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

Good God, yes!

Let's make sure they know there are opportunities, and available paths to achieve them.

But, let's not put down junk hauling or doughnuts either. There's no shame in it. You can make money in it. And, it's a higher aspiration than not working at all, isn't it? And, not working at all is a big part of the problem.

 

I've been to them. I guess I'm thinking on a higher level than the basically guaranteed-admission schools that ask for a 2.99 GPA and a 510 on the SAT.

Employers think on a higher level than that too.

 

Yeah, if you want to work for Dick's law firm, or Goldman Sachs.

We laugh at the idea that someone might "pull themselves up from their bootstraps", but then we also complain if a poor African-Americans can't go from poverty in Ferguson, to Harvard, to the board room in a matter of a few years.

What concerns me is the cycle of generational poverty.

I don't think multiple generations of the same family should require subsidized housing and food. These subsidies should help people get their feet under them, provide for their kids, and give them a better life.

Instead, we see the cycle continue.

When they tore down the Cabrini-Green high rises, we heard how sad it was for people who had been born there, lived their whole lives there, and now had kids and grandkids living there.

That's a policy failure.

Dick tells me that a poor African-American child born today has no chance. He tells me that child's future child has no chance.

At what point down the line do they have a chance?

Why can't we make incremental gains?

Why can't we go from poorly educated, to high school educated, to college educated over a couple of generations?

Why can't we expect to go from unemployment, to employed, to well employed, to business owner over several generations?

 

Then why aren't they?

 

You tell me.

Why haven't we?

 

Really? So for a black kid, its Ivy/Stanford or bust?

We've spent 14 pages talking about how African Americans are at the bottom of the food chain, behind practically every minority who's come over in the last 75 years, but a Fresno State degree isn't good enough?

 

Sure, but let's also not forget that high or chronic unemployment is not caused by people choosing to not work.

 

It's OK, but:

A) It isn't a competitive degree in today's landscape, not just against the Ivies but against any UC school or just about anything else up and down the West Coast;

and

B) kids who come there from urban schools with that kind of middling academic profile do not tend to do well, so in a lot of cases it's just burying them more in debt with no degree.

 

re: MC's post ...

Sure about that? I think it contributes heavily to the problem.

Part of a lyric in a Gang Starr song, 20 years old, has always stuck out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT4jQld_FiE


What the fuck is wrong with working a shit job during your teen years? It's part of growing up.

'Course, they touched on another problem within the poverty equation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikCQRx3BWQ0

 

Well, if "Gang Starr" said it in a rap song, it must be true.

 

Gang Starr answers you in that same excerpt.

It doesn't pay as well as selling drugs. That's what the fuck is wrong with it.

 

Sometimes, art imitates life.

It's the sentiment.

McDonald's!? Sheeeeet, I ain't havin' that.