Zoom-boing
Platinum Member
Like most things in life, follow the money. Poverty is the underlying cause of the disintegration of family and the high incarceration rates. The small percentage of blacks who slip through the gauntlet and enter the middle class end up assimilating to the American Dream, showing the ability to jump through hoops and excel at school and work. The trick is to address the social conditions that make it more likely that blacks will enter the cycle of poverty > prison.
There no way to have this discussion without serious statistical analysis because the Right and Left have different frameworks. The Right sees every social outcome as a matter of personal choice, and they over look the vast disparities that exist at the start of the race (where blacks, as a group, overwhelmingly start with less, and lack easy access to education, health care and the stable home life that comes with wealth). The Left sees personal outcomes as coming from a complex causal network, of which individual choice is just one factor, albeit an important one.
Given that we Americans can't agree on the basic facts surrounding this problem - and neither group on a forum like this can offer deep research analysis - we end up merely screaming undefended conclusions as if they were common sense, so black and white that only a moron couldn't see it.
We're not making progress or trying to get the other side to understand what is rational and defensible about our conclusions, we're just yelling, spamming and trolling for our point of view.
Actually, we have a number of people who have been conditioned to believe that the way to persuade people in the public forum is to shout them down and call them idiots for not seeing our truth (which we can't defend by any other means than yelling and name calling). This is an Orwellian strategy meant to benefit the status quo. As long as the prols are fighting amongst each other, they will never mobilize against the powers that own government.
Of the black family specifically or of all families in poverty?