BonusWaffle said:
Yes well sanders posts are not visions from heaven. Black people in general tend to have a lower socioeconomic status party because many of them identify as part of a certain culture, a culture that segregates itself into lower socioeconomic areas and careers. If we would stop encouraging this us vs them black vs white mentality this wouldnt be so much of a problem.
This is a pretty hefty statement to make and would require some evidence for anyone to accept it as fact, as I hope you realize.
Even if this were true, it does not immediately suggest a solution. Why is that culture in place? Because discrimination has taught them that? Because it has proven impossible for most to transcend the ghetto, if that's where they're from, no matter how hard they try? Because there are actually very few opportunities open to them?
And what would the solutions be, then? I would suggest that they aren't that different: you would want to make education easier to attain, you would want to help them get jobs, you would want to help rise their living standards precisely because those things would help eliminate such a culture, if that really was the problem. How do you eliminate a feeling of hopelessness, which is what that boils down? By offering realistic hope.
BonusWaffle said:
Middle class people tend to stay middle class, lower class people tend to stay lower class. While its possible in the united states to move between classes its just not what people tend to want to do, its not because the big bad white man is out to get them.
It's not about someone being out to get someone. It's about the way the system works -- as I noted before, this doesn't require malice or conscious discrimination. But that doesn't change the reality of what actually happens.
Your statement is also fairly easy to verify. Most Western nations have both less inequality and more class mobility than the United States does. That suggests that either people in the United States are more content to stay where they are (which evidence suggests is nonsense -- people in the US work more and longer hours than in most other nations, suggesting anything but complacency). A casual glance at American culture suggests this is nonsense, too: the American Dream, American Exceptionalism, work hard and you'll get paid, money as a status object -- all of these are stories and cultural aspects that would point to class mobility being a goal of American culture in and of itself.
And yet, we see little class mobility. Is that because people are content, as you suggest, or is it because in America, it is actually very, very hard to move between classes? Most research I know suggests the latter, not the former.
Crni Vuk said:
uhu. While I have no clue what the Romans thought about different skin colour, but they have been definitely as far as the Roman idea goes VERY narrow-minded, the idea of domination often enough came from a feeling of being superior, particularly as far as the Roman citizen goes compared to the other nations which didn't had the same status but just of "allies" or "vassals", I mean the Romans literally wiped out whole civilizations and described the Germans and other tribes as simple minded and inferior cultures. If not outright racism, it sure was not an empire build on tolerance. But that was not really common back then anyway, if you consider that the Egyptians, Ancient Greeks and Persians always saw them self as well as superior nations.
Yes, but the point is that
skin color and in fact physical traits weren't the vectors that determined superiority. Most texts that discuss why such-and-such culture is different focus on clothing, behavioral traits, hair styles, technology level and other such aspects. Not skin color, eye color, height or other (what we now know as) genetically determined traits.
