Poverty is different from class. The poverty achievement gap is 2x the race achievement gap. The following article describes a study that claims that poverty “entirely accounts” for racial gaps.
I can't read the article, but does it control for race within poverty? A lot of poverty conclusions are confounded by race, yet even within poor cohorts you will find significant disparities by race. For example,
> Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 130 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
This chart visualizes that point: SAT scores of whites in the poorest segment exceed those of blacks from all but the richest segment, and Asians exceed them no matter their income:
I'm not sure you read your own source. It seems you just cherry-picked a couple of passages that support racist views and decided to ignore everything else.
Your own source mentions not only the correlation between income and SAT scores, but it also points out a link between quality of the education services provided to some communities and social pressure. It's also telling that the outliers are explained in a way that boils down to "they succeed in spite of everything we throw at them".
It seems like you’re projecting racist views onto the parent comment. It never discounted the possibility of other race-related factors being the cause of the achievement gap, it was just challenging whether all of it could be accredited to wealth disparities.
> It seems like you’re projecting racist views onto the parent comment.
What? OP's argument was purely race-based. OP made absolutely no point other than underlining race-based correlations. If you remove all race-based remarks from OP's post, nothing is left.
> It never discounted the possibility of other race-related factors (...)
In your own words, you describe OP's post as focusing on "race-related factors", and even then you try to accuse those who point that out of "projecting racist views"?
For example, the differences in scores that is not explained by income could be caused entirely by disparate treatment of children by adults based on the child's race. That would be a race-related factor.
1. I'm pointing out that poverty and racial factors often confound each other. The comment I was replying to made it seem like racial effects disappear when you control for income. If you care about racial equality, then I would think it's in your favor to argue against someone who says racial effects don't exist.
2. It's not racist to point out that certain outcomes correlate with race.
Sure but I’d still rather not use that as the defining metric. Unless there’s some evidence throwing money at public schools in lower class neighborhoods is the solution to the problem. Every time I’ve looked into that subject in the US the biggest complaint by the teachers on the ground, in those neighborhoods, say they feel like they need to be teacher + daycare + parent for a subset + law enforcement officer etc. I grew up in a small town in Canada with mostly poorer lower/lower-mid class student but my school never had such an obligation (not overt expectation) to be parental replacements/invested psychologist/serious enforcers.
At a pretty sudden level focusing on education alone is the fault not the solution. When teachers actually get to be teachers it seems US schools do just fine or better than most of the world (not simply comparing to subsets of small homogenous European countries).
It may point to issues that are not race or class but structural in a way that suggests deeper issues. Indeed “throwing money at schools” is unlikely to improve situations at home. But poverty has a big effect on kids ability to learn. It isn’t just money—poverty is a multidimensional deficit in wellbeing. Kids who are stressed, abused, neglected, etc — it’s hard for them to learn effectively.
> say they feel like they need to be teacher + daycare + parent for a subset + law enforcement officer etc. [...] When teachers actually get to be teachers it seems US schools do just fine or better than most of the world
Some of it is definitely because of the lack of a support system at home (poverty, absent fathers...). But I think a lot of it boils down to culture. And if we're to look at it based on race, White Blacks and Hispanics could all improve.
There's a lot of families where school is seen as unimportant, and where education isn't as valued as it could be.
> Unless there’s some evidence throwing money at public schools in lower class neighborhoods is the solution to the problem. Every time I’ve looked into that subject in the US the biggest complaint by the teachers on the ground, in those neighborhoods, say they feel like they need to be teacher + daycare + parent for a subset + law enforcement officer etc.
You wrote this down yourself, and you still didn't get it?
The article and study are a lie. It leave out Asians because when you them then poverty stops explaining the achievement gap. They are blatantly cherry picking their data.
Which part of the article and study are a "lie"? Hand-waving wealth as being irrelevant to achievement by highlighting Asian success ignores other resource-related factors.
One easy factor to distinguish is the percentage of immigrants in the Asian population."Around six-in-ten Asian Americans (57%), including 71% of Asian American adults, were born in another country"[1]. The background of a lot of these immigrants made them well-qualified to succeed despite their American socio-economic status on arrival [2].
If you compare that to black people in America, many of who's ancestors were brought here in unsavory ways, only "One-in-ten Black people in the U.S. are immigrants". There's no comparison of the ingress of black people in this country when compared to Asian populations, and consequently we don't see the same US immigrant selectivity boosting the numbers of an already disadvantaged race in the same way.
This is not to say that culture has no effect, since I doubt the high participation rate of Asian children in after-school tutoring necessarily hurts those children [5], but it may represent a smaller part of the overall picture than most people think. Choosing minority races from opposite sides of the success spectrum and underlining some of their differences in a data-driven way may help us better understand and combat the problem of equity.
> The background of a lot of these immigrants made them well-qualified to succeed despite their American socio-economic status on arrival
Immigration filtering explains a lot, but the general trend holds even for subgroups that aren’t subject to those filters.
Some Asian groups, like Vietnamese, came to the US as refugees, not skilled workers. In 1980, poverty rates among Vietnamese people were among the highest off any ethnic group. Today, Vietnamese have similar income levels to non-Hispanic whites.
Moreover, the kids of poor Asians have much more income mobility than the kids of similarly placed whites. Asian children who grow up in the bottom 20% of the income distribution have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20%, compared to an 11% chance for white kids. These poor Asians are typically in America as a result of family reunification. Thus, neither the kids nor the parents are subject to filters such as H1B job requirements.
How do you escape the conclusion that culture makes the difference?
Your examples are two opinion pieces that seem to not actually understand what critical race theory even is. Asians aren't a problem for the people who study critical race theory, it's really only a problem for people who have no clue what they're talking about.
Asians and Hispanics create two problems for critical race theory, one pretty easily fixable another less so.
1) CRT, originally developed in the 1970s, generally assumes a black-white dichotomy. Insofar as it addresses Hispanics and Asians, it does so by putting them in the “black” column—victims of oppression in a system of “white supremacy.” But that’s plainly not true. If you look at the statistics, the closest comparison to the experience of poor Latino and Asian immigrants is poor white immigrants like Italians. They are achieving economic parity with whites within a couple of generations. They don’t face persistent multi-generational gaps like black and indigenous people do.
2) Asians (and to a lesser extent Latinos) broadly do not share the political premise of CRT: that our economic and political systems are tainted by “white supremacy” and must be fundamentally changed. That flows partly from culture. Animosity between different ethnic and cultural groups is widespread in Asia and Latin America. Generally speaking, it’s perceived as bad manners, not an existential threat to prosperity. My parents never talked to me about racism growing up, and I suspect that’s pretty typical in Asian and Latino families. By contrast, I think such conversations is very common among black Americans. That attitude is reinforced by the economics. The experience of the overwhelming majority of the kids of Asian and Latino immigrants is closing the gap with whites as compared to their parents. The notion, fundamental to CRT, that non-whites can only make progress through coordinated changes to the system isn’t compatible with their lives experience.
The CRT worldview makes slavery the central event of history, and oppression by whites the central theme. That’s what’s going on in the Nikole Hannah-Jones quote above. How do those folks perceive immigrant groups that come here and tell their kids to shut up and work hard? I think that leads straight to the idea that Asians are complicit in “upholding white supremacy.” And even white people like John Oliver get in on that narrative.
Of course from our perspective we are just raising our kids according to our culture. In broad strokes, both east and south Asian cultures tend to be deferential to authority and emphasize an internal locus of control. If you ask my mom why bangladesh is poor, she’ll point to corruption and other moral failings, not British colonialism. Whether that is accurate or not, that’s completely at odds with the CRT worldview, which emphasizes an external locus of control—blaming oppression by whites for everything.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a journalist, not a Critical Race Theorist. Find a better descriptor for this (perhaps prevalent) "worldview" than "the CRT worldview". Prompted by a bunch of unproductive discussions like this one, I took some time and actually read a bunch of CRT journal articles, and none of these discussions intersect what actual CRT work says. That may be as much a fault of popular culture and pop sociology as it is HN's, but either way, it's annoying.
It is easy to make a case that Nikole Hannah-Jones essentializes the transatlantic slave trade. But it is unreasonable to generalize from Hannah-Jones to a whole field of study without evidence.
I put a lot of work into my citing the data sources from my comments so that the numbers can be vetted by the institutions they were reported by. Do you have any sources you can reference that show where you get your numbers from?
> Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 130 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
https://www.jbhe.com/features/53_SAT.html
This chart visualizes that point: SAT scores of whites in the poorest segment exceed those of blacks from all but the richest segment, and Asians exceed them no matter their income:
https://resources.corwin.com/sites/default/files/singleton_2...