I think it’s particularly cruel to compare Far Eastern immigrants in this country to African-Americans and then to blame African-Americans for having less stable families and a lower education level.
It matters a lot why someone (or someone’s ancestors) came to this country. When the slave merchants selected their stock of human flesh, they didn’t screen them for their ability to do well in science and mathematics. When the slaves arrived, they were denied anything other than a religious education and their families were routinely separated. It has never been the case in this country that the black community, as a whole, has had parity on the quality of the education available to them. They’ve never had the communal wealth of other immigrant populations. They’ve never been treated equally by law enforcement or prosecutors or judges or juries or real estate agents or car dealers or landlords.
The law has frequently been set up to move them into slums where the law has usually permitted every kind of predatory scam that can be designed to separate people from their money.
I’m very much in favor of being forward-looking at not wallowing in the pain of the past, but there are reasons why African-Americans have lower educational attainment and less stable families than other immigrant groups. And just lecturing people to get married before they have kids and to get a good education is disrespectful even if it is good advice.
But this doesn’t have much to do with white privilege. Bill O’Reilly says that white privilege doesn’t exist. But there’s approximately zero chance that Bill O’Reilly would have ever have a son shot down in a blaze of police bullets for the crime of walking in the middle of the street. It’s almost impossible to envision a child of Bill O’Reilly getting shot for the crime of walking in the rain while talking on his cell phone. So, the privilege in some cases is as simple as the privilege of being alive.
