Quote Originally Posted by Beanz View Post
Gandalf you said


"Black people are poor because they generally choose to be poor"

It is an indefensible statement. It is just another example of the normalisation of racism. It is yet another example of your wheeling out a bigoted trope born of ignorance. That ignorance is born out of your own personality. You are not alone, fundamental attribution erroris very common.
It is a perfectly defensible statement and I qualified it by citing my own experiences as an example of it as the black community tends to put its families through the same needless grind as that which I went through too. Am I black? It was a choice by those parents to be poor growing up. If you have children, few resources, few skills, and then abandon your kids, then poverty is the inevitable result. It is not an absolute, but a general argument that is supported by the data. There are no rules in society telling the majority of black families to have no family structure. Like Obama argued "children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison."

It is a choice to put children through this. It is a choice to get pregnant to men who will not stand by you. It is a choice to not give all your children the advantages that other children with two loving parents will have. Now you can dress it up and shout racism from the rooftops as much as you like, but in many of these cases black people are choosing poverty. There is no racism holding anybody back, everybody has the same freedom to become a doctor, or lawyer, or truck driver. However, what I will argue is that without correct nurturing, love and guidance, you might not even think to become a doctor. So not only is there financial poverty, but there is nurturing poverty. It is a choice not to nurture your child. It is choice to raise your child in the least advantageous way possible.

Is society really holding people back or is it more likely that people tend to be holding themselves back or maybe some just do not have the ability or even the drive to achieve. State by state, there is a pattern and they are either choosing it or else it is being forced on them. Take your pick.

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indi...2:%22asc%22%7D