Race and class in America

Ahem, the Drug war would have nothing to do with crime and poverty, correct?

Sounds like interesting articles. I have wondered how much money we are spending on our children and not just on toys. Many parents now seem to suffer from child worship, you know the "nothing is too good for my kid" types. New cars at 16, cell phones, IPods, 5 and 6 years to do 4 years of college. Living at home rent free for long periods. Anyone seen any analysis on this?

Steve

I agree with something Ralph Nader said: "You can't always look down to find the source of your problems." Some of the most heinous crimes this decade have been committed by white CEOs, and other people in the upper echelons of power.

Just think 4,000 troops dead in the Iraq war which was based on lies. Republicans have even had the cajones to try and skimp on the budget for the VA system and the GI bill.

Loosing your retirement is probably more traumatic than being mugged.

Kenny Boy Lay was George W. Bush's most special friend in Texas.

As Ron Paul has pointed out, the value of gold and oil have been equal according to trends and surveys. But, our white God-fearing president and his lock-step following Republicans have mortgaged out our future causing the dollar to drop - hence $4 per gallon gas.

It's worth repeating what Joseph posted first on the thread: "Ahem, the Drug war would have nothing to do with crime and poverty, correct?"

I'm a white guy who married into a black family. I live in a house that my wife's family has had for two generations +.

Most folks around here are decent. Actually, my black neighbors are more accepting of me than my parents white neighbors in suburbia are of them.

I've lived here for over a year and think that drug dealing causes most of the problems around the neighborhoods.

When folks have to assume risk to deal black market items, like drugs, they're more likely to arm and involve themselves in violence, bodily harm, and theft.

If the government would legalize drugs, then these thug-types would be off the street. Their profit margin would diminish.

The end of alcohol prohibition didn't make us a nation of alcoholics. Most people know how to drink and smoke in a recreational manner.

I lived in Boulder, CO and can tell you that plenty of white upper class folks do drugs. Drug experiences may have been the impetus for some experiences of Old Testament prophets. It's time to admit that drugs are part of the human experience, so we can clean up our streets and deal with some major aspects of crime, namely black market derivatives.

Isn't it interesting thast all of the comments except a passing reference so far have been about the 2nd. article?

What you really need, Rod, is a copy of Paul Fussell's "Class: A Guide through the American Status System" (1983). All of about $3 on Amazon. Then you won't have keep on reinventing the American pop sociological wheel about class phenomena like college, proletarianism, obesity, sexual mores, material consumption, social class geography, class-typical attitudes and mythologies, and the like.

Trust me, it's a very funny book you won't be able to put down, and its last section (which hasn't aged well, though the rest remains very accurate) is considered where Doug Copeland coined the term 'Generation X' from.

"IMO, suburban churches which have a surfeit of money and talent to use on giant buildings and overblown worship services ought to take it upon themselves to provide intensive counseling, mentoring, parental training, marriage supports, financial support and such to people"

Mr. Me, excellent advice and I agree, but you are asking them to practice real relationship-oriented, life-changing Christianity instead of Christian-flavored entertainment and Bible-fact-learning. The latter is far easier and more enjoyable than the former. God bless those churches that are doing it though.

The second article of note was the always-provocative Virginia Postrel's meditation on how race and class affect patterns of consumption. It has been widely known for some time that when compared to whites, African Americans tend to spend more of their income on cars, clothes and jewelry -- things that advertise to others that the person who has these things has money. But new research indicates that this phenomenon is more class-based than race-based. (Emphasis mine.)

I'm not sure why this is such a surprise to some people. You have to have a minimum level of income to afford to buy a really big-ticket item, such as a house. (Unless you get someone to give you a mortgage you can't afford, and we can see where that had led us.)

If you're living on a low income and make up your mind you want to save for a house, you might never be able to afford one -- and you won't have a car either. But if you decide you want to buy a car, at least that's something you can hope to afford. If you can't buy a house, at least you can buy -- and own, and show off -- a car.

The higher one's income is, the more one is able to contemplate the purchase of higher-ticket items. And, ironically, higher-ticket items are often less "flashy" than lower-ticket items -- e.g., a $100K house might be less impressive to look at than a $50K car.

One thing that also contributes to the fact that higher-income people tend to buy higher-ticket but less flashy things is an element of what used to be called "middle class values", the idea of planning for and investing in the future. For a variety of reasons, including the overall difficult and uncertainly of life at the lower end of the economic ladder, there is less incentive for poorer people to think that may, and more incentive to look for a more immediate payback.

I have a lawyer friend who used to defend indigent clients. He and I were talking once about how little his clients tended to think about the consequences of their actions, and the fact that many of them seemed unable or unwilling to see any connection between anything they had done and the fact that they were standing in a courtroom in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit. He said that for many of them, life is just all about getting through the day. All they think about is what it will take to make it to the end of the day, and they seldom if ever think beyond that.

This is the same kind of thinking that makes a choice between putting money in the bank for a down payment on a house that you might be able to buy in five years, and spending that money on a diamond necklace that you can flash around the neighborhood today, no choice at all.

"Me"
The churches are a deep seated part of the problem here. The prosperity gospel is thick here (in the south), name and claim it, blessings are perceived as largely material, and should be a part of every "true believers" life. If you are sick, poor, or fall into misfortune, then you must have some secret sin in your life that "blocks" God from blessing you.

It true here in black churches, and white churches. I left the last church I attended ( and the last church I probably ever will attend) after the white pastor of the 20k (+) mostly white people started preaching about being in Gods spiritual zone for blessings. Oddly enough you couldn't be in the zone unless you were contributing more than 10 % or if you lacked faith at least 10% of your gross income. One couple was held up as ideal because they were paying over and above the suggested minimum tithe by using their credit cards when they were both unemployed.

The problem our unbalanced, unbridled consumerism that is endemic in this culture and it hits the poor the hardest.

I disagree with MDavid that black people everywhere do poorly. Spend time with Jamaicans, Canadians, and europeans of african descent, or african itself not every country is a banna republic hell hole.

The change we need isn't going to come from any current institution, all the great American institutions are at this time too entrenched. It has to come from our personal choices first, and our ability to get our families, friends, and neighborhoods to follow along.

Loosing your retirement...

The word you were looking for is "losing" - one "O", not two.

I'm sorry to be pedantic, but for me it's a fingernails/blackboard thing.

I agree with much of what you wrote, nonetheless.

I'm really not exactly sure why Jews and Asians are both doing so well financially (both in America and worldwide) in the face of such blatant discrimination. Nor why blacks are so poorly, both in America and every other nation in the world. It's quite puzzling, yet I'm very sure it can be blamed on Christians and white people. Of course, the one thing we do know for sure is that genetics have absolutely nothing to do with these trends. Can't be. Secular doctrine tells me so. Must. Not. Think.

You might want to read up closely on Diaspora Jewish history to explain the first- especially the restrictions on land ownership and limited professions and economic roles permitted Jews in western Europe, and the 'face of the oppressor' intermediary role Jews in eastern Europe adopted between the feudal landowners and the serfdom (and is still reflected in the thinking and behavior of the Jewish neocons, who are almost entirely of eastern European origins). Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Anti-Semitism" also explores the 'exceptional Jew' sociology that developed in Germany mostly, but western Europe generally and was adopted later the U.S. too. (Think 'Einstein'.) And again- just how do you explain the relative lack of geniuses produced by Israel, and by the Orthodox sects of Brooklyn, if genetics is responsible?

As for maintaining upper middle class status, the Fussell book I mentioned above explains how higher class status is easily maintained across generations. Basically, middle and lower middle class people commonly engage in behaviors degrading and destructive of class status. Long term ones are having too many children to educate well, and/or raising them in ways that favor stupidity or avoid development of useful forms of intelligence. (This blog really is excellent at illustrating the losing end of this struggle, and the substituents, consolations and rationalizations, compensations, and resentments resorted to.) All that upper middle and upper class people really need to do is avoid temptations and those two traps, which they know very well.

For Asians in the US, you might want to look closely at exactly who bore and bears the social and economic costs for the initial burst of wealth and prestige and ascent into higher professions. Short version- other people of their Asian ethnic group. In part older family members, perhaps mostly lower class ethnic members in parts of the US (who remain impoverished as a result) via rents and ethnic businesses, and at some remove, sometimes seed wealth that came from Asia originally.

I'd love to hear your explanation for why the most conservative Christian parts of American society don't seem to produce geniuses or people who are all that upwardly mobile. Indeed, leaving conservative Christianity behind seems to correlate with upward mobility, and joining it with with stagnation or downward mobility. Is it genetic?

Economists love to run models on everything. Anyone know of any economic models where one group has complete (state mandated) economic dominance over another, what happens upon removal of the mandate. How long does it take to overcome he disadvantage? I am not sure how economists would model for social influences.

Steve

And the cover article is "How Google Makes You Stoopid." And here I am, surfing the Net to read about what's in the new issue, while it's sitting on my kitchen counter. QED.

MM: POSTSCRIPT:
The 'Piaget' reference was linked in my comment to when I was in NM sales, the 80s, discouraging those who wanted a Rolex which Neimans then as now did not sell.

And per your post, as for 'understated status symbols' try mine on sometimes; a gift once from someone with more dollars than sense; Vacheron Constantin. That one is almost like through-the-looking-glass elite in that only those who have traveled in some tony circles have a clue. Handed to me one night in a clear baggy over burgers by an estate jeweler friend, someone with whom I was merely friends believe it or not. Friends like that are a mixed blessing but a blessing, make no mistake.
Of course what I needed was a new roof, not a gold watch. Picky picky.

Erin, good point. But there is old money and new. It has been in the 80s on that it became fashionable to be ostentatious. Old guard are as I described in that Vatican dinner. But there are plenty of people who have a ton of money and love to show up in jeans when it’s black tie. Because they are ‘reverse chic’. And then there are those who might as well rent one of those lightbulb signs and place it in their yard: “Grew up poor. Looky looky what I have”.

You want the ULTIMATE example of that syndrome, the pompous (take it to the bank) post Reagan Republican gauche snob with flash who sees his roots as one might see liver cancer? ‘D’ Magazine (the madazine of Dallas) columnist (last page of each issue for the last several months. A nom de plume ‘Marty Cortland’. Who (natch) grew up penniless and write about how they just let ANYONE I first class on airplanes these days. And how he loves his nanny and is forced to buy her a house because she is raising his children. He writes “buying a house for someone whose last name I don’t even know”. Now mind you…he doesn’t ‘get’ the irony that this woman has worked for him for years, and is raising his children by his own words, and yet he has never seen it relevant to know her name.

God help us.
PS: Promise...there are no shortcuts to understanding the rich. And believe me, there are the (minimum) distinct two camps.

MM...even at 'pennies on the dollar' a Vacheron costs a pretty penny. But whereas time are getting hard at NM, times are not (yet) 'hard' for the 'super' wealthy. Last night the same jeweler friend sold a pink diamond to a wife of a NYC hedgefund CEO. Price was $1.2 million. Last month she bought vintage Cartier tanks for all her friends as gift favors for her birthday party to the tune of $85 thou.

But don't shoot the messenger.

If I cared to be in that world I would have stayed at Neiman Marcus rather than being an NPR commentator and opinion writer. And throughout those NM days, I paid off a modest house in a 'marginal' part of the city in a mixed racial neighborhood in order to return happily to writing. So, yes, I am fluent in the dialect of the super wealthy (for than matter my mother grew up on a 400,000 plus acre ranch southwest of San Antonio) but my personal life and my personal interests and the work I have published and aired accordingly are distinctly the antithesis of elitism.

But all knowledge is power.

The more powerful knowledge being, at either spectrum, an awareness of alternative realities. As I said recently on a talk show, "the more one learns about people whose lives are other than our own, the richer we become.'. And to be honest, when I am in Highland Park shopping village, (the most affluent area of Dallas) where every child is a natural blond and 'diversity' is a red-head....I feel like I am in Pretoria, South Africa circa 1975. Meanwhile, I'm off to a south Dallas Brookly Jazz Cafe for Sunday brunch where I, being 'white' am the 'diversity'. Owned by a woman half Cuban and half black Jamaican. Happy Sunday to us all. And meanwhile, viva Obama.

I love Section 8 and think we need more of it. I also think it should be seriously density restricted....no more than, for example, 5 section 8 places per 1000 other residents in a square mile, minimum one place. (I.e, if you have 10000 people, there can be 50, if there are 100 people, there can be one.) To do logically section eight renting has to be changed to be less 'different' than renting to other people, because right now it's entire apartment complexes that are Section 8, and other ones that won't do it at all. (1) No. We need to have half a dozen Section 8 people in a lot of different complexes, not a whole transplanted inner city in one building.

We need to do this because of what the first problem is talking about...cultural lag. There are always going to be people who can't change, or at least won't change fast enough. The less of their 'culture' that has come along with them, the faster they will change, or at least the faster they will be spotted and presumably arrested.

1) Section 8 won't pay for damaged to apartments done by renters...which is mostly a myth anyway, so it wouldn't hurt to cover it. Likewise, inspections are more rigorous than most local inspections, but this is solely an artifact of entire buildings being section 8 so perhaps having lower maintenance. If only a few renters were section 8, presumably they'd be treated mostly the same way as other renters, and their buildings wouldn't be run-down rat-traps. (Hey, I just realized my idea is more 'free market' than the existing one.)

If you seriously can't see the difference between what America did to black people and discrimination against Asians

You might check out some of the history of Chinese-Americans on the west coast. It goes back at least to Mark Twain's bitterly satirical article, from about 1870, complaining that a young boy had been arrested for throwing stones at a Chinese man... how unfair, when the boy's elder exemplars did so many worse things with impunity!

Then you can pick up a copy of Ralph Martin's "The GI War" and read about how Japanese-Americans were treated in California during and after the Second World War.

It probably wasn't as widespread as the vicious treatment of Black Americans. But it wasn't pretty.

Second question, relating to your earlier post, how is it that, after generations of stable post-bellum Black family life, led by learned and successful Black people in the United States, under horrendous, Jim Crow conditions -- after that proud history, educational achievement is now seen as "white" and 70+% of Black children are bastards? WEB Dubois, to say nothing of Booker T. Washington, would be derided as Oreos today, I think. And one of my heroes, Percy Julian (I'm an organic chemist), would be dismissed as irrelevant.

It doesn't seem like this can possibly be whitey's fault; the Black family and Black educational achievement were at their height when whitey was at his most openly vicious and brutal. And now, when whites are mostly abjectly apologetic for anything that anybody might possibly find offensive, well, see my previous paragraph.

Also, may I make a plea for PC? What gives us the right to call a child whose parents were not married to each other a bastard? How is it the kid's fault? If we're going to call names, let's save them for the parents, and maybe for people who cast stones at children.

"What gives us the right to call a child whose parents were not married to each other a bastard?"

Well, it used to be what the word meant.

Richard Bottoms! Of all the gin joints in the world, you had to walk into this one. . . . . I hope you don't get sprayed with the invisibility paint again. Yes, indeedy, why don't you sit down and learn a lesson from all the jobless white worker bees who are going to vote for McCain? The people who brought you George Bush--TWICE--can teach us all a thing or two about intelligence and responsibility.

Here is one white self-employed worker bee who will vote for McCain, not out of any love for McCain or dislike of Obama - I would like to go out drinking with Obama - but out of economic self interest and out of a fear of what he, Obama, would do with regard to foreign policy (naivete squared, if not more).

Wow, Ostrea, whatever you've been smoking along with those pork ribs, I'm not sure you should add alcohol to the mix. ; ) I salute your consistency, however. It is a rare quality and one that I admire. I would urge you, though, if you ever do have those children, to reconsider freely using terms like "stupid," "ugly," "fat," "slut," "lazy" and "crazy" in regard to them, even if they are fully justified in your own mind. Words like those tend to have a bad effect on the developing consciousness of humans who have not yet had a chance to form their own opinions and who are still vulnerable to the unchecked expressions of others. "Abusive" and "vituperation" are useful words too.

http://city-journal.org/2008/18_2_criminal_justice_system.html
"black prison rates result from crime, not racism."

Brian Horan: take a breath, good sir. You have a lot that needs to be said. Break it up into manageable chunks. The vast majority of our fellow citizens (contributors to this blog being notable exceptions) have a very limited cognitive attention span.

I am wondering -- out loud, as it were, and as I often do here -- why so many people are keen on emphasizing the past. Certainly, historic trends and influences are important towards understanding the present, but they often have almost nothing to say about what we need to do next.

I say, redress the abuses of the past by making the future better than the present. Identify what those improvements can be, and go about accomplishing them.

It can be as simple as breaking the "other" ice with your neighbors, and going from there. Sometimes, it takes becoming a nuisance to the powers that be, who will sometimes try to shut you up by giving you just a little bit of what you are asking for. Sometimes it takes starting or joining grassroots movements; those require rather more time and energy than some (many/most) people have, but the returns on that investment are often proportional.

My wife -- white, Jewish, middle-class -- has been teaching inner-city black kids for 35 years. I've lived with her in their neighborhoods for 25 years. I don't mean to say that it has been her "mission" to improve their lives, and we didn't decide to buy in our neighborhood for that sort of reason. But we have learned a couple of things along the way:

They are mostly just like anyone you might meet nearly anywhere. The differences are not in them, but in what surrounds them.

They are not represented by the reparations/help-us-poor-victims/get ours by getting back crowd. Those are just the most vocal -- and truth be told, the sources for the sexiest and best ratings headlines. They want a fair chance to work and live. Mostly, they don't get anything close to fair. Mostly, they try harder instead of turning to crime.

My wife has been at her most effective when the city has supported education to the extent and in the ways that work. Those ways were still working when No Child Left Behind was passed. It was the support that changed, not the quality of the services. The justifications entered spin mode, giving us such canards as every child must go to college, that test scores can be and are the sole criterion for measuring progress, and that any college-prep program will prepare a HS graduate for any job.

End of rant. :-)

URL for the online article: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime