LOIE
Gold Member
- May 11, 2017
- 954
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I've seen many ops and posts about poor blacks in the inner cities and I find most to be extremely critical and negative.
I’ve just read “Is Bill Cosby Right? (or has the black middle class lost its mind?) by Michael Eric Dyson.
He says, “The poor cannot erase the blight of white supremacy by behaving better, no matter what advocates of racial uplift or personal responsibility like Bill Cosby suggest. Assuming personal responsibility cannot remove vicious structural barriers to economic mobility. Exercising personal responsibility cannot prevent the postindustrial decline in major northeastern cities, nor can it fix the crumbling infrastructure that continues to keep the poor, well, poor. Being personally responsible can’t stop job flight, structural shifts in the political economy, the increasing technological monopoly of work, downsizing, or outsourcing, problems that middle-class folk, who are presumed to be more personally responsible than the poor, face in abundance these days. As historian Robin D.G. Kelley observes:
The reality is, all the self-help in the world will not eliminate poverty or create the number of jobs needed to employ the African American community. Multinational corporations control 70 percent of world trade, and about one-third of world trade consists of transfers within the 350 largest global corporations. Rather than merely exploit Third World labor to extract or cultivate raw materials, increasingly we have witnessed the export of whole production processes as corporations seek to take advantage of cheaper labor, relatively lower taxes, and a deregulated environment…Well-paying jobs made possible by decades of union struggle disappeared.
We hold the poor immediately responsible for mastering their domain, and yet society bears the ultimate responsibility for making their social environment a cruel obstacle course of severely limited options while virtually assuring their failure with poorly arranged alternatives to their suffering. To paraphrase Dorothy Day, the great Catholic social activist who spent her life working with and loving the poor, “We must work toward a world in which it is easier for the poor to behave decently.”
I’ve just read “Is Bill Cosby Right? (or has the black middle class lost its mind?) by Michael Eric Dyson.
He says, “The poor cannot erase the blight of white supremacy by behaving better, no matter what advocates of racial uplift or personal responsibility like Bill Cosby suggest. Assuming personal responsibility cannot remove vicious structural barriers to economic mobility. Exercising personal responsibility cannot prevent the postindustrial decline in major northeastern cities, nor can it fix the crumbling infrastructure that continues to keep the poor, well, poor. Being personally responsible can’t stop job flight, structural shifts in the political economy, the increasing technological monopoly of work, downsizing, or outsourcing, problems that middle-class folk, who are presumed to be more personally responsible than the poor, face in abundance these days. As historian Robin D.G. Kelley observes:
The reality is, all the self-help in the world will not eliminate poverty or create the number of jobs needed to employ the African American community. Multinational corporations control 70 percent of world trade, and about one-third of world trade consists of transfers within the 350 largest global corporations. Rather than merely exploit Third World labor to extract or cultivate raw materials, increasingly we have witnessed the export of whole production processes as corporations seek to take advantage of cheaper labor, relatively lower taxes, and a deregulated environment…Well-paying jobs made possible by decades of union struggle disappeared.
We hold the poor immediately responsible for mastering their domain, and yet society bears the ultimate responsibility for making their social environment a cruel obstacle course of severely limited options while virtually assuring their failure with poorly arranged alternatives to their suffering. To paraphrase Dorothy Day, the great Catholic social activist who spent her life working with and loving the poor, “We must work toward a world in which it is easier for the poor to behave decently.”
