I didn't say anything of the sort. Culture is in part the political and social environment, merely distilled to a certain demographic. However, if you're going to suggest that 'thug' culture and single mother homes are products of a history of slavery, you're going to have to prove it.
No, I don't have to prove it. You can't prove your position, so stop asking me to prove mine.
Fair enough. But you don't know to what degree it comes into play? Is it worse than immigrating from a hellhole?
Of the blacks that emigrate to America, even those from "hellholes," there are still some that actually live relatively affluent lives. They come to America to escape the threats posed to their affluence by the country they live in. In other words, the immigrants who come here and are successful are probably already hard-working and successful in their original country.
Because your household is overwhelmingly self-imposed and imposed on you by your family, not the outside world.
What kind of view is this? That a household is organized primarily according to the whims of its members, and not by the social forces and pressures exerted upon it? No, not true at all. Culture affects us from the outside in, not the other way around.
I'll be sure to read some Bell Hooks and James Baldwin so I can think correctly.
Also, I mentioned Bell Hooks up there just for fun without knowing you'd eventually bring her up. It's been awhile since I read We Real Cool, maybe I'll get back to you on that one.
Stay cool...
I never said there was no connection, I said that the statistics that measure black success in America since emancipation don't support your view that the failure of black Americans today is due to slavery and Jim Crow. If that's the main reason for the failure seen today, how do you explain the fluctuating rates of success as you move backwards in time?
I don't understand how statistics aren't on my side. I guess I'd have to ask what statistics you'd like to see. As far as I'm concerned, the majority of blacks in this country can trace their lineage back through ancestors who suffered immensely under Jim Crow. Those statistics are enough for me to make my argument.
EDIT: actually,
@rms just laid out some straightforward details above.
How is that a structural issue? Is there a law prohibiting blacks from getting a driving license?
There is if they need to drive to the DMV in order to get the driver's license...
So you're suggesting that black people don't have the same basic opportunity to buy a car? What a ridiculous view, is there a government policy forcing two young black people to have sex, conceive while still living with their respective mothers, the father to leave and the mother to then raise that child in the kind of environment that makes it hard to buy a car when that child grows up?
Yes, I'm suggesting that the opportunity isn't equal. I'm not saying that the responsibility can't be distributed, but I'm not saying that we can lay the blame entirely on fornicating black people.
There are lots of working black mothers who have to care for children they probably wish they'd waited to have; but they didn't, and they're trying their best (in many cases) to care for them. In many of these cases, the opportunities for them in buying a car are very different than those of white families, and even single white mothers. John Oliver just did an episode on this, actually.
Actually plenty of white males lost work when women entered the workforce for the first time in any mass. Are you saying that black families were more prone to domestic violence back then?
Sure, white men did lose jobs as women moved into the workplace; and those white men proceeded to take the lower paying jobs, which employers were okay with because they didn't want to hire blacks.
This forced blacks out of work and, yes, contributed to the disintegration of the black family structure. It also contributed to black males joining neighborhood gangs - as a way to secure some kind of income, and to feel more masculine.
The concept of innate rights requires human consciousness to exist as a concept in my view and I don't think human consciousness exists or doesn't exist based on whether we live in a social system.
This is somewhat unrelated and the answer may annihilate my own point, but how does someone have an internal conversation if they don't know a language? (ie, baby left in the wild before learning a language.)
Consciousness is a material phenomenon, that's all - it isn't any metaphysical essence or substance. It's an effect of human brain processes. Consciousness projects innate rights onto the human subject in retrospect; it doesn't guarantee rights in and of itself.
I'm not sure why you're asking about language and internal conversations; but there is no such thing as a private language (Wittgenstein debunked this argument over fifty years ago), and without language a subject cannot have a purely "internal" conversation with itself. Language is very closely related to the evolution of the human brain, and the two go hand in hand: language implies the possibility of translation, meaning that any and every language - and any and every conversation - necessitates the possibility of being interpreted by a second party. Language is an evolutionarily social phenomenon, not a subjectively private one.
This doesn't mean that organisms don't have brain functions and processes, but it does mean that most animals don't have the capacity for self-reflection, and pre-social human ancestors also lacked this capacity. Human beings do, but self-reflection does not guarantee rights, and it most definitely doesn't "prove" that rights exist. All it does is lay the groundwork for human subjects to be able to retrospectively claim that rights exist prior to socialization.
Consciousness, language, socialization... there is no way to effectively separate these things out from one another. The earliest known cave paintings appeared roughly around the same time that the Neanderthal line went extinct and modern humans emerged on the scene. It's highly likely that the biological conditions necessary for consciousness were accompanied nearly instantaneously by the capacity for representational language structures. The human concept of "rights" is very much an effect of humans settling into social groups, although the first writings on ethics and rights did not appear until much later (Hammurabi's Code being a famous early example, which didn't appear until roughly 1780 BCE).
To take this a step further, there is significant evidence to suggest that the modern notion of freedom, which the authors of the Declaration of Independence relied upon, emerged within a very specific historical context: the ancient Roman concept of "freedman," i.e. a freed slave. In other words, our modern notion of freedom derives directly from ancient iteration of slavery itself, not from some metaphysical notion of pure human freedom.
