USA Where the Poor Live Dearly

http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2015-05/poverty-racism-black-neighborhoods-baltimore-ferguson-new-york

by cyphunk • 11 years ago

13 15 11 years ago

zeit.de

cyphunk5• 11 years ago

why would the original submission of this article be flagged? Not worth discussing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516703

andor• 11 years ago

I was wondering about that as well. The discussion so far was far from a flamewar.

Mithaldu4• 11 years ago

The article seems to have done two things wrong:

1. Got facts wrong, apparently. I'm not in a situation to know whether it did, but it seems to have, and articles that seem wrong do get flaggedby users, presumably to prevent spreading mistruths.

2. It criticized the USA. I read HN via http://www.hckrnews.com/ and thus get to see a lot of the flagged articles even long after they're dead. Articles that criticize the USA are always in that category. That doesn't mean all of HN flags those, just that there is a critical mass of users with the necessary amount of karma who dislike them.

tptacek3• 11 years ago

I flagged this one too, and hope others will as well: it's especially clear to me that stories flagged off the site shouldn't dogfight that decision with new submissions under different URLs.

I flagged for two reasons:

* First, it's off-topic for the site (see: guidelines), a story of the kind usually flagged off.

* Second, it's just a bad story, that doesn't overcome the site's presumption against stories like this by dint of superior quality.

cyphunk5• 11 years ago

1. I've seen things more off topic than this, especially things which relate to currently popular events.

2. "bad story" is subjective and many disagree. I didn't know that disagreeing with opinion was reason to flag.

but anyway, you're a power user. do what you like.

jqm2• 11 years ago

The title is "where the poor live dearly" but then the article goes on to talk exclusively about perceived racial injustice.

Maybe the author didn't spend enough time in the US to see there are vast swaths of the country full of poor Whites and Hispanics also? Nor notice that there are in fact well to do Blacks in the US? It was a dumb article. And poverty happens to people of all races.

cyphunk5• 11 years ago

Because the article isn't about white poverty. It comes at a time of the Baltimore riots and I think it's understandable it doesn't attempt to address all forms of poverty.

jqm2• 11 years ago

Well then... it has a misleading title.

tptacek3• 11 years ago

It comes at a time of riots in Baltimore, but focuses on Ferguson and Park Slope; these are three cities that have virtually nothing in common:

* Ferguson is a city not just influenced by racism but literally produced by it: it's an artifact of redlining and white flight, with a majority black population and a municipal government and police force dominated by whites.

* Baltimore is a city whose government is dominated by blacks, with a black mayor, black police commissioner, and a 50/50 black/white police force; the city of Baltimore was a manufacturing and shipping hub devastated by globalization, unlike St. Louis, which has a diverse economy with strong finance and health care sectors.

* Park Slope is an economically elite section of New York City where white corporate lawyers happen to have Jamaican nannies, which apparently says something about race relations in the US, though I'm not clear what that's meant to be.

It's a dumb article. It's not that it doesn't address all forms of poverty; it's that it doesn't have anything coherent to say about any of them that any US high school sophomore couldn't conjure up the night before the due date for a social studies term paper.

Mithaldu4• 11 years ago

While it is true that poverty happens to all races, it is also true that poverty happens differently to different races: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S... (I'm sorry i don't have more recent data, i did not search very long.)

And the article also points out something that rings true to me: That difference is in part caused simply by a lack of ambition.

I come from germany, which has a very low spread of difference in wealth, due to strong measures for wealth redistribution. However i also come from east germany, which, even 25 years after the fall of the wall still sees employees earn 30% less than in west germany. And i also do see my family of younger generations, all of which i exceed by an income factor of 4 despite growing up under the same conditions, primarily because they don't believe themselves capable of becoming more, something which is reinforced to them by the environment they live in.

Btw, even in germany whenever i see black people, they're primarily in the lower-earning industries. If they're employed at all.

USA Where the Poor Live Dearly

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