Dying Young, Black

The Washington Post ^ | Wednesday, November 28, 2007 | Michael Wilbon

[B-Chan]

You are absolutely right. Color is irrelevant; culture is what matters. It is every bit as difficult to escape the White Trash nightmare as it is the Black Trash nightmare. Blacks and whites need to join forces to destroy the idea that being street trash or trailer trash is somehow cool.

[wardaddy]

My ancestors were poor ...dirt poor in Mississippi after the Civil War.

They would have been called trailer trash....but precious few of them were predators.

Here in middle Tennessee I’d wager that what some would call white trash dwarfs the black community in numbers but in violent crime there is no comparison. You take black and illegals crime out of Tennessee and it could be Denmark....white trash dog fighters included

I don;t find these cultures equivocal based on poverty of low prospects.

It’s more than that. Some cultures worldwide are very poor but not so violent.

Others are very poor and quite violent......same culture the world over with same problems.

I blame lack of fathers as much as anything....much more so than poverty or depressing environment.

it’s cultural lag and how that affects cultural behavior and ultimately how it manifests over and over perhaps even gets ingrained with subperformance.

blaming the majority culture for all of the minority culture’s problems is one of our biggest mistakes we make.

I’ve lived all over the world in these cultures and that’s how I see it....as much as folks hate it , you simply cannot make every group equal in outcome in just a short little hiccup in the human chronology timeline........no matter how well intended and what happen’s is everyone is simply brought down.....that is precisely what has happend to the cultural aggregate here in the US since thre 1950s

[A_Former_Democrat]

Nevertheless, 40+ years after The Great Society, Dodge is still Dodge.

[B-Chan]

'Poor" and "trash" are not the same thing. My mom's people were sharecroppers until the 1950s. Sharecroppers. They don't make Americans poorer than that. Yet every one could read, write, pray to God, and keep out of jail. They knew that there was a way decent people were expected to behave, and they behaved that way. They were, in a word, civilized.

Civilized people can be of any social rank. Being civilized means being hardworking, charitable, clean, ambitious, hungry for knowledge, self-confident, socially ecumenical, appeciative of goodness and beauty, self-controlled, respectful of authority, and reasonable.

"Trash" likewise has nothing to do with money. Trashiness is being uncivilized. To be trash is to be lazy, self-centered, dirty, unambitious, unresponsive to education, weak-egoed, tribal/clannish, ignorant of all goodness and beauty except that based in the grossly physical, violent, contemptuous of authority, and fanatic.

Once a child has been exposed to trash "culture" is is exceedingly difficult to civilize him or her. That is why our war must be fought on a cultural level. Good culture = good country.

(Note: I grew up poor as well.)

[wardaddy]

I respect you B-Chan but I live in an area of serious white trash with broekn culture too. The crime stats while bad do not mimic the black community...at least not yet.

White ghetto thugs are screwed up though...very much so.

The biggest contributor to cultural degradation in the poor white community though are overweight white girls popping out a new fatherless mixed race culture over and over with usually different sires and crating a new underclass that will be outcast from both...and some seriously angry males in 20 years with no paternal lightsource to guide them.

We’ll need more prisons again.

I’m not optimistic....I think America has declined markedly since the 60s for sure....and it looks to get worse....speaking out against it is unpopular...even here at times.