Reparations, Reparations

A friend posted a link to (moderate? maybe) right-wing media coverage of some of what underlies BLM and other current attempts at fixing the race problem in the USA. In it, I found this article talking about the reparations bill and (implied ironic) support it gets from the billionaire community: https://www.businessinsider.com/bet-founder-billionaire-calls-for-reparations-black-americans-2021-6?fbclid=IwAR3HW4oLhq2_WFsFDacHuRwY3KVkKAUzJbaLE_FbGT7SDaJTbuDRL_TJ_n4 

My problem with this is that I grew up in a town where we actually had a moderate level of success in required desegregation. 

 (Forced would be a bit too strong of a term. Most of the community was okay with it. And, on the other hand, there were a minority who resisted, many of them real-estate agents and others who tried hard to keep some neighborhoods exclusive -- I assume so they could charge higher prices for land that really wasn't that significantly different.)

I was in a middle class neighborhood, with various cultures (and races) represented on our street and most streets in the neighborhood. Even the exclusive community on the north edge of town had something of a mix. (I'm not sure how the exclusivists made it work. You had to have a certain income to even get properties there shown to you as a potential buyer, among other things, and I think that the non-white members of the community had a certain agreement with the majority white members that they wouldn't try rocking the boat too much. Token non-whites? But the word "token" itself comes from the contexts in which such exclusive communities are assumed to be justified, so be careful how you use it.)

I did not realize it, but it was a very progressive community for the time.

Apparently, that kind of community was not common. And it really didn't work on an ongoing basis, even though the cultural mix is still there.

Particularly, there were a lot of, especially black, football players who rode into college with the expectation that a football scholarship was all they needed to be set for life. And discovered the hard way the difference between the small pond and the big pond relative to how good they were.

If we (royal we) had really wanted them to succeed, we had to teach them the work ethic that was necessary in the larger community. We had to teach both them and their parents that the football scholarship, for all that they were working their hearts out for it, was not going to be enough to keep them out of the ghetto unless they used it to get other education, other degrees. Athletic scholarship students working in parallel on non-sports degrees needed to become the rule, not the exception.

But that work ethic conflicted with the culture they were raised in. Not with the black culture, but with the white ghetto culture.

In a very real sense, Odessa was/is the ghetto to Midland's middle/upper-class.

The whole concept of paying one-time reparations is part of that white ghetto culture. When you give people money like that, most of them use it to solve their immediate problems instead of setting even part of it aside to provide a path out. USD 300,000? For half of those who receive it, it'll be gone in a year, most of it spent on stuff that adds to the profits of the worlds richest people, adding to inflation and adding to the income gap. For another thirty percent, it'll be gone in another three years.

Less than ten percent will attempt to use it for education or investment and such, and the resulting inflation will eat away at that, too.

That people want to do something is, I suppose, commendable. 

That they don't want to figure out what needs to be done is being lazy -- Throw money at the big problem instead of giving time and attention to all the little problems that are the social calculus that produces the big problem.

What we need is middle- and upper-class folks deliberately cutting their workweeks down to twenty hours so they can go out to the ghettos to mentor people who need mentors more than money.

But before they go, they need to learn the difference between do-gooding (trying to teach lower-class people their own false ideals) and actual helping -- reaching out to actually help people get what they need to solve their real -- not ideal -- short-term problems first, then staying with them for the middle and long term, and refraining from pushing solutions on them. 

Forced solutions are non-solutions. 

It's kind of like the difference between doing the math for a student and helping the student learn the math, except the solutions that keep people out of the ghettos require helping them to invent their own math and their own tests. Teaching them your math will only help the ones who can make the logically jump from what you teach them to what they need.

(And, in keeping with that thought, I'll do as I usually do and refrain from trying to draw a lot of conclusions for you. You figure out what conclusions make sense for you.)