I'm "African American"

[Ban Hammer 14,815]

You can live in the ghetto (being any race at all), drop out of school, get your GED, go to community college while working a full time job, then complete your degree at a 4 year university. Anyone can do that.

exactly!

[Peikko 1,575]

I was speaking hypothetically. And in the work force, I think women are still a minority. I think you're being intentionally obtuse if you're even going to debate that.

Speaking hypothetically to what? You wanted people to believe that you were proof that positive discrimination is a bad idea. ####### to that because what you said was rubbish which you are now admitting.

Women are not a minority in the work force, women are a minority in certain business sectors and some women are discriminated against even now.

Edited February 9, 2010 by Madame Cleo

[FortLaudy 10]

Peer pressure didn't affect me either, but then again I went to a fairly good school and I had a stable two-parent middle-class family.

So it's also the white man's fault that black fathers don't stick around ? You have to agree Gene, these are all silly excuses, one excuse being an excuse for another. The excuses are what I have the biggest problem with, and the enabling of the unwanted behavior.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Peer pressure is a lame excuse for failure. It has no effect on thinking people.

What aspirations, imagination or ambition is inspired by WELFARE? It is specifically designed to prevent those exact qwualities and keep a race of people exactly where they have been, by one means or another, for more than 300 years. The KKK couldn't have done it better...and then if someone disagrees they say HE is the racist. Beautiful, just beautiful.

I don't think what I said is difficult to understand, in the context of an insular communities with a list of clearly defined social problems.

[Peikko 1,575]

i said no such thing. now quit trying to be so provocative and stay in context. in case you didn't get it the first time, i'm merely pointing out that i'm not buying the "oh i'm stuck in this situation" ####### that so many tout. what prevents a teenager (17-19) from joining the military and bettering themselves is baffling. it's not a real difficult recipe to follow: stay in school, join the military for 3 years or more, and you get your college paid for. and yeah, that's exactly what i did. and i wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth either.

and btw, my last assignment i had a co-worker from the "hood" who did exactly that too and last i knew of, he was working on his master's. and he isn't the only example i can cite either.

You did because you suggested that blacks in ghettos choose this lifestyle when obviously in your mind there is no reason for them not to, apart from the fact that they are black.

[FortLaudy 10]

QUOTE (Happy Bunny @ Feb 8 2010, 06:41 PM)

You can live in the ghetto (being any race at all), drop out of school, get your GED, go to community college while working a full time job, then complete your degree at a 4 year university. Anyone can do that.

exactly!

And then some CHOOSE not to

[Fandango 1,440]

Speaking hypothetically to what? You wanted people to believe that you were proof that positive discrimination is a bad idea. ####### to that because what you said was rubbish which you are now admitting.

Women are not a minority in the work force, women are a minority in certain business sectors and some women are discriminated against even now.

Oh for the Love of God, I really do think you like to argue to hear yourself talk....or at least see yourself write.

I WOULD NOT WANT A JOB WHERE I DID NOT OBTAIN SAID JOB BASED PURELY ON MERIT.

Is that easy enough for you to understand now? Shall we pull it apart somehow so you have someone to quote?

[FortLaudy 10]

You did because you suggested that blacks in ghettos choose this lifestyle when obviously in your mind there is no reason for them not to, apart from the fact that they are black.

Not only blacks choose this lifestyle, people from all races do. But we call them something when they are white: lazy and unmotivated, that's not PC when referring to the ghetto folk.

[Peikko 1,575]

Oh for the Love of God, I really do think you like to argue to hear yourself talk....or at least see yourself write.

I WOULD NOT WANT A JOB WHERE I DID NOT OBTAIN SAID JOB BASED PURELY ON MERIT.

Is that easy enough for you to understand now? Shall we pull it apart somehow so you have someone to quote?

Who would? Black people?

[Peikko 1,575]

Not only blacks choose this lifestyle, people from all races do. But we call them something when they are white: lazy and unmotivated, that's not PC when referring to the ghetto folk.

Nobody makes a positive choice to be in that situation from the position of a real choice. I know you feel that people do, because you see people like that and because you are not like that it seems impossible to you that that can happen, but sad to say, it can and it does. I don't think it would matter to you either way because only those who can help themselves deserve help in your world.

There are many examples however, of people providing help to people that were not aware that they could change, and positive change occurs which is a blessing. They become worthy of being helped after they have been. I know that's a hard concept for some to grasp, seriously.

Edited February 9, 2010 by Madame Cleo

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

So it's also the white man's fault that black fathers don't stick around ? You have to agree Gene, these are all silly excuses, one excuse being an excuse for another. The excuses are what I have the biggest problem with, and the enabling of the unwanted behavior.

I'm not putting them out there as "excuses" and I don't recall offering judgement on why things are that way.

I am saying (as I said before) that unless one believes that blacks are intrinsically inferior to whites, that the only reasonable conclusion one can reach about why "Black America" is in the state it is, is due to the legacy of the racist policies of the not too distant past.

Affirmative Action exists to address the latter, its not a perfect solution, but then there is no such thing - especially if the alternative is to simply let people get on with it and pretend that the disparities don't exist.

The problem in this thread is that noone is able to step outside of their own shoes and look at the big picture. Its easy to tell people to pull their socks up from a position of privilege.

[FortLaudy 10]

Nobody makes a positive choice to be in that situation from the position of a real choice. I know you feel that people do, because you see people like that and because you are not like that it seems impossible to you that that can happen, but sad to say, it can and it does. I don't think it would matter to you either way because only those who can help themselves deserve help in your world.

There are many examples however, of people providing help to people that were not aware that they could change, and positive change occurs which is a blessing.

I'm not against all help, just the free handouts and people who think they're actually helping and making a difference by giving out free handouts.

I have the attitude of: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I love the Auzzie "on the dole" system in particular.

[Peikko 1,575]

I'm not against all help, just the free handouts and people who think they're actually helping and making a difference by giving out free handouts.

I have the attitude of: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I love the Auzzie "on the dole" system in particular.

I have no idea what you mean by 'free handouts'. There are problems with the system of unemployment that exists in the US. I don't think anyone would deny that, but I wasn't aware that the system was designed to allow people to choose to be bums. I wonder how that bill got passed?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

(this is interesting)

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Many factories and businesses prior to 1964, especially in the South, had in place facially discriminatory policies and rules. For example, a company's policy might have openly relegated African-Americans to the maintenance department and channeled whites into operations, sales, and management departments, where the pay and opportunities for advancement were far better. If, after passage of the Civil Rights Act, the company willingly abandoned its facially segregative policy, it could still carry forward the effects of its past segregation through other already-existing facially neutral rules. A company policy, say, that required workers to give up their seniority in one department if they transferred to another would have locked in place older African-American maintenance workers as effectively as the company's prior segregative rule that made them ineligible to transfer at all. Consequently, courts began striking down facially neutral rules that carried through the effects of an employer's past discrimination, regardless of the original intent or provenance of the rules. "Intent" was effectively decoupled from "discrimination." In 1971, the Supreme Court ratified this process, giving in the Griggs decision the following construction of Title VII:

The objective of Congress in the enactment of Title VII…was to achieve equality of employment opportunities and remove barriers that have operated in the past to favor an identifiable group of white employees over other employees. Under the Act, practices, procedures, or tests neutral on their face, and even neutral in terms of intent, cannot be maintained if they operate to "freeze" the status quo of prior discriminatory employment practices. What is required by Congress is the removal of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to exclude on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification.

^[10]

In a few short paragraphs the Court advanced from proscribing practices that froze in place the effects of a firm's own past discrimination to proscribing practices that carried through the effects of past discrimination generally. The Court characterized statutory discrimination as any exclusionary practice not necessary to an institution's activities. Since many practices in most institutions were likely to be exclusionary, rejecting minorities and women in greater proportion than white men, all institutions needed to reassess the full range of their practices to look for, and correct, discriminatory effect. Against this backdrop, the generic idea of affirmative action took form:

Each institution should effectively monitor its practices for exclusionary effect and revise those that cannot be defended as "necessary" to doing business. In order to make its monitoring and revising effective, an institution ought to predict, as best it can, how many minorities and women it would select over time, were it successfully nondiscriminating. These predictions constitute the institution's affirmative action "goals," and failure to meet the goals signals to the institution (and to the government) that it needs to revisit its efforts at eliminating exclusionary practices.There may still remain practices that ought to be modified or eliminated.

^[11]

The point of such affirmative action: to induce change in institutions so that they could comply with the nondiscrimination mandate of the Civil Rights Act.

However, suppose this self-monitoring and revising fell short? In early litigation under the Civil Rights Act, courts concluded that some institutions, because of their past exclusionary histories and continuing failure to find qualified women or minorities, needed stronger medicine. Courts ordered these institutions to adopt "quotas," to take in specific numbers of formerly excluded groups on the assumption that once these new workers were securely lodged in place, the institutions would adapt to this new reality.^[12]

Throughout the 1970s, courts and government enforcement agencies extended this idea across the board, requiring a wide range of firms and organizations—from AT&T to the Alabama Highway Patrol—temporarily to select by the numbers. In all these cases, the use of preferences was tied to a single purpose: to prevent ongoing and future discrimination. Courts carved out this justification for preferences not through caprice but through necessity. They found themselves confronted with a practical dilemma that Congress had never envisaged and thus never addressed when it wrote the Civil Rights Act. The dilemma was this: courts could impose racial preferences to change foot-dragging or inept defendants (and by doing so apparently transgress the plain prohibition in Title VII) or they could order less onerous steps they knew would be ineffective, thus letting discrimination continue (and by doing so violate their duty under Title VII). Reasonably enough, the federal courts resolved this dilemma by appeal to the broad purposes of the Civil Rights Act and justified racial preferences where needed to prevent ongoing and future discrimination.^[13]

Thus, preferential affirmative action in the workplace served the same rationale as the non-preferential sort. Its purpose was not to compensate for past wrongs, offset unfair advantage, appropriately reward the deserving, or yield a variety of social goods; its purpose was to change institutions so they could comply with the nondiscrimination mandate of the Civil Rights Act.

link

(the whole article is worth a read for anyone interested)

[FortLaudy 10]

Instead of this: Food & money donation to poor

http://www.foodforthepoor.org/help/

I would suggest more education on this: Urban Farming education

http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/article/2...USINESS/2080515