The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Stereotyping
28 Comments Published by Brian on Wednesday, May 30 at 9:39 PM.
There is a mildly irritating sentiment in our society which (though I have no evidence of this) seems to be growing healthily among even liberal members of my generation that stereotyping social groups is okay because most stereotypes generally hold some truth to them. "They are stereotypes for a reason," after all. A new study coming out of the University of Chicago goes some way toward refuting that mentality.
Psychologists at the university gave female students a math test followed by a non-mathematical test. Some of the female students were casually reminded before they took the test that men consistently do better than women at standardized math tests, while some of the female students were not given such a reminder. The female students who were given the reminder did more poorly on not only the math test, but the non-math-related test afterward. This led the psychologists to some interesting conclusions about brain power, as they determined that the stereotype reminder didn't simply reduce the women's expectations for themselves, but rather took up valuable space in their brains that could have otherwise been used to process the test questions. Even women who did not buy into stereotypes performed more poorly because they were thinking too much about how they didn't want to be one of the women to perform poorly and thus grant support to the stereotype.
This is another in a long line of studies which demonstrate that reminding students of negative stereotypes of groups to which they belong makes them perform more poorly on tests. Even just being asked to fill in a bubble saying what your race or gender is (which pretty much every standardized test on the planet does) causes blacks and women to perform more poorly. Another study asked students seemingly benign questions like whether they lived in co-ed or single-sex dorms, and even this triggered thoughts of gender stereotypes and affected the students' performances. The principle can work the other way, too, as when students were asked why they chose to attend a private liberal arts college, activating what one psychologist called the students' "snob schema," making them think about how smart they are and thus causing them to perform better on the test.
None of this, of course, proves that there is no truth to stereotypes (though in many of these cases the performance gaps normally cited between genders or races are almost entirely eliminated by not triggering thoughts of stereotypes). It does, however, go a long way in demonstrating the way in which stereotypes are often times self-fulfilling prophecies, that whether they are accurate or not may not have all that much to do with the natural abilities of a given gender or race but rather with the way the stereotypes themselves have disadvantaged women and minorities. And this, of course, would lend support to the position that while stereotypes do not hold any great degree of truth, those who believe they do are in fact contributing to their damaging effects.
I think most people would agree with this conclusion when it comes to racism (I don't know of many people who still argue that whites are the naturally superior race), though I suspect many do not adhere to it when it comes to gender. There are, of course, at least some minimal natural differences between men and women due to genetics and hormones, but I personally am of the belief that the wide gulf that has been created between the genders is almost entirely socially constructed. These studies are another reason to maintain that belief.
Psychologists at the university gave female students a math test followed by a non-mathematical test. Some of the female students were casually reminded before they took the test that men consistently do better than women at standardized math tests, while some of the female students were not given such a reminder. The female students who were given the reminder did more poorly on not only the math test, but the non-math-related test afterward. This led the psychologists to some interesting conclusions about brain power, as they determined that the stereotype reminder didn't simply reduce the women's expectations for themselves, but rather took up valuable space in their brains that could have otherwise been used to process the test questions. Even women who did not buy into stereotypes performed more poorly because they were thinking too much about how they didn't want to be one of the women to perform poorly and thus grant support to the stereotype.
This is another in a long line of studies which demonstrate that reminding students of negative stereotypes of groups to which they belong makes them perform more poorly on tests. Even just being asked to fill in a bubble saying what your race or gender is (which pretty much every standardized test on the planet does) causes blacks and women to perform more poorly. Another study asked students seemingly benign questions like whether they lived in co-ed or single-sex dorms, and even this triggered thoughts of gender stereotypes and affected the students' performances. The principle can work the other way, too, as when students were asked why they chose to attend a private liberal arts college, activating what one psychologist called the students' "snob schema," making them think about how smart they are and thus causing them to perform better on the test.
None of this, of course, proves that there is no truth to stereotypes (though in many of these cases the performance gaps normally cited between genders or races are almost entirely eliminated by not triggering thoughts of stereotypes). It does, however, go a long way in demonstrating the way in which stereotypes are often times self-fulfilling prophecies, that whether they are accurate or not may not have all that much to do with the natural abilities of a given gender or race but rather with the way the stereotypes themselves have disadvantaged women and minorities. And this, of course, would lend support to the position that while stereotypes do not hold any great degree of truth, those who believe they do are in fact contributing to their damaging effects.
I think most people would agree with this conclusion when it comes to racism (I don't know of many people who still argue that whites are the naturally superior race), though I suspect many do not adhere to it when it comes to gender. There are, of course, at least some minimal natural differences between men and women due to genetics and hormones, but I personally am of the belief that the wide gulf that has been created between the genders is almost entirely socially constructed. These studies are another reason to maintain that belief.
Thus Tom, yet another reason to have "PC police" as you call them :-D
Got a question for you:
Did they repeat the test doing the same thing for men? Perhaps women can be affected greatly by such statements, but men can't?
If women as a gender can be put into such a state of vapours simply by someone making a casual (but hurtful) statement, perhaps having them making important decisions like voting or commanding armies is not in humanity's best interest?
Perhaps the reason that Whites and Asians perform better on the standardized test is because the portion of their brain that worries about such things doesn't trigger when they fill out the little bubbles asking what they are? If a little bubble throws them the others so badly, how the hell can they be expected to work under any kind of pressure in the real world?
This is a can of worms, Brian. I'm glad you opened it, but those worms are going to be all over my rug now.
People can be trained into specific reactions that will change their performance. I really wish someone had done tests like this 50 years ago. My bet is that all of the talk of victimhood has brainwashed women and blacks/hispanics (since minorities actually means that when stated in this context, rather than Asians and Jews, who consistently perform better than European-descended on things like standardized tests) into thinking that they really are inferior, so they have this reaction.
No wait, that doesn't make any sense. Jews have had a negative stereotype throughout their entire existence, been persecuted, killed en masse, and told that they were inferior for three and a half thousand years.
I guess that if they hadn't been held back by all that negative sterotyping they'd have even more Nobel Prizes and make up more of Congress.
Bah! This test crap is nonsense. Whoever the test group was, I can safely bet that their performances were inferior to what would have come from an equivalent group forty years ago. It would probably be a better idea to investigate that than to worry about a few people's fragile little egos.
Tom
The news article is really half-assed. I'm going off to read the original papers on this, be back in a half-hour or so.
Oh, I see that white guys did worse after begin compared to Asians, so I was wrong in my last post in my reference to that subject.
Back in a little bit.
Tom
Ah, ha!!!! This is nothing new, there's over a hundred papers out there on this affect, and research has been done for twelve years now.
It's not that people who don't have the stereotype introduced perform better than average, it's that ones that have the stereotype reinforced immediately before the test perform worse than their peers:
http://tinyurl.com/3x5vbg
The control group that didn't have the stereotype introduced performed exactly the same as in the real world. Even in the UC paper quoted in the article, if the strain on the working memory was reduced by pre-test preparation, the result of the stereotyping was reduced.
This means that this type of experiment tells us nothing about the need for Brandon's PC police, or any harm done by stereotyping in the real world. The experiment is telling us that the psychological state of someone in a high-pressure situation is important and that distractions can be detrimental to the final score on the SAT.
I think anyone who has ever taken a law-school final could tell us that without spending all the money that this study cost.
You see, for someone working in the real world, in applications like science and engineering (or even in law), there isn't the kind of immediate pressure that you see in a testing situation. Therefore, the differences seen in the unstressed performance are not caused by the factors described in this psych paper. That's not to say that there might not be other factors, but they've yet to be documented.
Sorry, Brian, besides the immediate practical bearing on testing, the paper proves absolutely nothing about negative stereotypes in normal day-to-day life--otherwise Jews would all be digging ditches.
Tom
Tom,
Your lack of even a passing understanding of the fundamental nature of stereotyping notwithstanding, I will do my best to engage you in this debate (Tom's not the only one who can be condescending!)
(1) Your counterexample employing Jews and Asians does not hold due to the basic differences in the nature of stereotypes of those groups vs. stereotypes of blacks, latinos, and women. Stereotypes of blacks, latinos, and women involve a belief that those groups are incompetent, deficient, or inferior in some way. Stereotypes of Jews, negative though they may be, involve a belief that despite their small numbers they control the world, occupying the highest seats of power whether it be in government, media, or finance. Stereotypes of Asians involve a belief that they are hardworking and good at math. The distinction between these two types of stereotypes is readily apparent and completely explain why these studies demonstrate a disadvantage to blacks, latinos, and women and not Jews or Asians.
(2) Your point in your third comment about the nature of the first study I linked to being related to brain processing and distractions is true but irrelevant. First, it doesn't negate the study's relevance to stereotyping, due to the rather obvious fact that in the real world, subtle reminders of stereotypes are abundant and are distracting to blacks, latinos, and women in ways that are not distracting (or are perhaps even helpful) to others. Second, the other studies I discussed speak rather more directly to the stereotype question, which you altogether ignore in your third comment.
(3) Which seems more likely to you: that whites and Asians possess special characteristics related to their brain chemistry that makes them not worry about stereotypes as much as blacks and latinos, or that whites and Asians have no reason to worry about stereotypes because the pervasive negative racial stereotypes APPLY ONLY TO BLACKS AND LATINOS? Ditto for men vs. women. Indeed, I don't even need to ask which is more likely, since the data sufficiently demonstrates that everybody is susceptible to these kind of subtle triggers, as evidenced by the question about going to a private liberal arts college.
(4) Were blacks, latinos, and women not victimized fifty years ago? Were feelings of inferiority not reinforced in those communities fifty years ago? Or are you saying that because we didn't TALK about that victimization fifty years ago, things were better back then? Your comments reflect the all too common and rather malicious attempt to conflate victimization with empowerment. By claiming that all attempts to empower historically disadvantaged social groups are really attempts to reinforce notions of victimhood in these groups, you can conveniently excuse yourself from any need to acknowledge the privileges you were born with as a white man, and indeed taint liberals with subtle accusations of racism. In the end you leave society in a rather prickly position: we can't talk about ways in which certain social groups have unfair advantages over others, because that will only lead to more feelings of victimhood, which will lead to more feelings of inferiority, which will exacerbate the original problem. It is obviously specious, circular logic which ignores the simple fact that racism exists, that dangerous stereotypes are pervasive, and that white men do in fact enjoy a great deal of privilege in our society. But as with so many things, people will hold the silliest of beliefs if it means they don't have to acknowledge inconvenient truths.
(5) You were just kidding about the implication that women shouldn't be allowed to vote, right? ...right?
If a group of subjects were told that they would need to score significantly higher than another group of subjects to receive the same recognition, would they respond by scoring higher than a control group? Or if a group of subjects was told that they did not need to score as high to recieve the same reconigiton as another group, would they subconsciously underperform?
1) Actually, Brian, you're pretty off-base with historical Jewish stereotypes. In most cultures, they were considered much, much lower than either Hispanics and Blacks in American culture, barely human, as a matter of fact. They still outperformed their surrounding cultures.
The "rulers of the world" concept really dates from the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" back in the late 19th Century--it's very recent in terms of a 3500 year old culture.
2) See above. Pervasive negative stereotyping does not seem to hold some cultures back long-term. It is possible that some other ones may be more susceptible to having their brain chemistry changed in the long-term. Certainly, if you abuse a child enough, they make a different proportion of neurotransmitters.
We're sponges, soaking up the things around us every minute. I hold, however, that concrete, real items in our surroundings are much, much more important than real or imagined slights. The members of the underclass are not there because someone from the outside did something to them. They're there because they are convinced internally of the hopelessness of their daily lives.
3) It is shown in the UC study that white men, (a privleged class in your mind) can be distracted just like everyone else. We're exposed on a day-to-day basis to a plethora of inputs.
I, personally, believe that true human freedom comes the day that one realizes that there is no need to give a rat's ass about what anyone thinks of your actions.
If other people have not yet reached my level of enlightenment in that regard, it's not my damn fault. This freedom is available to anyone, no matter what their race, color, creed, gender or sexual orientation.
Repeat after me: "I don't give a rat's ass..."
4) Fifty years ago, there were people of differing economic groups, but there were not different cultures like there is today. The blacks in 50s America had intact families, went to church on Sunday, listened to the same radio, watched the same TV programs and had the same aspirations as the whites. This was despite segregation.
Women could fill a role of either working or not, (and about a third worked outside the home) since one breadwinner was sufficient to enable a family to buy a car and a house. This is in contrast to the system that presently exists in the US where the median wage has been sinking since it topped out in 1973. This means that women no longer have a choice--they're forced into the workplace even if they would be happier and better suited in a role as a housewife and mother.
In other words, despite the pressures of negative stereotypes from the outside, people in the 1950s were in better shape than they are now as far as their self-images because they had a resilient inner core that didn't give a rat's ass what anyone thought of them.
Go take a look at the three biggest cultural icons of the period, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and Clark Gable.
(And don't tell me that there's a problem because they are all white. There was only one culture during this period, so non-whites looked at them in the movies and wanted to be like them, too.)
In every case, there was a strong individual who was reserved, but totally convinced they were right--who figured out what was the moral thing to do and then went ahead, no matter what the odds.
This is what's crippling people nowadays and making them more susceptible to outside influences--they're being told that outsiders should be able to dictate what they do.
5) Brian, if I believed that women's psyches were really as fragile as you do from this psychological paper, I'd say they were only fit for the brothel or the burkha. Fortunately, I have more faith in my fellow men and women than you're exhibiting. They can rise above this unimportant nonsense.
Remember, "I don't give a rat's ass..." Simple as that.
Tom
Tom is "rat's ass" really necessary? The phrase undermines the value of rodents' posteriors. Shouldn't we be worried about the negative implications this could have on the rodent community, or the impact you are having on the children by using such hateful language so casually?
If it's good enough for Detective Andy Sipowicz, it's good enough for me. It's one of my milder expletives, as the folks who know me well can tell you--most of my remarks are considerably bluer than that.
Besides, I hate children. Let's throw them in the pond, it'll toughen 'em up.
Tom
"despite the pressures of negative stereotypes from the outside, people in the 1950s were in better shape than they are now as far as their self-images because they had a resilient inner core that didn't give a rat's ass what anyone thought of them...
There was only one culture during this period, so non-whites looked at them in the movies and wanted to be like them, too."
I'm not sure words can adequately express the tumult in my head right now.
That said you're coming from a homogenous white-bred newly suburbanized 1950s America where the colored man was ignored or relegated to the role of gas station attendant. Hearing your beliefs about the state of America in the 50s and those of my father and other minorities I can only be led to the conclusion that you led a relatively insular life. You even told me that you saw your first African American on a trip up to Chicago.
The America of the 50s and 60s that minorities describe to me sounds like a pretty scary place to me. Kids beating you up because you weren't white. Lynchings for looking at a white woman. Being pressed into fighting the man's war because you couldn't afford to go to college. Doesn't sound like a place of gumdrops and sunshine to me.
You need to stop romanticizing the past. Not just you, lots of people do it. They exaggerate the good things and downplay the bad. The world has always been screwed up in some ways and good in others. People project into a romanticized past and yearn for the good old days and whine about how kids these days are ruining the world and so much worse than the last generation. It just doesn't jive Tom.
We're not stupider than your generation, we just don't need rote memorization as much. Americans have always been ignorant of what goes on outside their country. Stop yearning for a fantasy past OZ and realize that it's always been a mixed bag and probably always will be.
"Stupider" isn't a word. "Jive" is a form of music, or when used as slang has a number of meanings none of which make sense in that sentence. "Jibe" on the other hand means compatability and consistency.
(1) Well, no. Having been denied the right to own land in Europe, Jews came to be relegated to positions such as retail and finance. Upon their arrival in America, they took up these same roles, simultaneously feeding mainstream society's desire to caricature them as moneygrubbing and scheming and establishing a stake for themselves which would allow for the accumulation of wealth and stature. The Jewish and Asian experience in America and elsewhere is fundamentally different than the black, latino, and female experience. Denying such a plainly established fact is an exercise in futility.
(2) & (3) Your second and third points bleed into each other, so I will respond to them collectively. First, you are occupying an extreme position in which personal responsibility is the only thing that matters. I do not deny the importance of personal responsibility, only its solitary role in determining social outcomes. It would simply be foolish to assert, as you do, that there is no connection between the historical oppression of blacks, latinos, and women and their current position in society today. It is also terrifically unfair to imply, as you do, that because I have pointed out an obstacle to equality that I believe that obstacle is insurmountable. What I am asserting and what you are ignoring is that to place the onus for overcoming that obstacle squarely on the disadvantaged is a soft form of discrimination. The playing field is not level. Those responsible for its inequities are the ignorant and the privileged. Any sane and moral person cannot conclude from these premises that the fair resolution of the problem is for the disadvantaged to suck it up and work past it. Not giving a rat's ass is all well and good, Tom, but it does not negate the fact that we live in a society that does in certain ways control who we are and affect how we live.
(4) Congratulations, Tom. You have successfully denied with a straight face the existence of an African American cultural heritage that precedes 1960. I invite you to read the following works so as to disabuse you of this ignorant, racist belief: Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass; Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth; Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington; anything by W.E.B. DuBois; and maybe perhaps any 7th grade history textbook. I also invite you to look into the history of jazz and the blues, both of which began as distinctly black cultural enterprises, well before 1950.
Brandon, some things were worse.
You have to admit, no matter what your biases, that the black family prior to the 1960s was intact. There was outside oppression, but not self-destructive mutilation like there is now.
I'm well and truly pissed off right now....
My father was an immigrant, Brandon, my grandfather was an illegal immigrant. I grew up in grinding rural poverty, where at least one month per year we had less than 1000 calories/day to eat. Medical care was next to non-existent. I had to be dewormed three times as a child.
Your contention that I see the time of my youth as some kind of paradise is laughable, if I'm kind.
You grew up in the suburbs, I grew up in a situation where I had to go to work at 12 so we had more food on the table and hunt raccoons in the winter to sell the skins to pay for shoes.
Do NOT presume to tell me about the haves and have-nots in the 20th Century. I was a have-not.
The family structure of American minorities has been shattered in ways that would have made the KKK and other bigots of my youth proud. Divisions between the genders, sexual orientations and races have been aggrevated for political gain.
It's not that your generation is any less intelligent then the previous ones. It's that your education has been woefully inadequate, and it is repeatedly demonstrated when anyone speaks to you of any events prior to your birth.
Many of you are students. From the standpoint of most serious subjects and the understanding thereof, you are toddlers at best. Everyone is in their mid-20s--it's the way that it has always been. You need about thirty to fifty more years of life before you get enough of a perspective on events to be able to consistently understand all of the interconnections.
This, in the past was called wisdom. Unfortunately, such things seem to have fallen by the way-side. After all, why read/study 3000 pages per week, (as I did from 1965 through 2000), when you can google another person's work in three minutes and quote that?
Bah, humbug.
Tom
Get off my goddam lawn.
Oh, and Brian, read all of those books long before you were born. All of the books that you mentioned (except for DuBois, enough of a Communist that I reject him without saying) are from the 19th Century--three or more generations *before* the events that I describe.
If you *really* are interested in black/white relations during the 50s, I'd recomment Ellison, for starters, followed by Baldwin and Toni Morrison. I find the experiences of Ellison in New York very close to those described of my Lithuanian ancestors in the Chicago stockyards in 1903.
If you really believe that there are differences between the races and genders, maybe you're the one who is a racist, Brian.
Kofi,
Hey stupid, "stupider" is a word:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stupid
http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=stupider&gwp=13
http://www.wordwebonline.com/en/STUPID
Also, "jive" does make sense in that sentence. Many people use "jive" to say that multiple things work together. No, it's not the literal definition, you're correct about that, but any modern person would be clear about his intent. Jive is a form of dance where people move together, ya know, they jive together.
Next time you pull this crap of insulting people for the grammar they use I'm going to be there to embarrass you and make you look silly.
Much like "aint", "stupider" is not a word no matter how many dictionaries it may begin to show up in. And jive is not correct. Simply because millions of morons misuse a word does not make it acceptable.
"The Heath Handbook" has a list of the preferred comparative and superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs. The handbook's rule of thumb is that, if a word is one syllable, use "er" and "est," as in "tall, taller, and tallest."
But . . . "Many adjectives of two syllables and all longer adjectives form the comparative and superlative by adding "more" and "most."
Examples:
alert more alert most alert
ambitious more ambitious most ambitious
Let's try a little real world application. The comparative and superlative of "wrong" would be "wronger" and "wrongest." Such as, "Billy Joe you are wronger than me; perhaps the wrongest of all." The comparative and superlative of "incorrect," however, would be "more incorrect" and "most incorrect." Such as, "Billy Joe you are more incorrect than me; perhaps the most incorrect of all."
"Jive makes sense." Next you'll tell me "mute point" is fine too. Regarding this jive/jibe debate: http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/gibe.html
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20000711
I'll quote my favorite part: The general opinion on the jibe/jive issue is summed up in this example from a 1980 edition of The Daily News: "Can you take seriously as a writer anyone who refers to 'the welfare roles of this country' and reports that everything a character said 'had jived with the facts'? Such a person may be taken seriously only as a symptom of decay in our language."
And so, Billy Joe, you are the wrongest, most incorrect grammarian of all; worthy of being taken seriously only as a symptom of decay of the English language.
Such as, "Billy Joe you are wronger than me; perhaps the wrongest of all."
Wronger than I! I, I, I. Unless you were adding an extra grammatical error to be fun.
Damn shame language is not the only thing that's decaying in our society.
Do any of you even know any black people in their sixties or seventies? Don't take my word for all of this, go ask them. Hell, read the interviews in Studs Terkel's Race about the changes in racial interaction between 1940 and 1960 from the people on both sides who experienced it.
Tom
No, Jon. I was wrong. I admit it. Still not as wrong as that Billy Joe character, though.
Tom feels the thread slipping more off topic (off topicer?) with each additional grammatical correction.
No, Tom, I do not know any black people in their sixties or seventies. To be honest, I don't I know any white or hispanic or asian people in their sixties or seventies either. I know a couple in their eighties, quite a few in their fifties, but that sixty-seventy range is just vacant.
For what its worth I think you're right on this one.
With warmest regards,
Billy Joe Mills
Tom,
Of COURSE they were from the 19th century. You were alleging that blacks in America did not possess a distinct culture until after the 1950's. I was giving you a reading list which would demonstrate that black culture began WELL BEFORE the 1950's and carried on through that decade into today. Incidentally, I meant to add Invisible Man to my list and just forgot.
Brian, what I am saying is that the 19th Century black culture was almost totally subsumed by the mainstream culture by the 1950s.
What was described in the earlier works was history to the post-WW2 urban population.
I dind't say it never existed. I said it was gone.
Tom
Tom,
Your arguments are so wholly absurd as to defy comprehension. The gulf between your fundamental beliefs and mine is so wide that any attempt at reconciliation, on this and almost any other issue, is a hopeless endeavor suitable only to the most masochistic of thinkers and debaters. I hereby surrender to the unstoppable force that is your incurable psychosis.
Two words "Harlem Renaissance"
Q.E.D.
Question on that, Brandon:
Wouldn't you say that the forms and statements coming out of the Harlem renaissance were more "American" that those being exhibited by either the Italians or Poles at the same time?
Weren't they closer to the art forms coming out of the nearby Lower East Side twenty years later than to anything before or since?
My guess is that Harlem was a New York, rather than race phenomenon.
Better examples that you might have used would be the gospel music of the early 20th or the kind of jive swing invented by Cab Calloway and his sister.
Those were certainly nothing like anything that the white folks of the time had, with the possible exception of some of the Holy Roller churches.
However, even those were incorporated into the American culture during the 1950s with the advent of "hot jazz" and rock-and-roll. The economic importance of this blending was demonstrated by Colonel Tom Parker when he marketed Elvis as a white boy who could sing like a black one--and this was in the South, mind you.
The race-mixing in the military and factories during WW2 and Korea made integration inevitable. The increased mobility of cheap autos combined with the urbanization (then suburbanizing, in Blue Island, for example) of an entire generation of formerly rural blacks in Northern cities finished the job. People like Martin Luther King were working to make the de facto gains that they had made de jure.
They were just getting on their feet, had folks beginning to be upwardly mobile and had established their own business districts (often in the face of threats of riots instigated by the radical Marxist wing of the Civil Rights Movement) when LBJ's government arrived.
Did Reagan say, "The most terrifying words one can hear are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'"? If not, he should have.
Within twenty years, the inner cities were a shambles and the permanently servile and government-dependent underclass that voted Democratic (when it voted at all) had been created.
White people have a lot to be sorry for, but it's considerably different from what most people think it is.
Tom
Harlem renaissance just being one thing that came to mind. Also coming to mind from the early 20th century in terms of a verifiably distinct African American culture is jazz, swing, rag time. Granted mostly musical and dance, but song and dance are huge elements of culture. It's true that these were later co-opted and brought into the mainstream, but so has hip-hop. That doesn't mean it isn't a different culture or at least a sub-culture.
As for these things being "American," well yeah. It's hard for African-American culture to be anything but "American" in the sense that they had no connection with their countries of origin and had been in the U.S. for over a century, but I still maintain that it was relatively distinct from most American culture for quite some time. Harlem was both a New York and a race phenomenon. You can't separate the two any more than you can separate Rag Time from Louisiana and the Creoles of New Orleans.
As for the race mixing of the war period. I agree. It did make a big push towards integration. Unfortunately for most minorities, once the white soldiers came home they took the better jobs, often to the detriment of the underclass. The fact that there wasn't a loud and boisterious cultural movement that I can think of in the 40s and early 50s amongst the African American population doesn't mean it had died. Much like most of American culture in the war period, it took a back seat to total war mobilization.
The NAACP was founded in 1955. Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam in 1952. The back to Africa movement was huge in the 30s and 40s. I would definitely call at least the latter groups quite distinct groups trying very hard to not assimilate and that carried into the 60s and 70s with the Black Panthers and Black Power movements. I don't see a new thing coming up. It looks more like a stop-start cultural shift that is seen everywhere - flowering of activity in the right conditions followed by more muted phases.
We'll always disagree on what led to the ghettoization, so I'm not touching that.
Everyone:
I think it is easier to understand Brian's point if you picture Brian looking into a mirror and being proud of himself as you read his writings. Perhaps he is even sitting deep in thought with his hand on his chin like the thinking man?
Honestly though, haven't you ever been driving, and have someone do something totally stupid in front of you and think to yourself, "damn, this person is a moron," only to discover that the driver is asian and then think, "oh ok, now it all makes sense."
I also love how people like Brian try and make it sound like the blacks and latinos have had it the worst out of any group in history. Last time I checked, every single group of people (whether be race, religion, sex, etc.) has been persecuted at one time or another in nearly all countries. Blacks, Irish, Latinos, Polish, Arabs, Asyrians, Italians, etc., etc. I think to separate each group individually as having it more "rough" than another group just compounds the problem. EVERYONE needs to treat their fellow man like they want to be treated, and then get on with their day.