Do you consider yourself more left or right wing?

[curl-6]

sc94597 said:

curl-6 said:

Socialization and culture are a big factor, yes.

I don't live in the US nor do I have any experience with the African American community specifically so I cannot make any comment there, but one thing I do see in my own life as someone who came from a poor rural town is that often in demographics that fare worse in terms of socio-economic status is there is a culture of learned helplessness, where people accept their status as unfixable rather than striving to escape it, and are socialized into behaviours that perpetuate their own poverty just cos people naturally imitate the behaviour of others around them.

For instance, the kids of teenage mothers tend to go on to have kids in their own teens in turn, or people piss away their money on things like alcohol or gambling cos it's what their friends do, or people drop out of school cos the culture around them doesn't value education, all of which are choices which contribute to poor outcomes.

Again, this doesn't explain the regional differences. We are looking at metro-areas (non-rural) within different regions of the U.S.

In two regions (North & Midwest) the Federal Government didn't actively enforce school integration, didn't actively employ Black Americans as a policy initiative, didn't construct public housing policies with integration in mind, and didn't create Voting Rights Act districts to enfranchise Black voters. The Fair Housing Act (FHA) was also very loosely enforced in this region, which enabled racial segregation through mortgage loan approvals (or disapprovals) aka redlining. 

In the other region (South), the opposite of this happened. There was active enforcement of school integration (through military force and bussing), there were government contracts compliance programs that disproportionately affected the South due to large shares of federal employment of Black Americans in the region, the Voting Rights Act districting mandates meant that politicians had to be more responsive to Black voters (who made up a much larger minority share of the population), public housing policy aimed for increased integration, etc. 

The cultural differences across racial-lines exist in both regions. If anything Black-Americans in the South were in a poorer position starting out than those who fled to Northern cities during the Great Migration. So they should have had more of the "learned helplessness" you are suggesting might account for the difference. And the South has the additional issue in that historically it was a much more ideologically racist region. 

The answer really is that strictly enforced structural desegregation policy made the racial gaps in the South smaller than in the North. 

https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/3894.html

This paper examines the available evidence on the causes of black economic advance in order to assess the contribution of federal policy. Over the period 1920-1990, there were only two periods of relative black economic improvement -- during the 1940s and in the decade following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the voting Rights Act of 1965, and the institution of the government contracts compliance program. Black migration from the South, a traditional source of economic gains for blacks, almost stopped at about this same time, and recent evidence on the impact of black schooling gains indicates that educational gains cannot explain the magnitude of black economic progress beginning in the mid-1960s.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2F0002828042002679

In 1954 the United States Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for black and white children were "inherently unequal." This paper studies whether the desegregation plans of the next 30 years benefited black and white students in desegregated school districts. Data from the 1970 and 1980 censuses suggest desegregation plans of the 1970's reduced high school dropout rates of blacks by two to three percentage points during this decade. No significant change is observed among whites. The results are robust to controls for family income, parental education, and state- and region-specific trends, as well as to tests for selective migration.

https://s4.ad.brown.edu/Projects/Diversity/data/report/report2.pdf

The persistence of very high black-white segregation in a few major Northeastern and Midwestern metropolitan areas was a striking feature of the two decades between 1980 and 2000. These areas, home to about one in six African Americans, had extreme values of the Dissimilarity Index, dropping only slightly in that period. The 2010 data provide a window into this region that could well be described as America’s Ghetto Belt.

It's not 1954 or 1965 anymore though, most people alive today weren't even born back then, segregation and such have been over for decades and decades.

Giving people a free ride cos of the skin colour or their gender doesn't solve the problem, at some point, people have to help themselves.