I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.

Around Los Angeles, there are so many successful Japanese-Americans, second or third generation, who are dentists, business persons - who went to school at USC or UCLA, and tuition paid for by their parents - the dad a gardener who saved his whole life for his kids to get an education and have a better life. I know of four Americans of Japanese descent whose dads were gardeners. Two brothers and a brother/sister.

Do you remember the LA riots of 1992 - the Korean owned mom and pop stores getting looted, or saved from looting by Korean shop owners? Why on earth don't black americans own the mom and pop stores, in their own neighborhood?

The excuse making and rationalization around here is pathetic. And of course the demonization of a kid who worked his ass off to start his own business - he's the son of a surgeon!!

 

I'm still interested to know how we are going to get the black community to spontaneously start these millions of businesses with sound business plans.

 

Again, the alternative is: Shiftless niggers.

 

You do realize poor people were gambling before there were lotteries, right? Numbers rackets and stuff. And have fun banning cigarettes. That idea worked so well with alcohol.

 

It depends how broadly you want to go. I am assuming (and it might have said in the story) that if she is 6, her grandparents are somewhere between 40 and 45. Think about the home life of an African-American child born to uneducated parents between 1969 and 1974 in New York City. Is that a model for success, as most of our parents gave us? It's the cycle we all know about.

So take "illegal" drugs out of it and concentrate on things that happen in white households. If parents smoke, children are far more likely to smoke. If parents drink heavily, children are far more likely to drink heavily. Why, then, would we expect it to be different regarding the far more addictive drugs of crack and heroin? And why is it reasonable to think a multi-generational family that has never had any exposure or opportunity for "the good life" of education and stability would suddenly find it in the form of a 17-year-old teenage girl? Unfortunately, Dasani's path was almost assuredly set at birth. And society at large bears an enormous burden for that.

Regarding white racism of today ... nobody is going to call it racism. But yes, the deck is stacked almost impossibly against her.

--White flight, either to the suburbs or to private schools, has re-segregated the school system to almost as large a degree as it was before Brown v. Board of Education.

--College acceptance has been set up almost entirely to favor white people, with its near-singular focus on standardized tests and the rise of prep programs that cost thousands of dollars.

--Remember Trayvon Martin's girlfriend on the witness stand and the way she was so roundly and gleefully mocked on the witness stand? That's probably how Dasani is going to sound in 10 years, because that is local dialect. And that was ugly, ugly racism at its worst.

So, yeah ... as a matter of individuals, the great shame is that her parents provide nothing. But returning to what Dick has been saying, why is that? How is it that one portion of society -- and the one that has been mistreated the most viciously and violently -- stays so far behind the curve? The answer is either that there's a big historical problem, or that black people just aren't as good as the rest of us.

 

Seeing that n-word is repulsive. I'd go with shiftless, lazy African-Americans!

 

How old are your kids, LTL? My kids have graduated high school the last two years, and I have gone through every high school seminar on going to college. I don't agree with that statement for a second.

 

1) The GOP has been railing about minimum-wage doomsday since it was first created at 25 cents an hour in 1938, and has continued to rail about it with every subsequent raise. It's bullshit and always has been.

2) I don't think I want to live in a country that writes off major cities as "eh, better than Bangladesh."

 

Well, you're wrong, and there is all sorts of data and writing about it. Check out the articles on the changes in the SAT, one of the big reasons they're doing that is the gaming of the system by the testing companies and the spectacular results they achieve with said gaming of the system.

 

I guess it's possible. Can we also assume that at least some people in poverty have higher aspirations than hauling junk or making doughnuts and many more institutional roadblocks to achieving them and that's at least part of the reason they're impoverished in the first place?

Also, I busted my ass working during that time not so someone would take a chance on me doing the same exact thing. I busted my ass to get out of that situation so maybe, one day, I wouldn't have to scrap and claw for everything in life.

And, as hard as I worked, the thing that allowed me to break out of it was luck.

 

It's not total bullshit, though, I don't think. And it's particularly not bullshit in 2014, with cheap labor available elsewhere in the world. Unskilled Americans, no different than unskilled Bangladeshis and Chinamen, need something to sell. Cheap labor would be something to sell. It's what migrant workers sell, for example.

 

No, I'm not wrong. You are talking about the high end universities. If you are any kind of student, you can achieve a test score and grades good enough (without having to take tutoring for SATs) to get into a San Jose State University, or Fresno State or Long Beach State. There is a ton of money available for low income/minority students. Go to the high school sponsored seminars.