Professors cause outrage by lamenting ‘culture of inner-city blacks

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liberty
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Professors cause outrage by lamenting ‘culture of inner-city blacks

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I don't see the problem; there are superior and inferior cultures. A superior culture provides a higher standard of living, more freedom, and more security, and an inferior culture offers a lower standard of living, less freedom, and less safety. The inner-city black culture is one of those inferior cultures. It is a place where a parent has to worry about their child being shot on their front stoop; one can't walk the streets for fear of being attacked, and a place where no one wants to invest money, because for some strange reason, people don't want to lose their investment. A society where learning is encouraged, economic investment is appreciated, and a high degree of social order is maintained will be a better place to live.

The good news is that cultures can change. After the Japanese suffered the humiliation of Commodore Perry forcing his way into Japan, they realized they were backward and set out to change their culture. They did it in a little over two generations, a rather impressive achievement. If the Japanese can do it, why can't any other people?


Professors cause outrage by lamenting ‘culture of inner-city blacks’ (timeshighereducation.com)

Professors cause outrage by lamenting ‘culture of inner-city blacks’
Penn and San Diego law academics’ opinion piece, arguing ‘all cultures are not equal’, brings calls for institutions to speak out

Not all cultures are equal.
That’s the assertion made by Amy Wax and Larry Alexander, law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of San Diego, respectively, in a Philadelphia Inquirer opinion piece that also goes on to rail against modern culture, including – but not limited to – “inner-city blacks”, birth control and the “anti-assimilation attitudes” supposedly “gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants”.

The editorial attributes modern America’s decline to the eschewing of “the hegemony of the bourgeois culture” of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, which preached marriage before children, family values and respect for authority – in contrast what the authors call today’s idle, sloppy, divorce-prone and anti-authoritarian youth. The piece was published earlier this month but didn’t cause a stir until recently, when students – who are just now returning to campus – noticed and began calling it racist, and saying its language is dangerous, especially in light of the recent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which left a woman dead.

“[White supremacist Richard] Spencer’s incitement of moral panic can find its intellectual home in the kind of falsely ‘objective’ rhetoric in Amy Wax’s statement, which positions (white) bourgeois culture as not only objectively superior, but also under incursion from lesser cultures and races,” a statement from a Penn multicultural group posted on Medium read.
A column in the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, signed by 54 students and alumni, called the ideals extolled in Wax and Alexander’s piece “steeped in anti-blackness and white hetero-patriarchal respectability, i.e. two-hetero-parent homes, divorce is a vice and the denouncement of all groups perceived as not acting white enough, i.e., black Americans, Latino communities and immigrants in particular”.

Wax and Alexander note that the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s weren’t perfect – there was racial discrimination and sexism as well as “pockets” of anti-Semitism. But they also see a breakdown of order, and a modern “obsession with race” that they say would disappoint Martin Luther King Jr: “This cultural script began to break down in the late 1960s. A combination of factors – prosperity, the Pill, the expansion of higher education and the doubts surrounding the Vietnam War – encouraged an anti-authoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal – sex, drugs and rock-and-roll – that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society. This era saw the beginnings of an identity politics that inverted the color-blind aspirations of civil rights leaders like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into an obsession with race, ethnicity, gender and now sexual preference.”

Now, the authors argue, that order has been damaged by certain “inner-city blacks” and attitudes against assimilation allegedly circling among Hispanic immigrants (whether other immigrants are in on this conspiracy is not detailed).
They write: “All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a first-world, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script – which the upper middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach – cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.
I expected to be placed in an air force combat position such as security police, forward air control, pararescue or E.O.D. I would have liked dog handler. I had heard about the dog Nemo and was highly impressed. “SFB” is sad I didn’t end up in E.O.D.

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