What must it be like to be on the receiving end of such paternalism? It sounds awful. And horrifically damaging. If people tell you every day that you can't win, and you have no responsibility for bad decisions you make, how can you possibly succeed after such a psych-war campaign to make you into a control-externalizing mental infant? I'd hate my parents forever if they did this to me.
She meets her black name-sharer who reveals that she is, surprise, a single mother with three kids (who she bore very young), while the author stayed married and had kids late. News flash: Blacks who simply wait to have kids and have them when married and stay married are overwhelmingly not in poverty. Meanwhile, whites who fail to do these things are very often in poverty. No racist white person is forcing anyone to have kids in their teenage years, from multiple men, and fail to marry. These are personal decisions, and bad decisions have bad consequences for people of any race.
And then they sit around talking about "the utter ridiculousness of upper-middle-class white people". Yes, so ridiculous, not having kids out of wedlock, and forming stable social arrangements.
And "the intense differences between Brownsville and Park Slope, very different Brooklyn neighborhoods but both suffering from a severe lack of diversity.". Yes, I'm sure those white neighborhoods are really "suffering" because there are too many whites. Must be a nightmare.
She literally calls it a "version of justice" when black people give false information to police to avoid tickets for public violence: "Now I understood why the tickets were never paid: most of these Lisa Davises had, in some way, disappeared. They had given fake addresses or moved, and they were skirting the law – their own version of justice – however they could."
Yes, there is racism against blacks. No, that doesn't mean black are morally-perfect shining hearts of goodness whose every action is perfect. People are people; the way this author wipes away the individual to make everyone simply a piece of their group, the way she excuses any action from someone in a victim class, is kind of horrifying. And it is racism.