protest "forced busing", you're effectively keeping black kids in worse schools.

Turns out if you criminalize marijuana and declare a "War on Drugs", you can arrest a whole bunch of young black men, lock them away and give them criminal records. Then you can go on bemoaning the lack of black role models.

Or you can simply neglect to fight redlining, ensuring that it's impossible to get a house in the white neighborhoods.

Or you can institute a policy that schools whose students fail to get good test scores are penalized. I wonder what that'll do.

I could go on, but I think James Baldwin says it best: https://youtu.be/_fZQQ7o16yQ?t=150

To preemptively respond to the argument that these policies were long ago, I like that analogy Obama gave of an ocean liner:

> Sometimes the task of government is to make incremental improvements or try to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that, ten years from now, suddenly we’re in a very different place than we were

Policy is about the next 50-100 years, not the next 10. If you put racist policies in to effect, people will see the effects for generations upon generations.

[MiroF]

Greater percentage of black men in prison today than in the jim crow era. If you're in prison, you can't be there for your children.

In my hometown, DC, one out of every three black men will be imprisoned in their lifetime.

[Strang]

> I struggle to buy this line of thinking that, somehow, the epidemic [...] is the consequence of discriminatory systems or conspiracy or racism.

I agree, but I do think it's largely the unintended consequences of well-intentioned policy. Policies that were designed in part as a safety net for single mothers seem to have perversely incentivized family breakdown.

[rexpop]

> Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now than when the government was enforcing Jim Crow, when schools were segregated by force, when the Ku Klux Klan was not only active but had active members sitting in Congress, and when academics openly claimed that non-whites were inferior to whites and proposed eugenic 'solutions'.

Unfortunately, they are. Those clumsy relics of explicit bias were too reliant on individual antipathy, which is dissipating in a connected world, where others' experiences area available through books, movies, and the Internet.

What we have, instead, is a much more sophisticated, and less error-prone system. It's not a "convenient scapegoat," it's actually very, very inconvenient. Institutional biases are hard to change, especially when they're baked into the ends, and not incidental means.