Unequal childhoods and unequal adulthoods

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xq_iCMgP2Q

It will take about an hour to watch this lecture by Annette Lareau as she follows up her original research (early 2000s) on children in middle class and working class families, with how they did as young adults. I’d noticed in stores how differently some parents talk to their children (who may be in the shopping cart).  Although these days, they may be talking on the phone!  Often I wish they’d just shut up.  My goodness, they talk and talk and talk.  But some don’t.  Low income parents talk much less to their children, and by the time kids get to school there is an enormous gap in vocabulary.  But her research goes a lot deeper—about how middle class families “untie knots,” research ways to do things better, get the better school, or teacher, or activity. They have different social networks, they marry different people, and live in different neighborhoods which have different schools.

It’s worth watching.  But I don’t buy any government solution for this which we’ll hear from the academics.   The common complaint will increasingly be “white privilege,” but Lareau found similar attitudes in black and white families who are in the same socio-economic class. Fathers are more likely to be present in the middle class families; parents have more education; more sibling rivalry in middle class families; more talking; more boredom among middle class kids; and middle class kids stay “younger” longer with fewer responsibilities.  Race was not as big an issue as values and attitudes. Many middle class teaching approaches are the opposite of what works with low income kids. Drilling and memorization work well for them—just not for the teachers. Immigrant parents seem to have stronger academic standards for their children which may be lost by the 3rd generation.

He meant Gore, Kerry and Bush

But when I read his article on the disadvantages of an elite education, I immediately thought of President and Mrs. Obama who seem hopelessly out of touch with the common man.

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day [attempting to small talk with a plumber], is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate. William Deresiewicz

3453 Leaving race behind

Amitai Etzioni doesn't like it when people ask his race, even when the U.S. government asks. He discovered that if he marked a box labeled "other" that he was simply assigned to a racial category. He writes in "Leaving race behind" American Scholar, Spring 2006:

"Treating people differently according to their race is as un-American as a hereditary aristocracy, and as American as slavery. . . The national ideal says that all Americans should be able to compete as equals, whatever their background. . . Since the onset of the civil rights movement we have ensconced in law many claims based on race: requirements that a given proportion of public subsidies, loans, job training, educational assistance, and admission slots at choice colleges be set aside for people of color. . . There must be a better way to deal with past and current injustice. And the rapid changes in American demographics call for a reexamination of the place of race in America."

Etzioni notes that Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the U.S. and their population growth, both legal and illegal continues at an explosive pace. In 2003-2005, one of every two people added to America's population was Hispanic, but they may be members of many ethnic and racial groups. Race is biology, but ethnicity is geographic and cultural. By the third generation, 30% of Hispanics and 40% of Asians in the U.S. have married outside their racial or ethnic group. Will the government continue to offer their children special benefits?

Who needs help from the government? In my extended family we have on the one hand well-off, well-educated African American and Hispanic relatives who are married and living a stable, comfortable life style, and on the other, dirt poor, living-on-the-edge, poorly educated white relatives, "shacking up" as we used to say even before we knew poverty and marriage were related. Do you give reparations to the black family (whose ancestors were never part of U.S. slavery)? Do the Hispanics (who don't speak a word of Spanish) get a special deal for a job? Do you just give more money in welfare to the poor family, but no special incentive or slot for college because a middle-class black child got it?

One thing Etzioni doesn't touch on is the race careers--politicians, journalists, social workers and academics whose livihood depends on keeping us a divided nation. A black professor is suing because he didn't get tenure and he's claiming racial bias. But he's also doing stem cell research--adult stem cell, and doesn't believe in embryonic stem cell. Could be something else at work that has nothing to do with race. Did you see the article in the NYT about the woes of the highly educated, wealthy black people who can't find good nannies? Like most of the race-based articles, it was terribly anecdotal, but apparently some east European nannies have actually made a choice of whom they want to work for, and so have some black Americans and Caribbean women. I personally think the only color that matters here is green, and to get a good nanny in NYC you probably have to at least pay $40,000 a year with benefits.

Technorati: affirmative action, Racial Issues

3332 My letter to Oprah

My husband suggested I turn on the Oprah show--she was doing a program on "class." I watched a few minutes (it was a rerun of an April show), but couldn't handle the twaddle of Robert Reich, Clinton's former Secretary of Labor. Her web site summarizes his thoughts:

Reich "says that a family's ability to provide their children with a quality education, health care and access to other resources determines one's class. "A lot of kids who are poor or working class are not getting the schools that they need and are not having the connections and the models of success that they need."

He notes three indicators of class: "weight, teeth and dialect. In terms of appearance, people who are overweight or have poor teeth are generally regarded as lower class."

I didn’t see the part about teeth but did hear him saying they (lower class and poor) aren't getting good schools. That's been proven false by putting lower class district children into stunning new schools with incredible technology. New bricks don't turn out new scholars. Old values and concerned parents do. Poor families who take the initiative to get their kids into charter schools benefit in the long run. Immigrant Vietnamese and other Asians and even some immigrant Mexicans have managed to move their families into the middle class by hard work and strong family values, not good teeth and good schools.

Here’s my letter to Oprah.

I was disappointed in your "class" show because of the misinformation Robert Reich presented.

The growing gap is not between classes, but between families of married couples and unmarried women with children. Women can virtually eliminate poverty by 1) finishing high school, 2) not having babies as teen-agers, and 3) marrying the father of their children. If her husband takes a job, any job and keeps it, he will almost guarantee their success.

There is still plenty of opportunity in this country--illegals who flood over our borders seeking it is proof of that. But young women need to get smart and stop listening to musicians and boyfriends who call them "Ho" and "bitch" and get down to the business of saving their future children with some backbone and pride.

Maybe you could also open a school for girls here in the U.S.

Source update: William Galston, a Democratic strategist and former domestic affairs adviser to President Clinton is usually acknowledged as the source of the statistics on the relationship between poverty, education and marriage. See James Q. Wilson, City Journal, Why we don't marry. The original Galston source doesn’t seem to be on-line, but every one quotes him. You can look through his bibliography--may be co-authored with Kamarck.

Source update: Kansas City--money and school performance, Cato Policy Analysis . "The lessons of the Kansas City experiment should stand as a warning to those who would use massive funding and gold-plated buildings to encourage integration and improve education."

Robert Reich
Oprah show
poverty
marriage