collapse

* Recent Posts

Please Register - It's FREE!

The absolute only thing required for this FREE registration is a valid e-mail address.  We keep all your information confidential and will NEVER give or sell it to anyone else.
Login to get rid of this box (and ads) , or register NOW!


Author Topic: End of Integration  (Read 7199 times)

mu_hilltopper

  • Warrior
  • Global Moderator
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 7403
    • https://twitter.com/nihilist_arbys
End of Integration
« on: July 06, 2007, 04:15:03 PM »
I think he hit the nail on the head.



The End of Integration 
By DAVID BROOKS
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
July 6, 2007

Nothing is sadder than the waning dream of integration. This dream has illuminated American life for the past several decades — the belief that the world is getting smaller and that different peoples are coming together over time.

Over the course of the 20th century, the civil rights movement promised to heal the nation’s oldest wound. Racism and discrimination would diminish. Blacks and whites could live together, go to school together and gradually integrate their lives.

The end of the cold war promised to heal the rift between democracy and dictatorship. More nations would be welcomed into the community of free peoples.

The trauma of Sept. 11 promised to heal the rifts between red and blue America. Then there were the integrating forces of globalization and technology. The growing movement of people would pave the way for multicultural societies. The movement of goods would increase interdependence. The revolution in communications technology would increase global conversation.

All these promises hung in the air, but then crumbled, even in the past few weeks.

The progress in civil rights has not produced racial integration. Amid all the hubbub about last week’s Supreme Court decision, we were reminded that five decades after Brown, blacks and whites do not live side by side, even when they share the same income levels. They do not go to the same schools. And when they do go to the same schools, they do not lead shared lives. As several people noted last week, many educators are giving up on the dream of integration so they can focus on quality.

The movement of peoples, meanwhile, provokes as much rage as assimilation. The immigration reform bill was defeated last week by Americans who feel their country is being torn apart by outsiders who don’t play by its rules, and by a ruling class blind to the threat.

The fall of communism hasn’t created a global community of democracies. It turns out the Russians don’t want to be like us. The Arabs don’t want help from infidels. The Iraqis’ democratic moment has turned into sectarian chaos. The Palestinians have turned theirs into a civil war.

The threat of terror hasn’t united Americans, but divided them. The globalization of trade has sparked nationalistic backlashes. The revolution in communications technology has brought media segmentation, as people seek out newspapers and shows that reinforce their preconceptions.

Expecting integration, Americans find themselves confronting polarization and fragmentation. Amid all the problems that have made Americans sour and pessimistic, this is the deepest.

It could be that all we need is a change of leadership in order to rediscover the sense that we’re all in this together. That’s what the Obama and Bloomberg boomlets are all about. It could be we just need to work harder to overcome racism and tribalism.

But it could be the dream of integration itself is the problem. It could be that it was like the dream of early communism — a nice dream, but not fit for the way people really are.

For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors lived in small bands. Surviving meant being able to distinguish between us — the people who will protect you — and them — the people who will kill you. Even today, people have a powerful drive to distinguish between us and them.

As dozens of social-science experiments have made clear, if you separate people into different groups — no matter how arbitrary the basis of the distinction — they will quickly begin discriminating against others they deem unlike themselves. People say they want to live in diverse integrated communities, but what they really want to do is live in homogenous ones, filled with people like themselves.

If that’s the case, maybe integration is not in the cards. Maybe the world will be as it’s always been, a collection of insular compartments whose fractious tendencies are only kept in check by constant maintenance.

Maybe the health of a society is not measured by how integrated each institution within it is, but by how freely people can move between institutions. In a sick society, people are bound by one totalistic identity. In a healthy society, a person can live in a black neighborhood, send her kids to Catholic school, go to work in a lawyer’s office and meet every Wednesday with a feminist book club. Multiply your homogenous communities and be fulfilled.

This isn’t the integrated world many of us hoped for. But maybe it’s the only one available.
 

Murffieus

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 899
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #1 on: July 07, 2007, 11:36:51 AM »
The only integration that works is economic integration-----forced integration will not work. Now that every person has equal opportunity in the eyes of government with laws established to protect that-----education is the key to economic racial integration.

This will continue to evolve----50 years from now most neighborhoods will be integrated.

ChicosBailBonds

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 22695
  • #AllInnocentLivesMatter
    • Cracked Sidewalks
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #2 on: July 07, 2007, 11:48:58 AM »
The only integration that works is economic integration-----forced integration will not work. Now that every person has equal opportunity in the eyes of government with laws established to protect that-----education is the key to economic racial integration.

This will continue to evolve----50 years from now most neighborhoods will be integrated.

Not sure I agree with that last statement....part of the point in the article is that despite laws to support integration (or force it), people still tend to gravitate to certain areas or certain groups.  I'm a minority in my city which is about 50% Asian and 40% Caucasian....years ago it was mostly Caucasian according to the locals here but has changed and continues to change...we love it...great schools, nice people, hard working folks.  And largely in the flux continues to be more Asians as I believe there is a comfort level. 

So in my personal case, yes we integrated ourselves by moving to an Asian community....but overall it has become an Asian community growing with more Asian influx.

mu_hilltopper

  • Warrior
  • Global Moderator
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 7403
    • https://twitter.com/nihilist_arbys
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #3 on: July 07, 2007, 01:12:41 PM »
While a rising tide lifts all boats .. there will always be poor amongst us.   50 years, there'll still be economically depressed swaths in every big city.

I look at Milwaukee's central city .. 44% unemployment of black adult males ..#1 in the country for teenage pregnancy.  Add in, 50% drop out rate from school .. and even of the 50% who make it .. their GPA and attendance rates are abysmal, so a very small percentage are legitimately educated when they're out of HS. -- So if the 44% unemployment wasn't bad enough, the future generations are destined for even worse lives.  Very tragic.

I don't see that group of people ever being integrated, it's just too systemic.  While some escape the cycle, there's 3 more that take their place.

Murffieus

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 899
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #4 on: July 07, 2007, 07:11:29 PM »
hilltopper----look back 50 years and see where we were. We took a trip to play in the 1956 sugar bowl BB tournament in New Orleans and had a black player (Al Avant)----he couldn't stay with us as he went to a black college dorm to sleep & eat----separate toilet areas for black and white-----blacks had to go to the back of the buses----segregated earting areas----two separate waterfounts, etc----back then just about the only black students at MU were athletes.

Now 50 years later see where we are----all of the above has been corrected and there is now a sizeable minority of black students at MU and other colleges and universities-----the hate that existed back then has all but evaporated. Project this rate of progress forward 50 years----even if not at the same rate-----things
will be a great deal better than today!

mu_hilltopper

  • Warrior
  • Global Moderator
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 7403
    • https://twitter.com/nihilist_arbys
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #5 on: July 07, 2007, 11:24:27 PM »
While it's obvious blatant discrimination has been enormously reduced in the past 5 decades, chunks of African-Americans have (relatively) "new" issues that go beyond the type of racism that spawned separate water fountains.  Many are systemically poor for reasons that cannot be traced to any type of discrimination that's been, or will be moreso, "eliminated". 

There's a cycle of poverty of teen pregnancy, lack of value for education, lack of fatherhood, and 30 year old grandparents on top of the erosion of low-skill jobs that will keep rolling for what looks like eternity, as 100s of solutions have been tried (and billions of $$ spent) over the last 30 years, and conditions have stayed the same, or worse.

I often think of the mid to late 90s, when the economy was red hot.  If ever a group could pull themselves out of poverty, it was then.  And it didn't happen.   So to pull groups out of poverty, you'll need an even hotter, even longer economic boom that creates decent jobs at an unprecedented rate -- and even then, that might not break the cycle.

It's very difficult to have hope for the necessary sea change that would alter the situation, now or in 50 years.

Murffieus

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 899
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #6 on: July 08, 2007, 07:46:01 AM »
Things will get better----though the poor and uneducated will always be with us.

My father had an easier time getting started to earn a living than his father (an immigrant) even though my dad's start was early on in the depression of the 1930s-----I had an easier time getting started than my father, and my kids have an easier time than me. My point is that it wasn't always as easy to get started years ago as it is today.

Similarily, I'll bet the number of blacks in higher education today is up 25 fold from when I was at MU 50 years ago-------and if the past is any indication of the future (which it always has been) 50 years from now black participation in higher education will be up another 10-20 fold----will take time----but the nature of man is improvement-----just look back the past several hundred years to see how far mankind has come in all respects!

SoCalwarrior

  • Global Moderator
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 1429
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #7 on: July 08, 2007, 11:40:26 AM »
Not true Murf.  Men in their thirties today are doing worse than their fathers.  Medium income has dropped 12.5%.  It is not always better for the next generation.

Murffieus

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 899
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #8 on: July 08, 2007, 01:12:45 PM »
So Cal----- all my kids are out of the block ahead of what I and friends of mine were at their age----and just about all my sons  friends are doing just as well----you should see the properties they own (and no subprime loans).

Where did you get your information where median income has dropped 12%-----hard to believe with only 4.5% unemployment and home ownership at an all time high .

Even in the unusual case where the younger bread winner isn't making top dollar------his/her spouse is working so family income should be significantly higher------40 years ago women were not a major factor in the work force----all that changed in the last 25 years. No reason why family incomes of non college  isn't at least $40,000-50,000 per year today.

SoCalwarrior

  • Global Moderator
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 1429
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #9 on: July 08, 2007, 01:56:32 PM »
Congrats to you and your kids, Murf.  But what is true to you means little in the scheme of things.  Although I appreciate your optimism, you can't use myopic examples to sum up the world.

here's the report:

Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?
Pew Publications/Reports
Economic Mobility Project
by John E. Morton and Isabel V. Sawhill
American men have less income than their fathers’ generation did at the same age, according to a new analysis by the Economic Mobility Project, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Comprised of a Principals’ Group of experts from The American Enterprise Institute, The Brookings Institution, The Heritage Foundation, and The Urban Institute, the project seeks to investigate the health and status of economic mobility in America.
The report, Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?, was co-written by John E. Morton, managing director of Pew’s Economic Policy Initiatives and director of the Economic Mobility Project and Isabel V. Sawhill, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Principal of the Economic Mobility Project. It includes analysis led by a research team at Brookings and outlines what economic mobility is, why it matters in today’s economy, and why it is important for policy makers to focus on mobility as part of the ongoing national economic debate.
According to the report, men who were in their thirties in 1974 had median incomes of about $40,000, while men of the same age in 2004 had median incomes of about $35,000 (adjusted for inflation). Thus, as a group, income for this generation of men is, on average, 12 percent lower than those of their fathers’ generation. While factors other than cash income also contribute to economic mobility, these data challenge the two-century-old presumption that each successive generation will be better off than the one that came before. The findings rely on new analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
In addition to the Principals’ Group, the project is also guided by a nonpartisan Advisory Board of nationally recognized economists, social scientists and policy experts. The initiative was launched in February and comes at a period of intense scrutiny of such issues as executive pay, the minimum wage and the quality of America’s public school system – the latter being of particular concern because education is widely agreed to be a key driver of mobility.
The broader mobility story is complex with data challenges and many important questions left to be answered. Over the next year and a half, the Economic Mobility Project and its partners will research, analyze and present data to the broader public about the status of economic mobility in the United States. Future releases will include; a comprehensive fact book containing key data and trends about mobility, featuring chapters on race, gender, immigration and cross-national comparisons; a report on the leading factors or indicators behind economic mobility; and an analysis of shifting federal investments in education and other policies that may impact mobility.
Information about the project is available at www.economicmobility.org.



ChicosBailBonds

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 22695
  • #AllInnocentLivesMatter
    • Cracked Sidewalks
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #10 on: July 08, 2007, 02:31:04 PM »
The irony in a lot of this is some of the blatant discrimination among minorities toward other minorities.  You should come out to Los Angeles sometime and look at the dynamic of African Americans vs Hispanics....it's not pretty.

Murffieus

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 899
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #11 on: July 08, 2007, 02:48:10 PM »
Impossible----1974 (the year used in the comparison) was the worst economic year since the 1930s----the average stock was down 75% from it's previous high----unemployment was 12-13 %----worst year by far I ever had financially.

So to say that income has shrunk since then adj for inflation is ludicrious---back then an average day on the NY stock exchange was 10,000,000 shares----today it's 2.5 billion shares growth well ahead of inflation. The Dow was at 500 in August-Nov of 1974-----today it's 14,000 (2,800 pct increase)----this is symbolic of opportunity/success not just buying stocks but the employment income opportunities this growth has presented----and any healthy person who didn't make it from 1974 to 2007 only has himself/herself to blame!

Bottomline----the standard of living is considerably higer today than 40 years ago-----anyone 60 years or older who isn't biased politically will tell you that !

« Last Edit: July 08, 2007, 03:31:53 PM by Murffieus »

ChicosBailBonds

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 22695
  • #AllInnocentLivesMatter
    • Cracked Sidewalks
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #12 on: July 08, 2007, 02:53:38 PM »
Not true Murf.  Men in their thirties today are doing worse than their fathers.  Medium income has dropped 12.5%.  It is not always better for the next generation.

Well then Congress shouldn't be looking at raising taxes then should they?   ;D  Should lower capital gains taxes and provide more INCOME for people to take home, especially if this study you've put forward is accurate.


Incidentally, last year it was reported that incomes have increased 44% since 1990 and when factoring in inflation, has remained flat (not a 12.5% decrease).  Every study looks at these things a bit differently, however. 
« Last Edit: July 08, 2007, 02:58:03 PM by ChicosBailBonds »

Murffieus

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 899
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #13 on: July 08, 2007, 07:14:16 PM »
Also I reread So Cal's post and see that the study was done and interpreted by  some guy from the "Brookings Institute", which is a leftist organization (a liberal think tank)-----I knew there had to be some bias connected with that report----it just didn't make sense!
« Last Edit: July 08, 2007, 07:17:17 PM by Murffieus »

Pakuni

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 9875
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #14 on: July 09, 2007, 10:53:43 AM »
Incidentally, last year it was reported that incomes have increased 44% since 1990 and when factoring in inflation, has remained flat (not a 12.5% decrease).  Every study looks at these things a bit differently, however. 

This is largley because of the huge increase in income for the top wage earners. The huge increases of the top 1 percent (17 percent from 2003 to 2004 alone) offset the minimum gains made by the other 99 percent of us.
So yeah, the economy is booming if you're one of the fortunate few. Otherwise, things ain't so grand.

From 2003 to 2004, the average incomes of the bottom 99 percent of households grew by less than 3 percent, after adjusting for inflation.  In contrast, the average incomes of the top one percent of households experienced a jump of almost 17 percent, after adjusting for inflation.  (Census data show that real median income fell between 2003 and 2004.  ...[T]he 3 percent rise among the bottom 99 percent seems to largely reflect gains by households in the top quintile of the income spectrum...)
The top one percent of households garnered 36 percent of the income gains in 2004.
This disparity produced an exceptional jump in income concentration in 2004.  The share of the pre-tax income in the nation that goes to the top one percent of households increased from 17.5 percent in 2003 to 19.5 percent in 2004.  Only five times since 1913 (the first year that this data set covers), and only twice since World War II has the top one percent’s share risen by as much in a single year (in percentage point terms).  Each percentage point of income is equivalent to $68 billion in 2004.
The share of total U.S. income that the top one percent of households received in 2004 was greater than the share it received in any prior year since 1929, except for 1999 and 2000.


http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/07/new_data_show_i.html

ChicosBailBonds

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 22695
  • #AllInnocentLivesMatter
    • Cracked Sidewalks
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #15 on: July 09, 2007, 01:01:08 PM »
Could very well be Pakuni.   I know the solution isn't to raise taxes on folks, that's for sure.  Even if you raise taxes only on the "rich" (defined by who knows who), it will be passed on to everyone else and hit those pocketbooks.

I'm sure those 535 people in Washington are working their tales off to find the answers.  ::)

mu03eng

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 5049
    • Scrambled Eggs Podcast
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #16 on: July 09, 2007, 01:13:30 PM »
I think we have reached the point where legislating integration is not only not effective, in some cases it is counter-productive.  Biasing one group in favor of another at any point and time breeds anger, doesn't matter if its "good" or "bad" bias.  I think the whole thing revolves around the education system.  Fix that especially for the younger kids and I think 10-15 years down the road you would a significant difference.  However, that most likely will never happen because nobody in the public/government wants to/can wait 10-15 years.  Its all about whats the fix for the next two years.  Not to mention the massive amount of money and change that would be required to fix the system.
"A Plan? Oh man, I hate plans. That means were gonna have to do stuff. Can't we just have a strategy......or a mission statement."

Murffieus

  • Registered User
  • All American
  • *****
  • Posts: 899
Re: End of Integration
« Reply #17 on: July 09, 2007, 01:48:26 PM »
mu03eng----very good post!