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Comment by JabavuAdams | Hacker News Reader

This. Systemic racism ... aaaand ... loser gangster culture. Would love to see the numbers on whether it's easier to become a chartered accountant or a rap artist.

I'm seeing the other side of this, recently (disadvantaged white people). It's astonishing the loser mentalities and habits that many disadvantaged children learn from their early caregivers and peer group. As middle to upper middle class people, we often have no idea how many little bits of knowledge we pick up to work the system (legally), from those around us.

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I think of it more as the bullying culture. I got bullied a lot for simply looking “nerdy” and doing my homework. Affects me to this day. It was “cool” to be dumb and flunk out. That’s a recipe for a system that holds people down.

I went to school with those loser gangster children. I tutored a lot of them. I'm still friends with a few of them through social media. While I was being insecure about my grades, physical size (I was a pipsqueak), and typical teenage angst. Some of those loser gangsters had real insecurities about society. Being treated poorly by a family, school, and country that did not want them there.

>aaaand ... loser gangster culture.

No. You have parents that are not able to attend to pre-school education, whether it's a time or money issue, or even an education issue themselves. And then you have children, let down by parents who were let down by society, who are ashamed of how far behind they are.

The idea that you can further shame people into "shaping up" is farcical. Please stop being part of the problem.

I appreciate what you're trying to do, but do you have skin in the game or personal experience with these issues?

I have family that dealt with these issue, I live in and near communities that are fighting it, and I live a version of it, transposed from the pre-school->school transition to the college->postgrad/working world transition.

Isn't this exactly what acephal alluded to above?

> But this also was a major source of resentment and ostracization that I'm still dealing with to this day.

Isn't it possible that resentment and ostracization could lead someone to not want to try as hard to learn?

My contention was the characterization as "loser gangster culture." It's victim-blaming, even if the victim is an angry-seeming young black boy.

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