Games4Fun said:
mrstickball said:
Games4Fun said:
mrstickball said:
No, not really.
It matters only when people want to take it as a problem.
For example, your statement about men/women making different money is totally wrong. It's been proven for awhile that men and women, provided they do the same work, will get paid the same.
As for your claim about race and drugs, the bureau of Justice disagrees. As per their statistics, many more blacks are jailed for drug dealing because there are simply more black drug dealers than whites in comparison to users. http://www.jrsa.org/ibrrc/using-data/data_quality/data_elements/drug/drug_examples.shtml
As per their data, 69% of all incarcerated for drug offenses are by whites. But for dealers, its a 50/50 split between blacks and whites.
In the end, the reason (I think) they are still issues are because people still push them as problems, and complain about them. When we stop seeing people as male/female/black/white/straight/gay, we can judge people based on quality and character, which is a far more useful metric for defining worth.
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Unfortunetly race does indeed still matter for the States as a whole. Now, thats not to say ever single person is racist as that is far from the truth but lets have a small look at the income levels of different races.
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0689.pdf
look at the difference in thoose that make less than 15k now look over at the median income between black and whites. That is a huge difference it shows race is still a problem on at least this level. Why are there such big differences among the different races in pay?
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....Because education among blacks is worse, and education heavily correlates with ones' income and pay inequality?
The table you show proves this assumption. Education among blacks was on the rise until the past 10 years, which has been stagnant (also the same can be said for whites), which was also when they had the lowest percentage of people making under $15,000 per year.
The issue is more of a cultural issue than a racial one. Some cultures breed educational problems, mostly caused by horrible government educational systems (e.g. forced districting to failing schools) and bad parenting, spurred by the proliferation of single parents.
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Yes inequality was the term I should have used for this. Im really rusty on this stuff atm and need to go back over my own notes and books I have.
By forced districting to failing schools does this mean putting the failing ones togather? im even more rusty than I thought. Also, something I dont recall ever understanding is the the major differences in schools. Example the huge difference in big city schools and then like the one I went to which is kind of a middle ground. Big city schools of course generally being the ones minorties tend to get stuck.
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Forced districting means that a certain school must take all kids from a given area - a 'district'. For example, I live in one school district, and must send my kid (if I had one. My wife is pregnant, so we'll be having one shortly, though) to this local school district. I can't send him to the better school that is closer than this one, because my house is 1 mile from the district line. In some cases, it is allowed if the family pays money to the district, but most people don't have the money.
When that happens, it means that if you have a neighborhood that has a crappy school, everyone - white, black, hispanic - must go to that school no matter what. In Ohio, a woman was sent to jail for sending her kids to the school that was better, because she was outside of her district.
The districting issue isn't racist - its an issue where everyone suffers, but due to the location of some racial groups, some suffer more inadvertantly. Of course, I'm big on vouchering as the solution to this (e.g. allow all children an education voucher to go to whatever school they want - any public, any private, any religious up to a certain dollar value).
In the end, I don't believe racial inequalities are due to inequal opportunities, but due to cultural factors that play a significant part in hindering some peoples' education or lifestyles. For example, crime among poor blacks and poor whites is usually about the same. However, since there are more poor blacks than poor whites, there are more blacks that commit crimes. Some see this as racial bias, but I see it as a socio-economic bias that just happens to effect some more than others. Furthermore, its not that you don't want to fix the issue, but we have to ensure we fix the issue without favoritism via racial quotas, or things that benefit one race over the other, which we do a lot of in America.
