re: Dennis Prager on why poverty does NOT cause crime

quote:

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The people who are impoverished now are so usually due to their penchant for poor choices.

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They're screened in and out, so to speak, so that's true - there are still poor white ethnic neighborhoods, but people that got out, typically assimilated, although you will see the occasional even upper middle class community of Jews, Russians, Italian, etc., in various places, particularly in the Northeast.

On the other hand, the black middle class has been growing, slowly but steadily - and to be fair to blacks, generally, there were legal, institutional barriers to their advancement not present in the unofficial bias against Irish, Italian, Eastern European immigrants, etc. And, it must be conceded that blacks started "in the hole" so to speak, with nothing but the clothes on their back, no education and no avenues of advancement.

While many immigrants came here from Europe and went straight into manufacturing - blacks were predominantly in agriculture for 50 to 75 years after Emancipation and only slowly trickled out to cities in the early 20th Century. Even then, they struggled to find a place - you see residuals of that in the train porters - one of the few avenues of advancement to middle class open to blacks, they jealously guarded entry into the profession and even today, in some places, you'll see the grandsons and great-grandsons of porters from 70, 100 years ago - the family names continue to persist.

But, it is happening today - blacks are moving more and more into the suburbs in Chicago, Atlanta, the NE, Washington, D.C., etc. and, at some point, there will be a critical mass that realizes - "We have more in common with our white suburban neighbors than we do the people in the hood, period."

That will be the next major political paradigm shift.