JohnStOnge
Member
- Jul 8, 2005
- 321
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The above is a perfect example of a fish not understanding the water than support him, actually.
Do you honestly think that one can easily wipe out the pernicious outcomes of 400 years of oppression in one generation?
Obviously you do.
You are wrong.
But it's a very comnforting wrong way of thinking, I'll admit that much.
I understand the argument. I've seen it many times before, like a document I've looked at from Catholic Charities called Poverty and Racism: Overlapping Threats to the Common Good. There's a chapter in it on the effect of "White Privlege." I'd post a link to it but I can't due to the rule about having at least 15 posts first.
There are all kinds of people in this country with all kinds of backgrounds and ancestries. I notice that people of Asian ancestry weren't listed among "underrepresented minorities" by the University of Michigan. Nobody gots 20 points for being, say, the grandchild of a Vietnamese immigrant. Why is that? Is it because, even though they didn't benefit from White privlege, are only two generations removed from a background of horrible wartime conditions and a completey foreign culture, they tend to somehow manage to achieve the grades and test scores to get in without the need for getting extra points?
In my opinion, the "400 years of oppression" has become an excuse. Not that it has no impact at all. But "400 years of oppression" does not reasonably explain why, for example, poor white children scored better than middle and upper class black children on the NAEP test I described above (whites eligible for the school lunch program averaged 292 while blacks whose families were too well off for them to qualify averaged 276). And the difference is "statistically significant" at the confidence level normally used by convention.
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