CMV: Black people need to begin accepting their own responsibility for their problems; it is black criminality/culture that is causing the black community's problems, NOT white racism. [Serious]

Keep in mind that arguments blaming black culture are nothing new. In fact, arguments fairly similar to yours appeared more than 120 years ago:

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle [through labor] rather than of artificial forcing.

Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life[...] No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem[...]

As such, some modern writers have written:

This perspective doesn't really hold water, though:

Americans don't want to imagine that our racist history is actually an ongoing, racist reality. We like to look at racism as a thing that has gotten better (if not gone away completely) and that the way black Americans are treated in society is actually colorblind. So, if forced to pick between the idea that our country's structures and systems are biased toward white people or the idea that black communities are flawed, many pick the latter[...]

Poverty in the black community is higher, and has been consistently[...] There exist three options for that persistence, if we assume that culture might play a role:

  1. There is something about black culture that prevents black Americans from escaping poverty. We'll call this the black culture option.
  2. There is something about the culture of being poor that prevents the poor, regardless of race, from escaping poverty. We'll call this the culture-of-poverty option.
  3. There are no internal cultural forces at play. We'll call this, partly for the sake of stirring the pot, the racism exists option.

Put more simply, there are three options for why black people continue to experience higher levels of poverty: it's in part black people's fault, it's in part poor people's fault, and it's society's fault. The best answer, without question, is the latter.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the problem lies with the second option, that there is something about being poor that results in future generations being poor[...]

Last November, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a study suggesting that the children of people who receive government benefits are more likely themselves to receive such benefits[...]

The study — conducted by looking at Norwegian, not American, benefits usage — found a relationship. But the noticeable uptick in the likelihood of children signing up for benefits programs was to the effect of being 1-in-16 or 1-in-8 more likely to do so. That's hardly a suggestion there is necessarily or even probably a transfer of the inclination to avoid work over generations[...]

Perhaps another assumption is in order. Let's assume instead that the black culture option is the correct explanation. That pathology actually is something reserved for black people[...]

Believing that black culture is primarily at fault means believing that black cultural attitudes are why the black unemployment rate has always been at least 50 percent higher than white unemployment. It likely means assuming that vague, hard-to-identify and complex cultural attitudes are responsible for most of the things on this bulleted list: flat wages, higher rates of arrest for possession of marijuana, higher rates of incarceration, a greater likelihood of being arrested at school, a lower likelihood of being accepted to top-tier colleges[...]

Is black culture why this 2003 study found that job applicants "with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with African-American-sounding names"? American history demonstrates countless examples of racist obstruction of black economic success. Ongoing examples show countless ways in which black Americans are still obstructed in the same way.

Is this so impossible to imagine?[...] Racism is the simplest answer and racism, of all theories, is the one with a robust evidentiary trail.

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