zlacker

How do you point out (quite accurately!) all the systemic problems and external bad actors at work, then end up at the conclusion that those people need to “help themselves”?

>>relaxi+(OP)
"Yea that kid I said got abandoned, totes needs to help themselves."

>>relaxi+(OP)
Perhaps they are pointing out the cultural changes that need to occur to change the patterns of behavior. No amount of police funding can fix a broken home. Not even social workers can make a parent stay if they don't want to, nor stop many types of abuse, nor get a kid to stop looking up to a performer who crows about their criminal history and start looking up to some real role models.

Those are really hard things to tackle, and even talk about. So most people don't.

>>relaxi+(OP)
If you've ever seen a black kid in school get ridiculed and told to "stop acting white" because they were studying and trying to keep out of trouble, you'd know what they're talking about. There are cultural issues that need to be addressed, in addition to systemic racism.

>>dx87+Qe
I've inquired about this and there are some layers at work that may be oversimplified when kids restate this idea as "acting white".

I understand there is an issue in internalizing the 2 main versions (Southern spin vs Northern spin) of 'whitewashed history' in the US. An objective viewer would consider them very sanitized, misleading, and often propagandized versions of history that are somewhat benign to people of European descent but toxic to non-white people that mainline it. It leads to a misunderstanding of how the world really works, came to be, and minimizes the role criminality played in the whole exercise, especially due its exclusion of unbiased economic history.

I think certain populations in the US have the unfortunate experience of being miseducated about who they are and why they are where they are, then spend the rest of their lives (if curious) unlearning/re-educating themselves about how the world really works and filling the gaps that were conveniently excluded from our prevailing historical narratives.

The mistrust of the information in some areas of study is based on intuition that isn't completely wrong.

"Miseducation of the Negro" touches on some of these topics though it is not an exhaustive exploration. We've learned a lot more about the layers of misinformation since 1933 (publish date), it would be interesting to read an updated version.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mis-Education_of_the_Neg...

>>relaxi+(OP)
There's a cultural issue at the root of it. There are places with more racism, more inequality, and more absolute poverty with significantly less violence, and crime has gotten worse while we've made progress on civil rights issues and racism over the past 50 or 100 years. Popular culture within American ghettos glamorizes violence and crime. This is probably a very popular opinion in reality but vocalizing it is, ofcourse, social suicide. Having said that, I support the current riots as police brutality and institutionalized racism are severe problems that needs to be fixed.