Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
You can't compare the experience of different minorities.
Educated people tend to have educated children. The black community in America has a unique history due to slavery. We are talking about entire communities who were slaves and then forced into impoverished ghettos. When the entire community is in trouble, the trouble perpetuates through generations. You can't just tell them to go to school and get jobs, when its so much harder to do that.
Things are changing, but its a slow process. Every year the proportion of blacks in colleges rises. The other issue is that it's not ancient history either. Jim Crow laws were in force until 1965. Rosa Parks' act of defiance took place in 1955. A lot of black people alive today remember those events. So it's strange that we can't see why they don't have money to pass through generations. The vast majority of white college students in North America get financial help from their parents of some kind.
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This is all true.
However, it's important to realize there's a subset of white people in America that today that share many of the disadvantages impoverished black people have; it's the group commonly called white trash. These are mostly descendants of people who came to america as indentured servants, were effectively slaves for years when first arriving as a result, and then were left to fend for themselves with little or no help, much like black people after slavery ended. As such, while it's true that many whites get financial help from their parents, if your family is still living in an impoverished trailer park, that's almost certainly not the case. The cultural issues facing impoverished black people and impoverished white people are different, but not so different that they aren't comparable.