Why are Asian-Americans so successful in America?

Well, hopefully they will all spontaneously decide to do that one day.

 

When you grow up in a community where you don't know any adults who are doctors, lawyers, or engineers, it might be hard for you to envision becoming one yourself.

And, if educational success, followed by career success, isn't the goal from very early on, it's unlikely to happen.

What we need to do is let kids -- and their parents -- from all backgrounds know that they can achieve success if they work towards it.

I've seen this kind of thing on a slightly different level in my own extended family. My cousins growing up in Buffalo never aspired to colleges better than those in the SUNY system. Career goals were based around civil service jobs, like cop and fireman, and the steady paycheck, and the pensions that came with them.

Now, there's no shame in any of that, and they largely achieved those goals. But, what if the goals had been higher? Would they have achieved those higher goals?

 

OK. But if my kid isn't getting challenged enough in a nice suburban school system, how are any of the kids in an impoverished inner-city school district supposed to succeed? There are stories out there about how even top inner-city students go to places like Harvard or Berkeley and are utterly unprepared for it. My best friend - he's white - graduated at the top of his class of 14 at a public high school in rural Kentucky. For senior year in English, they put on a play. That was it. He's smart, but he was completely blindsided by the expectations even at our modest little institute of higher learning.

 

Wait, slavery's still legal? Wow, didn't realize that...

 

Well, I don't expect it to happen on a large scale spontaneously. But, does our current system even have this as a long term goal? Are we taking steps towards this?

One political party's entire message is that our system is unfair.

Are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton working on changing this mindset?

 

I'm sure it had no impact on the cycle of black poverty in America. Jim Crow, either.

 

Good fucking Lord, I hope you're not dumb enough to actually believe that shit.

 

You perfectly describe why this really isn't about race, or even slavery.

Rural Whites from Appalachia face the exact same problems and issues as African-Americans. And, race based programs often help African-Americans of privilege, and ignore poor blacks and whites.

 

Once slavery ended African Americans were afforded the same opportunities and treated as equals to whites.

 

To me, one of the saddest things is when you read about something like the tearing down of the apartment complexes in places like Cabrini Green, and you hear the stories of the people who have lived there for generations.

Public housing should not be a place where we warehouse the poor for generations. It should help stabalize poor families, so that their children can succeed.

But, you read about people who's mother were born in the building, and they're still living there too, raising their own family. That's a failure of monumental proportions.

But, we see the same thing in Appalachia. Kids grow up in poor towns, with no jobs, and never leave.

It's really not about race. It is about how we break a cycle.

 

But if we can't play the race card, people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would have to go out and get real jobs.

Can't have that.

 

Niggers, huh?