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Comment by spraak | Hacker News Reader

I also believe this is what African Americans are still experiencing, while maybe slavery was long ago to have been "worked out" of the genes, it was roughly just two or three generations ago that there was segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynchings etc.

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Jim Crow, segregation and lynchings were zero generations ago for a lot of people. It's easy to forget because so many of the leaders of the civil rights movement died early of unnatural causes, but someone who was 18 when the Civil Rights Act was passed is now only 72.

>while maybe slavery was long ago to have been "worked out" of the genes, it was roughly just two or three generations ago that there was segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynchings etc.

Slavery in the US was only two human lifetimes ago. My grandfather has living memory of older relatives who were born slaves. And then white people who's grandparents were homesteaders, farmers, or small business owners wonder why black people today have no wealth.

In the 1920s or so, black men were 24% self employed or had their own small business. Now it is a lot less than that. What exactly happened is up for debate but the results are certainly sad.

Desegregation and no more lynchings (which was prevalent enough it was basically domestic terrorism) is sad?

Can you show where that stat came from? 24% seems so high that it must be reflecting some major obvious phenomenon. Was there a big class of jobs that doesn't exist anymore? Were a quarter of white men self employed too? Was discrimination was so great that self-employment was a far better way to get work? Is that 24% of black men or working black men, or working-age black men? The statistic on its own leave so much confusion. Maybe self-employed meant itinerant farm laborer? It might not be so sad for that to stop existing.

I would believe it and I also believe the decline was due to racism. Southern racists didn’t like seeing prosperous black people. Just look at what happened to Rosewood:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre

Was the small business rate more common for all ethnicities back then? Without context this stat doesn't really tell us much.

Mass employment as employees is a relatively new phenomenom.

The other 76% were unemployed or in a precarious job.

It's a lot of fun to form beliefs in the absence of data.

Interesting you replied to this and not the parent?

Seems appropriate because it applies up the whole comment chain.

And if you're going to try and draw conclusions, then come out and say it instead of noncommittally leaving it up to our imagination.

It's a lot of fun to assume. /s

How do you know I haven't formed this view based on data? You're assuming I don't have any data.

Because if you had data you'd be like, "here's the data."

If your guess is right, we'd see differences in the effects of Jim Crow depending on what part of the country people lived in. Well, do we? I don't know.

> we'd see differences in the effects of Jim Crow depending on what part of the country people lived in

That's one, very obtuse hypothesis.

The past 50 years have not been so great for African American families either.

When you choose your opinions so that they conform to popular politics, you're at risk of getting contorted into contradictions just to keep having the "right" beliefs. This research says stress causes genetic differences in subsequent generations. So if it's the cause of modern black poverty and violence, it would mean black people are genetically susceptible to being poor and violent. If you consider poverty and violence as inferior qualities, then it says black people are genetically inferior to white people, which is so incompatible with popular culture that you'll be be ostracized for even mentioning the idea!

I think you're reaching too far there

Sorry for assuming your motivation. Do you agree with my conclusion about blacks being genetically inferior? Is there a mistake in my logic? Perhaps being RNA, not DNA makes it not quite the same thing?

If the main objective of DNA and genes is to spread itself, black people still have some obvious genetics advantage, historically. And it doesn't seem to be changing, much the opposite.

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