For the last decade I have worked at a low-income middle school in a dangerous/ghetto area of Las Vegas.
I have seen racial fights/riots between Mexicans and Blacks. I have seen students(90% receive a free lunch at my school) go fucking wild and throw the food provided to them by the school at each other and all over the cafeteria.
I have also seen students fresh off the boat from Cuba enter the school speaking no English and by the end of the year they are out performing their classmates. I've even had a student from Korea translate all of her assignments into Korean, complete them, and then translate it back to English so she could turn it in for a grade.
I understand that opportunities aren't equal or fair. Life isn't fair. I still have high expectations and standards for all the students. I guess I don't get it.
Fuck it, I need to make sure my bed sheets are clean for the next cross burning.
I saw something somewhat similar in high school. There were Korean students, most of them immigrants, who lived in the less nice areas of my town. I didn't exactly interview them, but it seemed like their parents were working all the time since they seemed to have a lot more freedom than anyone else outside of their schoolwork, and because affording an apartment in my area and raising children requires working an insane amount. The point is, they weren't living easy. Their parents put tons of pressure on them, probably because they worked their asses off to live in this country they (in most cases) don't even speak the language of, and because hard work, a good education, and ending up in a good profession are big in Korean culture. In my freshman English class, one girl even cried because she was stressed from midterms.
Then there were some African American students who were from the same conditions or better who just fucked around. It wasn't all of them, but there were a sizable crowd the school could identify. My friends and I called them the "oil spill" because between every single class they'd stand in a particular formation in the middle of a three-way intersection between the main areas of the school and they'd always be there before anyone else. In the classes I had with them, they were loud, disruptive, obnoxious, didn't do any work, and got shitty grades. Often times they were on an IEP, which is supposed to make everything easier.
I definitely think shit like "why can't they just make their lives better?" when talking about people in horrible social conditions shows a huge misunderstanding of how exactly a person develops. People can't just will away being socialized in a hostile environment with little education when they have little to no understanding of any other type of life. But people do have some degree of control, and damage to a group can't be repaired without the damaged group making an effort, too. (Seriously, what are we supposed to do, blast them with beams that erase the trauma of living in a violent, impoverished environment and inject them with an education and the values of a different society?) Just look at people like Frederick Douglass and other civil rights activists who seized whatever opportunity they took to get educated and better themselves and ran with it, almost as a "fuck you" to a system that tried to oppress them. I guess I have a lot more respect for those people than the African Americans I went to high school with, because those people went through a lot to grant the right to an education to their people, and then I see the people they were fighting for calling the teacher racist for calling them out for disrupting a class for months on end.
TL;DR: People are not completely controlled by their environments, but they're also not 100% able to defy them, either. It's understandable when people from a shitty environment act shitty, but it's a problem when they still act shitty when people are putting forth effort to help them create better lives for themselves. I don't think everyone can work themselves out of everything, but I think they should try.
