I Have Lived One Year In My Cities Poorest Neighborhood; This is what I have seen

Basil H. Rathbone wrote:

OK, first: this article opens up by quoting its own writers, which is a major sign of hubris/BS alert.

Furthermore: This test is from a racist website. That means they're looking for anything to further their black-is-worse viewpoint.

Later: they take the Maryland State Test to be an intelligence test, when it is expressly NOT designed to be such a test. It is an education test. By ignoring the fact that this test is checking on educational status and not intelligence (if it tested intelligence it would be useless, as that's not its purpose), LGDL is able to conclude as they wish, which is that blacks are fundamentally less intelligent than whites. But in reality the data supports only the conclusion that Baltimorean education is worse than that of the surrounding suburbs.

La Griffe du Lion is not racist, and he has no preconceived viewpoint. His writing is often flippant, but his calculations are sound. He interprets available data through statistical analyses and offers possible explanations as to why anomalies exist. Take for example his article on Ashkenazi intelligence, in which he concludes the vast overrepresentation of Ashkenazi Jews at the very best schools and in the most intellectually demanding fields is due to a mean IQ .8 SD above the white mean. I'd say that's hardly the work of a racist white supremacist.

Further, la Griffe does not claim the MSPAP to be an IQ test, but instead shows that the average difference in IQ that has been observed over decades (1.1 SD) is the exact same difference observed in pass rates at the satisfactory and excellent levels of the MSPAP. This finding buttresses Jensen's conception of intelligence as a generalized factor that affects most life outcomes. See La Griffe's table which illustrates the refractoriness of this 1 SD difference across varying tests of reasoning ability:

B/W Mean

Difference (SD)

-----------------------------------------------------------

0.99 Math SAT, U.S. average 1998

1.11 NY bar exam first attempts 1985 - 1988

1.13 National bar exam first attempts of every U.S. law student first enrolled in fall 1991

1.19 1986, 1987, 1988 results of National Board of Medical Examiners Exam Part I (required of all U.S. medical students)

1.21 Armed Forces Qualifications Test (from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth)

We are either to believe that discrimination and poor environment had an equal effect on each and every group of test takers, or we are to believe that there is a genetic factor due to the vastly different evolutionary pressures that come from living on the African Savannah compared to the Nordic peninsulas. An inconvenient truth, perhaps?

Saddest sack of shyt wrote:

It's very easy to be a problem finder and evry difficult to be a solution finder.

No how do we solve it?

Solving "it" cannot be done in one sentence, and it will take generations to make progress.

If you're looking for ways to help then re-read some of "I'm No Saviors" posts, he throws out plenty of clues that are actionable. For example:

I'm no savior wrote:

This culture and neighborhood will only escape there current circumstances if the charitable programs LEAVE and CEASE and if it is instead replaced with education that is staffed by Willing, passionate, intelligent educators.

Now, flip your original question around. You have the outline of a solution but will you do anything about it? It's much easier to be a naysayer than a doer.

just one story:

both of my dad's parents were immigrants. both relatively poor...neither educated.

All five of their children are college grads with upper middle class incomes. Two went to law school.

All fifteen of their grandchildren are or will be college grads. Two doctorates and a med student so far.

so...my grandparents' lack of education didn't hurt them so badly. i can't imagine why, though, since that's the "main reason" there's just so SO much injustice. We should all feel so ashamed of ourselves for not doing more for those who won't do it for themselves.

I would suggest that 40 years ago fewer people were college educated and therefore your grandparents' lack of education was not the barrier that it is today.

Wow. Some of you are just plain idiotic. I'm sure that you never stepped foot in a neighborhood as described, let alone grown up in the environment. You talk about liberal this liberal that while at the same time you are pushing ignorant right wing conservative bull shit... I love how it's easy to forget about slavery, failed reconstruction in the south, Jim Crow, and unequal education... All of that plays into the situation of the African American community today. You are very mistaken if you think 40 years is enough time to solve the problems... Racism is alive and well...

Read Kozol's books, Shame of the Nation, Amazing Grace, and etc. I work with students in an inner city neighborhood and the sense of hopelessness is overwhelming. These kids have always been treated like second class citizens. Their schools are falling down, roaches and mice run rampant, and the teachers are horrible... Sure you can say it is cultural. But instead of being a bunch of bigots some of us have to care and have to want to help to change the situation... Someone has to be willing to educate the young single mothers. Someone has to teach the children to love themselves; to believe that they matter.

Many of the students I work with are in gangs. Their fathers were in gangs. Their brothers are in gangs. It's the lifestyle they know. They are trapped in the cycle. But my colleagues and I are showing them that there are other options. It is difficult work, it takes time, and some of the youth just can't be saved. The majority can be though. I see it every day. We as a country have to give a shit about these kids or nothing will change.

College has been mentioned a lot in this thread... Sure these kids can want more for their lives’ and want to get a quality education but it is not part of their reality. Many teachers don’t take the time to talk to these students about college. Hell the teachers are just happy if the students make D's so they can pass them to the next grade so they won’t have to deal with them anymore. A disgusting amount of the high school students I work with read on third and fourth grade levels. Do you expect them to pass the ACT and SAT?? No one has ever taken the time to help them learn to read. Their parents should, right? Many of their mothers read on the same level as them... Sometimes people just need help pulling their bootstraps up.

I grew up in the projects. I lived on welfare. My mother dated dope-heads, drug dealers, and gang bangers. But I was lucky. My teachers and other adults took an interest in me. They cared about my education. They mentored me. They did not GIVE UP on me... Sometimes that is all it takes...

just one wrote:

... We should all feel so ashamed of ourselves for not doing more for those who won't do it for themselves.

Did it ever occur to you that the point is not about whether or not "we" should feel ashamed of ourselves or not. The point might just be what we think is the best course of action to attain a reasonably good outcome vis-a-vis the overall health and happiness of human beings in this country.

I am NOT arguing that endless welfare is a good idea. I AM suggesting that feeling ashamed or smug is simply irrelevant. There exist significant problems as described. Let us focus on solutions.

so what happens when one of you twats meets a black person that doesn't fit your 'made for tv' version of what you think a black person should be. does your head just f***ing explode? i have lived my entire life hated by black people because i didn't act black enough, and hated by whites because i was black in the first place. life is not as much of a cake walk as many suggest.

I got student loans wrote:

Interesting perspective.

Sure, I have a student loan payment now, but I also have a career that pays double what I'd be making with a high school education.

WOW! You make $500k a year?!?!?!?!? Damn fool, if you make that much you should be able to pay off your student loans in a month! I seriously doubt you are making twice as much as 4 of my best friends who all purposely (they were A students, one scored a 1520 out of 1600 on the SAT's) chose to skip college and rather start their own businesses. All 4 average $250k a year.

College is not the answer, motivation is. Shoot man, when I was 18 I made $120k in one year framing homes. No college education there!

I know more people who have a college education and are making $30k because they have no motivation and figured an education would simply land them a great job than people with no college education who are struggling financially.

Sure all this is a small data pool, my only point is that handing all poverty stricken people with a college education will not solve the underlying issue. Which is motivation.

once again, what you deem lazy and lacking in motivation others view as the only way to survive. so you don't accept food stamps...you work a crap job trying to provide for your family at 20 years old and get stuck in that cycle til you have kids of your own, who are also stuck in that cycle because you don't have the means or money to get out of that environment. i have 4 cousins that live in lynwood with my aunt. their father was a deadbeat crackhead who used to snort coke and watch porn all day at home. she never got a college education, and has tried her best in life working odd jobs to support her 2 sons and 2 daughters. is she a lazy person? a lot of middle class americans have this idea that if someone isn't living the same life as them, than they must be doing something wrong.

Bulldoze down the homes and exile the blacks and Mexicans to Haiti. Put the whites in Jr Colleges or easy state schools. Every US President since Truman has paid 100% of the military and home budgets for the US Colony in Israel which bulldozes the homes and exiles and tortures it's own White Semitic people for just for being Muslims. So we should just mow down the ghetto where you live, then ship the poor negros and mestizos to Haiti. Case closed !

College education isn't out of reach, but that's the perception. Remember that these are kids whose parents didn't go to college and whose schools probably aren't helping much with the process. So to go to college just seems totally out of reach: you have to pay to take the SAT, then pay for each application, and know who to apply to, and where to send your stuff, and so on.

This is not a liberal thing, or a conservative thing. It is not racism, although their are situations that have that. When you get down to the very core of what is happening here, it has to do with how we interpret our world through our own eyes. WE all have to see the world and make it work for us through our own context.

We are brought into this world as vulnerable, inferior beings and it doesn't take long for us to realize these inferiority feelings. We all have them. When you are a baby we depend on older people for everything. It is said we already have our lifestyle put in place by age six. But it is what we do with these inferiorities after age six is the key. Now we all have these inferiority feelings but we are all striving for a suppieor position in life. All of us are striving for suppiority, without even knowing it.

All behavior has a purpose towards a goal. This goal is always to put us in a position of better suppiority types of feelings. Think about it, how hard will it be to take a young child out of the cycle of poverty when he has developed useless ways to gain suppiority over his situation. Drugs, crime, prostitution, violence are all useless behaviors, but they do serve a purpose. To raise that person above the feelings of inferiority. They are easy, fast, and instantaneous.

To apply this to running, think about an athlete who is not confident. He has to work on overcoming his own feelings of inferiority about his abilities. They strive in different ways, working harder, making excuses, complaining about the coach.

We decry the lack of education, but like distance running, it takes many years of training to be good at it. These people (poor) just don't have the time for that. I teach in a very well-to-do suberb and a see the same inferiorities with these kids, but only on a different scale. They have greater support systems in place to help them through discouragement.

What is the answer? There is no answer. As long as we have beaten down, discouraged people, that have no clue who they are in this world, bringing children into the world, we are doomed to repeat history over, and over, and over....

Nobody is "trapped" in any circle. They choose to remain trapped. Sure, many people have very difficult circumstances to overcome; but the choice is clear - use your difficult circumstances as an excuse to stay in a rut for ever; OR pull yourself out of it. Nobody said life is fair. It isn't.

Lardy, I agree, theoretically we are not "trapped", but unfortunately as we build our lifestyle, it is what we are exposed to that has the greatest impact on us.

Think about this, we are approaching 65 to 75% of our population that is overweight and obese in this country. It's that constant exposure to unhealthy food that has driven this. I know many of my friends are in this category now and they are great people. Unfortunately, over time they have allowed the pleasure of over-eating to effect who they are.

Conservatives are right in that you need the drive of personal responsibility to pull yourself up. Liberals are also right, without support networks in place, it is very difficult to overcome inferior feelings. I just wish we could have a dialogue of what the balance of these two view points should be without calling each other names. Too much vertical striving here.

Really? After everything I wrote and THIS is the part you don't believe?

We're not talking fully loaded 2011 here, but nice, nice ones none the less. If you followed one of these people back to their house, you would find their car is worth about 3 times what their house is worth. Some people spend ALL their money on cars. On the reservation I spent time on, I saw the same thing. I knew a guy that drove a beamer, but was squatting in an abandoned house.

Oh, and pray that you never get hit by one of these drivers, because no way can they afford insurance. Sound unbelievable to buy a nice car without insurance or a place to live? It also goes back to the part about education. Having a nice car is a status thing and some will do ANYTHING to make it happen.

And why assume they're on welfare? Not everyone here is one welfare. Plenty of people have jobs, they just spend their money very unwisely.

Let me tell you about what I am doing. With a buddy of mine we have started a very small urban farm in some land a church gave us. Right now, we have only about enough food for us and some of our neighbors, but have plenty of room to expand, which we are. The goal is to begin small and develop a large farm (He has the farming knowledge, I have the business knowledge) that can not only employ people from the neighborhood, but will eventually allow us to sell to the neighborhood as well. People here eat absolute JUNK food. We seek to employ people to help develop them, and we seek to provide cheap, HEALTHY food.

Believe it or not, what you had to say does not change my opinion of what I think of the store owner. You seem to completely misunderstand the reason I brought up this point. I'm not seeking to build a successful business here.

I'm surprised that people seem to believe that I have done this simply so I could feed my curiosity and tell people about it. Relocating here was an action, and my continue stay here will be followed by action. It would be silly to move here and then just continue whining about the broken system and do nothing about it. I can do that from a loft in the trendy part of town.

If this town is South Bend then I lived in that neighborhood ten years ago. Although based on my last visit to town things are much, much worse.

and the fact that this thread is directed towards blacks in general is odd considering if have seen communities mostly white which are in just as bad shape as any black ones. replace the apartment style projects with trailer parks and crack cocaine with meth

To OP:

I'm curious - what, if anything, can us white, privileged suburbanites do to help people in this situation?

Just bulldoze the ngs and bnrs and truck them to Canada. That's what Israel does everyday to filthy Muslims.