On Fox News this morning, the featured guest was Star Parker and her organization “Urban Cure”. The subject was the removal of certain billboards paid for by the organization and placed in low income area of Milwaukee. They say: Tired of Poverty? Finish School. Take Any Job. Get Married. Save and Invest. Give Back to Your Neighborhood.
I did not catch much of the report as I can’t stomach Fox News for more than a few minutes, but it was clear that this woman and the talking heads at Fox News had the same message to anyone in the black low income areas of Milwaukee: If you are poor, it’s your own damn fault. Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for your life. Set a goal. Stick to it and you will win!
Clear Channel, owners of the billboards, removed the message after community outrage.
I agree and I go one step farther.
When will Democrats stop a similar campaign that effectively says “If you are poor and white, go to college”.
I recall a state lottery promotion that said all you need is “A Dollar and a Dream” and you too can be a millionaire. What it did not say was that the lottery is rigged so that while a few will win big, most of you will lose. It’s the same with the economic system we have legislated in the USA.
Sure, college is a good thing to look into, but so is getting married, getting a job, saving and investing, giving back to ones neighborhood, but NONE OF THIS has any real affect on the wide and widening wealth gap in the USA. None of this addresses the reality that, if working class wages kept pace with working class productivity since 1968, the minimum wage would be $24.00, not $7.25.
The system is rigged. Stop blaming the working class.
Will you please say more about the steps you think a poor white family should encourage their children to do? In particular, will you say more about the impact of any of those steps on their future earning capacity?
It is ironic that you jump to attack every attempt to make college accessible to working-class black families. You are a white middle-class male with a college degree who lives in a white middle-class suburb of Boston.
As you know, I enthusiastically agree that the minimum wage should be $24/hr. That won’t change America’s wide and widening wealth gap. It also won’t change the dramatic gap that separates the average wage of someone with a college degree from someone without one — a gap that is dramatically larger for black men and women.
The effect of your relentless attacks on college availability for young black men and women — if those attacks are successful — will be to make it even more difficult for those young black men and women to live a middle-class life.
I wonder how much time you’ve spent with black men and women our own age (you and I are contemporaries) who live in urban black neighborhoods, and I wonder how those men and women have reacted to your heartfelt concerns about the government attempts to suppress them by making college more available to their children.
Taking your bullets, in order …
Not so sure about this.
“Our progressive leaders have being doing exactly this for decades“
I think we have a fundamentally broken meritocracy that is an increasingly self perpetuating aristocracy as middle class jobs get outsourced and automated and economic opportunity is hoarded in the coasts and the hot cities. Maybe with Covid leading to a permanent commuting class we might see Hot cities become affordable again While gateway cities become entry level bedroom communities for the work from home crowd. I’m not so optimistic.
The reality is our blue state Voted to kill rent control and the communities in and around Boston are next to impossible for working families to live in. Cambridge And yes Somerville will cease to be the diverse multi generational place I grew up in as it accelerates into becoming a Hipster and yuppie playground For the Kendall square set and active retirees who are downsizing from suburban homes and moving into smaller condos and apartments.
The cities without jobs and industry and colleges are having a hard time retaining their young and the people these places have left behind are fighting each other over crumbs. Whether it’s Kenosha Wisconsin which has tried in vain for two decades to become a bedroom destination for Chicago-it’s done everything right by the Richard Florida playbook and still failed-or the Lawrence’s and Springfield’s in our own communities.
We need a Marshall Plan for our own country to decarbonize our infrastructure and spread out the cultural and economic capital being hoarded by the coasts. We need to make college a true opportunity ladder again. It isn’t for a lot of professions and far too many students leave with more debt than they can ever hope to repay with their field of study or chosen career.
This article is instructive along with David Autors work on automation. In a lot of ways Andrew Yang was the only candidate who diagnosed the problem and had a visionary plan to fix it. I may not agree with basic income, but at least it’s a new idea. The socialism and revived new deal of Bernie and Warren was a loser with Democratic primary voters, it’s doubtful a general electorate would have embraced it.
Biden at least is pushing a visionary carbon free green jobs plan, hopefully that can employ some of these alienated young men who would be adrift in college and cast aside in menial jobs. There’s plenty of men who would thrive in the trades which are leaving behind more vacancies than replacements as people retire. Plenty of other high paying occupations that do not require a degree. Plenty of occupations that do, and we should do both. Invest in vocational and higher education alike. Anyone saying it’s a choice is lying and ignoring the problem.
As a teacher I want the high school degree to sufficiently prepare students for the basic STEM and civic literacy to be well informed voters. Anything else is vocational, either with the creative class or the trades. We should be more honest about this and tell the communication majors to give plumbing a try. Make a more explicit pink collar pipeline that appeals to men (Huge EMT and nursing shortage). And a true green collar pipeline. Get those miners and union tradesmen building the next gen grid. We need to build a better pipeline for people of color more to enter teaching so the profession becomes more diverse.
There’s a lot we need to do. Making this deeper conversation into another Trump/Biden binary is intellectually limiting and dishonest. America wasn’t great before Trump either.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
Are you arguing that making college more affordable for working-class families is a bad thing?
It seems to me that you are describing the effects of ever-increasing wealth concentration. I’ve long agreed that such wealth concentration is a central issue.
You quoted a portion of my first bullet. Here is what it is a response to:
I reject your apparent assertion that making college more affordable for Black and minority families leads to “fundamentally broken meritocracy that is an increasingly self perpetuating aristocracy”.
I reject the claim that making college more affordable for Black and minority families is exclusionary.
How is it even possible to create “an increasingly self perpetuating aristocracy” in an economy that sucks an ever-increasing share of wealth into an ever-decreasing share of the population? It isn’t possible to have “aristocracy” without wealth. The average wealth per household is SHRINKING for all but the ultra-ultra-wealthy — we’re talking about 0.1% of the population, and increasingly 0.01%.
We are shrinking, not increasing, the size of the aristocracy. We are reducing the number and INCREASING the average wealth of the top end of the wealth distribution. As wealth is pushed towards the very top, the rest of the distribution gets less and less wealth. That isn’t how you increase an aristocracy — self-perpetuating or not.
I’m also not sure what “fundamentally broken meritocracy” means, and I’m not sure what the proposed fix is.
Are you seriously arguing that the situation of working-class families will be improved by allowing a college education to become evermore expensive?
I don’t see anybody making this into “another Trump/Biden binary”.
I’m instead rejecting the premise that there is anything “progressive” about attacking each and every attempt to make college more accessible to working-class families.
“Are you arguing that making college more affordable for working-class families is a bad thing?“
Quote me where I said that. I said we do both. Make college free and make vocational training free. I‘be been quite clear I want individuals who want to go to college and can succeed in college to go regardless of ability to pay. All 22 students I wrote personal recommendations for got in and I couldn’t be prouder. I’m also proud of the kids going into the military, following their parents into family businesses, going into auto tech, and going to work for the T. All living wage jobs are equally good and not every living wage job requires a college degree.
The Atlantic piece talks about upper middle class whites rigging the meritocracy to hoard wealth. It has nothing to do with increasing access to college education for minorities
@The Atlantic piece … has nothing to do with increasing access to college education for minorities:
That’s my point.
My exchange with johntmay — and the bullet you quoted from me — was about access to college education for minorities.
I agree with you on this, why are you downrating my comment?
“Take any job.”
OK, let’s deal drugs or prostitute ourselves.
Just finished reading L’Assommoir, a novel by Emil Zola about poverty in Paris in the later half of the 19th century. As then so as now, poverty is a profit center for the unscrupulous. The poor pay more for less than anyone else in society, such as it is, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be in our present version of late-stage capitalism.