[rayiner]

Counterpoint: black people.

The federal government subsidizes Chicago's public schools to the tune of $1 billion. You think private charity would be so generous to a district that's 90% black or Hispanic? You're out of your mind if you do. Whites fought, violently, for 100 years, to keep blacks from integrating into society. When the courts desegregated the cities, whites fled to the suburbs to avoid having to integrate, leaving the urban decay that is a major target of welfare today.

The history of race in this country is an unavoidable prong of the welfare debate, and it really undermines high-minded notions of how great a system of charity could be.

[powertower]

You are making most of that up. There are more than 1 way to look at something, and you seem to be focusing at the smaller part.

There are also "white people" that have ended slavery (something done by every race since the beginning of time), fought for other races giving them full rights, helped integrate those races into their society, made programs that removed barriers to schools and jobs while discriminating against their own kind, and funded integration to the tune of 100s of billions dollars a year (and now a trillion dollars / year).

…Something that no other race has done in the history of the world.

> whites fled to the suburbs to avoid having to integrate

No, that's only part of it, the human part (that likes unity of race, culture and behavior). They also fled because they were scared that crime and violence would follow.

Your blame of the dysfunctions of the black community is seriously misplaced. White people are not responsible for the care of black people anymore than I'm responsible for you having a life. Until you figure this out and stop the blame game, that dysfunction will likely continue.

[rayiner]

The idea that you can inherit money but not obligations is dysfunctional. We who live in the U.S. are the beneficiaries of tremendous investment into the country by Americans who came before us. We either inherited these benefits, having been born here, or bought into them, by choosing to immigrate here. We have inherited their sins as well. I was not born here, but every morning I ride to work on a train line that was built when Jim Crow still reigned in the U.S. and would still reign for another half a century before it was dismantled by the federal government. The obligations incurred by our predecessors are baked into the brick and concrete and steel of the civilization which they built.

The marginalization of blacks in the U.S. is not some academic issue that happened in the long-forgotten past and involved long-forgotten people. At the time my grandfather was starting his medical practice, which would sew the seeds for the prosperity of his family in my own time, blacks in the United States were systematically oppressed, prevented from participating in society or getting an education. This all happened in essentially modern times. George Wallace made his stand to resist integration 16 years after the transistor was invented at Bell Labs, and 5 years after the first integrated circuit was demonstrated at Texas Instruments. It was not that long ago even on the technological time scale, and a blink of an eye on the sociological time scale.

[powertower]

> The idea that you can inherit money but not obligations is dysfunctional.

The idea that white people come from old money that gets passed down from generation to generation is not based in reality. Many whites came here from the peasant class, and stayed this way for centuries. And most still are in this class one way or another.

> We have inherited their sins as well.

Sure, if you ignore every single positive thing white people have done; and if you assume that white people have some type of an agenda to actively discriminate against non-whites (at a greater degree than non-whites do against whites).

But what it really seems like you are saying is that white people in America should feel ashamed and guilty for being white.

That's a personal choice you made for yourself. Don't make it for me.

[eropple]

But what it really seems like you are saying is that white people in America should feel ashamed and guilty for being white.

No, that's not what he's saying, at all. Nowhere has "old money" or "guilt" entered the equation and that you are feeling very defensive does not give you license to put words into his mouth. rayiner (who I often disagree with, but I have to applaud him for this) is saying that people with privilege have responsibilities as well as benefits. You have, and I'm going to use a technical term, a metric fuckton of privilege being born white and male in the United States.

He is saying that you have a responsibility to society to be better with it than to say "fuck you, I've got mine."

[powertower]

> He is saying that you have a responsibility to society to be better with it than to say "fuck you, I've got mine."

As a citizen of the USA I agree that I have a responsibility to my country and society. I just don't agree that you get to decide for me what that responsibility is.

> You have, and I'm going to use a technical term, a metric fuckton of privilege being born white and male in the United States.

Please, be specific about my situation and what you have decided my skin color owes, just don't use nebulous politically-correct terms such as white-privlege ... unless you are trying to end the conversation.

[eropple]

> As a citizen of the USA I agree that I have a responsibility to my country and society. I just don't agree that you get to decide for me what that responsibility is.

Society does. That's why it's there. You don't define the social contract. That mindset is what leads to "fuck you, I've got mine."

> Please, be specific about my situation and what you have decided my skin color owes, just don't use nebulous politically-correct terms such as white-privlege ... unless you are trying to end the conversation.

You're joking, right? "White privilege" isn't a term of political correctness. It's a sociological construct that's used to frame and discuss relative advantage given majority or otherwise preferential traits (such as, in the United States, being any or all of white, male, heterosexual, and Christian).

Using the common constructs of the topic isn't "ending the conversation", it's being specific. I'm not going to fall prey to the commonly-used tactic of enumerating exactly why privilege is what it is so that you can attempt to bury the overall point beneath the details on which you think you can nullify the entire academically settled topic. You are welcome to educate yourself on the topic if you so choose.

You won't, but you are welcome to.

[rayiner]

I didn't say anything about coming from old money, or feeling guilty about being white. Don't put words in my mouth. What I said is that we (in the sense of We the People) have built a civilization, called the United States, and in that process we oppressed the black race for hundreds of years, an oppression that didn't even arguably end more than just several decades ago. We, those who continue this civilization, both benefit from the actions of our predecessors and are bound by their obligations. We don't need to feel personally guilty for those obligations, because we did not personally incur them, but we're no less bound to them then we are to the debt we back by the full faith and credit of the United States or the Constitution we uphold as the supreme law of the land. None of us personally had any hand in any of these things, but that fact does not free us to disregard them.

[eropple]

> The idea that you can inherit money but not obligations is dysfunctional.

I can't upvote this enough, and this in particular reminds me of a Salon article from not that long ago[1]. The rhetoric is a bit much, but the core thrust of the article is sound.

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/01/southern_values_revived/

[encoderer]

> There are also "white people" that have ended slavery

But of the roughly half of the country that wanted to end slavery, about 0.0001% of them actually thought both races were equal. The notion was considered absurd.

Even the "good" ones that thought that possibly, in theory, there could be equality, that was ruined by a century of forced ignorance and illiteracy.

His bigger point -- that there are things a Gov't must do because private charity never could/would, is pretty hard to refute I'd say.

> White people are not responsible for the care of black people anymore than I'm responsible for you having a life.

Read about most of the Black Laws in the northern states. In many states it was ILLEGAL for blacks to move into the state and take up residence -- born free, former slaves, doesn't matter.

A black man couldn't serve on a jury. Worse: A black man couldn't appear as a witness against a white man in open court. So white men could bring any crime they chose against a black man so long as there were no white witnesses.

White people were 100% responsible for the ghetto-fication of the black community because that was the only place black people felt safe.

All sorts of immigrant communities -- even catholics who were largely despised in the antebellum period (gradually getting better after) -- were able to fully integrate themselves into the American fabric and prosper. But not African immigrants. Why do you suppose that is?

You act like slavery was the injustice and, hey, white people freed the slaves. No way dude. It goes far, far past that.

Emancipation was only supported by a majority when the case was made that slaves were being used to build fortification and power the Rebel war machine. Among the majority of Unionists that supported emancipation, most considered it a tactic. Some a strategy. Very few an objective.

We -- caucasians -- built a layer cake of misfortune and discrimination. The fact that it's been 150 years since emancipation is meaningless. We absolutely have a responsibility to right this wrong and it is taking a long, long time.

And no, this doesn't apply to EVERY person of color. Many have achieved great upward mobility. Yes, we have a black President. To them, the idea that we need to provide charity to them is maybe insulting, perhaps indicating that we believe they've been prosperous only because of that charity.

But that doesn't change the burden to continue unwinding the twisted wrong of generations of discrimination.

[eropple]

> No, that's only part of it, the human part (that likes unity of race, culture and behavior). They also fled because they were scared that crime and violence would follow.

So you mean it's precisely that.

[rdl]

I can't really talk about black people, as the entire set of black people I know personally are maybe 10 engineers or other students at school, and a bunch of military people -- none of whom really need charity, are generally upstanding citizens (with flaws, but not much different from anyone else, etc.)

However, I can speak from first-hand knowledge about poor white people from Appalachia (unfortunately). There's substantial federal subsidy there as well, and a lot of it serves to "enable" dysfunction, rather than fix it.

I'd be fine with much smaller flows of money going in if they were tied to demands to actually fix the underlying issues. Building useful (physical or human) infrastructure, fine. Subsidizing loss-making operations temporarily, fine. Removing any pressures to improve, not fine. Which is essentially the same problem with government and NGO charity in places I've seen (Middle East/Central Asia/North Africa), vs. "private" (generally, faith-based, or returning diaspora, but hyper-focused issue based like Gates too) charity.

[late2part]

How's that subsidy working out?

[rayiner]

It at least maintains the pretense of equality of opportunity for those kids. The alternative, a spiral of urban decay tha would leave the great American cities pockets of third world poverty, is not one I could stomach. My family left Bangladesh for a reason, and I love my adopted country for the fact it has no equivalent to the favelas of Rio or the slums of Mumbai.