RageBot said:
cAPSLOCK said:
Had a big wall of text wrote up, deleted it. I'll just leave this here and go. I'll just say it's well worth the watch, and the guy is a good speaker so it makes it easy to sit through. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2mjvFNOwmc
It'll also be a fun excercise to find out who the racists are on this forum.
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I heard up to 10:00, and he didn't mentioned asians.
Why is that?
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African-Americans have a unique place in American culture and history, as do people from Mexico. By the same token, so do Asians. Asian-Americans from Korea, Japan, and China have a long history of creating insular communities and emphasizing the importance of academic success. The results are actually interesting regarding the impact of this: they find higher cases of mental disorders related to stress (performance) in Asian-Americans and far more cases of STDs in female Asian-Americans. To top it all off, while the classic example of "learn to speak English" is aimed at Mexicans, studies have shown Asian-American homes have far less people with a proficiency in English even as far as 2 and 3 generations in when compared to Indians, Mexicans, and people of Arab and Persian descent.
There are, of course, some really important differences, such as people of Asian heritage having a culture to work from while descendants of slaves had their history and culture taken from them. So imagine having your history torn from you to the point where you can only vaguely point at a continent on top of having deep seeded institutional oppression working against you. Asian-Americans by and large have no such negative framing. In fact, it's opposite: people expect more from Asian-Americans, which is obviously prejudice and does have detrimental effects, it's jus that the impact is of a different nature.
There's a hell of a lot to this, it's a rather large can of worms. Asian-Americans certainly get their fair share of racism and degradation--ask an Asian male how well he fares in the dating department. Just that the focus of that particular lecture is regarding problems concerning racism and privilege and how it pertains to poverty and higher cases of incarceration.
It was really more of a connect the dots kind of post. It's a great example of how deeply unfair American culture is and helps demonstrate that poverty is far more often the result of institutional problems and being born into the "wrong" area or race than the being some kind of hard-working, rugged individualist.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economicmobility.org%2Fassets%2Fpdfs%2FEMP%2520American%2520Dream%2520Report.pdf
Very good mini-study looking at economic mobility in the US, but there's stats all over the place.
Point being, life isn't a video game. It's not fair with set rules and we aren't all given the tools to succeed. Some people out there are playing Wii Sports, and some people out there are playing "I Wanna Be The Guy". It makes no sense to talk about punishing the poor or oppressed under such circumstances. The question in the OP is saying "let's punish a symptom" rather than looking at systemic problems that cause these conditions.
Keep listening. There's a lot there to that lecture that's worth listening to.