[dannypgh]

I think your scale is a bit off; you're looking at how far you or others are from a cushy life near the top, but you really should be looking at the distance from the bottom.

Take, for only a small example, stop and frisk, and disparate prosecution and sentencing. It should really go without saying that there is a racial element to this -- police officers don't know how much money you make or how much class privilege you can truly bring to bear when they decide to stop you, pull you over, search you, or arrest you. Being black or brown in a predominately affluent (and chances are, predominately white) neighborhood doesn't make you exempt from being bothered - in fact, it makes you look more "out of place" and more likely to be stopped, and I say that both from a casual review of literature but also my personal experiences. And of course, just about every day we hear about all sorts of wealthy black people (Forrest Whittaker comes to mind as a relatively recent high-profile example) who get treated like criminals at stores because overzealous security guards have unconscious (or sometimes even conscious!) biases.

The fact that black & brown people are disproportionately stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, and sentenced means that white people are disproportionately not stopped, not searched, not arrested, acquitted, or given lenient sentences. It means that a lot of white kids have been given second chances / have had their illegal habits or decisions overlooked and gone on to still get financial aid (drug convictions can permanently disqualify you for federal financial aid), not be a felon, and get decent jobs in decent neighborhoods when the exact same doors are closed for many people of color who didn't do anything differently.

Yes, there is a class component to all of this - being wealthy may make it easier to get off after your arrest - but the biases in the criminal justice pipeline at and before arrest are really more race-based than anything.

I don't think that anyone thinks that being white affords white people the kinds of privileges that a $500k/year salary gives you. That's really a pretty absurd suggestion and I think most reasonable people who are not completely ignorant should be aware of all of the white poverty that exists to know that. But, even after controlling for everything else - including crimes committed - it does help to keep you out of prison and the criminal justice system.

That's not the only privilege, either. But in our overly incarcerated society, it's an important one.

[msandford]

Are there no affluent black neighborhoods where a white person might look out of place?

It's not race that plays in so much as economic cues that sadly are not evenly distributed. A black guy in an M5 BMW wearing a suit likely faces no more prosecution than a white guy. The cops tend not to fuck with people who appear to have the means to buy influence or sue, irrespective of race.

If blacks are more poor than whites (on average) and thus have less education/family/friends/etc lottery to win, that happens not because they're black but because they're poor.

Being poor sucks but people aren't poor because they're black anymore than they're black because they're poor. You can't try and find causation either way there. People are generally poor because their parents were poor and it's not terribly common for people to aspire to much more than what they're used to. But that has more to do with how people bias themselves than how society aggressively discriminates.

You can't win the lottery without buying a ticket and there are plenty of people white, black, asian, latino, etc who don't try to purchase tickets.

[doktrin]

> Are there no affluent black neighborhoods where a white person might look out of place?

Can't say I've ever been to any neighborhood that would fit that description. Have you?

> Being poor sucks but people aren't poor because they're black anymore than they're black because they're poor.

I think the causal links binding race & poverty are a little more complex than you're giving them credit for.

Scale (e.g. how "much" one affects the other) is certainly up for debate. Arguing that they have no impact on each other whatsoever doesn't pass the sniff test.

[msandford]

No but I've mostly lived in rural areas, small towns, or suburbs far removed from the actually affluent areas or big cities. The richest people I know personally emigrated from India and obtained US citizenship as adults.

I agree that I oversimplified but not by a huge margin. We human beings are very nearly robots that are programmed by our parents and once on our own, we tend to do what they taught us. Not 100% of course, but to a large degree.

We are the product of our parents. They are the product of their parents. And so on, it's basically recursive. Yes that's a bit reductionist, but there is a lot of truth to it.

So how is it that blacks today are disproportionately poor? My outside-in theory is because their parents parents parents...parents were slaves and didn't really have any reason to plan for the future and figure out how to accumulate wealth or any of that. If you can't own property (and as a slave you couldn't) there's no point to figuring that out, only how to either escape or survive. And then after that add in 100 years of subjugation and you've got a pretty good recipe for not necessarily teaching your kids how to try to get rich or at least middle class.

So what I'm saying is that if you took someone who was black and poor (and thus didn't necessarily learn the skills necessary to escape poverty) and magically turned his skin white on the day he turned 20 he wouldn't all of a sudden get rich as shit because a bunch of white guys would suddenly shower him with money. Might his life be a little easier? Sure, but it wouldn't get dramatically better. Similarly if you took a guy from a white middle class background and magically turned his skin black he wouldn't lose all the things his parents taught him and be poverty stricken. Might his life be a touch harder? Sure, but I don't think he would immediately go to jail just because he's now black.

What do you think would happen if you took a black male from an affluent black family and turned his skin white? How much would that help him? What if you took a white male from a poor family and turned his skin black? How much would that hurt him?

I would argue that it's far, far more important to somehow get magically transplanted from a poor family to an affluent one than it is to have the color of your skin magically changed from black to white.

That's a really roundabout way to say that I don't think there are much in the way of causal links that bind race and poverty. Or that if there are, you have to go back quite a ways to find it. I think how you're raised and what skills your parents teach you are far more important than the color of your skin. Family and upbringing, 90%, race 10% or something like that.

If you disagree with me I'm very open to hearing what you have to say. This isn't a deeply held belief that's core to my being but rather some rambling thoughts I had on the subject.