Blacks had unique challenges especially those arising out of slavery and Jim Crow laws in the South. But so have poor whites in Appalachia faced unique but different challenges. As did Native Americans housed on reservations. Every group living in generational poverty has a story.
More than a hundred years before black slaves came to this country the upper-class plantation owners would import "indentured servants" to work their fields. Once their contracts were over, they were shipped to the mountains where the soil was poor and where they were condemned to generational poverty.
Without the ability to get a good education or build any generational wealth, they scratched out subsistence lives. There simply were no realistic escapes from the world they lived in unless they were born with exceptional talent.
So, while blacks lived with "real" chains, the poor whites lived with invisible chains. On paper, they were free, but unable to read or write, or do much more than grow crops and hunt, there was no place for them to escape their condition and the situation remains the same today.
For a brief time, when coal came along as a critical fuel to replace wood, we used these poor whites to mine coal. The trade-off was a "job" in exchange for dying from "black lung" disease. Such a deal.
When we decided coal was bad, we took away their employment and put them on government entitlements, where they ended up addicted to oxycodone. When that scandal was made public, we took away the oxycodone and they got hooked on Fentanyl instead.
Today poor whites in Appalachia, poor blacks in the cities, poor Native Americans on reservations, and poor Hispanics living in poverty have no physical chains on them, but they are prisoners of their respective cultures.
I have five black grandchildren. Four of them are growing up in an upper middle class two parent family attending great public or private schools. They have 4.0 or higher GPAs and the question is how our society is better off by institutionalizing racism to give them advantages.
My fifth black grandchild is being raised by my daughter, who is a single mother. She works hard but it is a struggle as a single parent and while we are there to be her "safety" net (helping my daughter to move from a poor black neighborhood to one mixed neighborhood with good schools), it is easy to see, how other poor black, white, or Hispanic children living in my daughter's old neighborhood growing up with only one parent at home would struggle to succeed.
I simply can't see why our society should offer my four grandchildren born with silver spoons in their mouth preference over a poor white or Hispanic child that is working their butt off to escape poverty and just needs a little help. While I understand the "equity" argument, it does not seem fair. My four grandchildren will be fine with or with preference.
My fifth black grandchild has needed help so she can live in a community with good schools. She will need help to go to the college. We helped my daughter when she needed help, and she tries to be as independent as she can be. But the fact that her child is black and not white, shouldn't matter.
We need to help those poor Americans who are working hard to escape poverty to do so and help their children even more. If you focus on poverty, you will in fact, help some minorities more than whites and Asians based on the demographics, but that is okay. You are helping those that most need help.
The big driver of unequal outcomes is largely the product of what percentage of each racial group lives in poverty. By focusing on poverty, you are addressing the impact of unequal outcomes by race but targeting to individuals that most need help and doing so in a color-blind way that does not trigger racial division.
As someone with black grandchildren, white children, and half Asian children, I see how each group responds to race-based identity politics and employer and university DEI attempts. When your daughters ask if it's okay to lie to about their race, because they don't want to be discriminated against, it tells you we are creating a problem even while we are trying to solve one.
When your mixed-race grandchildren tell you, they are "black" when it works for them and mixed race when it works for them. You begin to understand, the whole race narrative is simply not working and going to work less so in the future.
On the other hand, if we as a society focus on creating programs that maximize the ability of poor families to help themselves, we are providing as equal an opportunity to children as any system in the world.
However, what are your thoughts regarding how to break the invisible chains of those people of all races that have embraced a culture the leads to generational poverty. If we create opportunities, how do we get people to take them.
Jews and Chinese families arrived in this country facing discrimination and poor, often with no more than the clothes they were wearing. But in two to three generations, they achieved success as an ethnicity because of their cultural values regarding education.
A simple example, if a young girl is raised to study in school and finish high school, then pursue a career, and if it interests her to find a mate and marry before having children, she will reduce the chance of both her and her children growing up in poverty by an exponential amount. Even more importantly, once her children are grown their chance of living in poverty as an adult shrink to 3.3 times less, than a child that grew up in poverty.
Focusing on breaking the cycle of poverty will do more for minorities, than any affirmative action program has... in fact, several studies show that after 50 years affirmative action has not worked for minorities as an "identity group".
The conclusions of these studies were that discrimination was less of an issue than first imagined and the society was failing to equip blacks with the educational and cultural tools to succeed.
I understand the issue, but I still can figure out how society can "change the culture" in poor communities. We can provide those who want out a way out.
