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Furthermore, they can't seem to be able to rap about anything besides bitches and hoes.
The problem is that, for one thing, the performance of minority groups (including backwoods whites) is part of our society. They deserve worrying about just as much as anybody--how can we help them improve?
Furthermore, if these mores become the norm among the entire working class, which seems more and more likely given the way people have been eating up the submoron-level entertainment TV shovels at them, it has terrible implications for all forms of social mobility, public safety, and democracy at even the local level.
Just think: even voting for something as immediately important as local sheriff, all your neighbors who looooove "The Third Wheel" and "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader" and "The Blue-Collar Comedy Tour" and think "Kant" is how a Yankee says pussy also get a vote!
I'm guessing it has to do with the absurd levels of commercialization and the sports-worship that occurs when sports became one of the easier ways to get treated like not-shit (I've heard the Jews used to be the "basketball race" for similar reasons), and the overall ease in turning a group desperate for cultural identity into a cash crop.
Alternatively: Horribly depressing backlash against the Urkel.
I still read a lot of books today, so I guess I'll give my parents credit for that one.
Ege's comment is a little disturbing, just because it flies in the face of the heartwarming stories about immigrants starting from scratch, buckling down, and saving every penny so their kid can go to a good school and become a doctor/lawyer/engineer/etc. I can understand wanting to install appreciation for good ol' physical labor, but not wanting your kid to get the best education possible just doesn't make sense to me.
Well, according to that comprehensive study courtesy of Senjutsu, 55% of people with below basic prose literacy failed to graduate from high school, as opposed to 15% of the general population, and 44% of them spoke no English before starting school, as opposed to 13% of the general population.
I think it's entirely appropriate to bring up class and economic issues.
One thing I disagree with is blaming the stupidity of TV programs for people's idiocy. It's confusing cause with effect.
I think TV programs are stupid not because of some desire by TV executives to make people dumb, but because stupid shows are what people are demanding to see on TV. I'm pretty sure lots of intelligent concepts for shows are turned down everyday simply because they wouldn't get enough viewers.
In this sense, the quality and intelligence of TV shows is more of a reflection of the quality and intelligence of the average population, which is pretty fucking scary when you think about it.
One word: Machismo
I can illustrate with one of the saddest stories ever if needed, but only if.
Wolfe has said in the past that "it wouldn't sell" is what David Hartwell told him, but Hartwell himself denies it. I dunno. I do know that before Latro in the Mist came out you couldn't find the Soldier books for love or money. A lot of Wolfe's books - the bulk of his oeuvre, really - have only come back into print since about 2000 or so (my own theory is that the Sci-Fi Book Club omnibus of New Sun in 1998 finally found him an audience). Anyway, this new thing where everyone seems to be reading him is a fairly recent phenomenon, because I remember when it was like me and ten other dudes on the Whorl mailing list.
There's no denying that good fantasy is constantly being written, but hack fantasy has exploded since the 70s while hack science fiction - all that military action stuff, for instance - is still a niche pursuit, and straight up "pulp" fiction has all but died off. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence (authors being asked to submit plans for trilogies or series rather than standalone books, for instance) to suggest that regardless of its best examples, fantasy as a business proposition is about finding new ways to repackage Tolkien.
I mean it's pretty close to reality: for every low-class family out there that is trying to save money so their kid can go to school, there are many parents who make kids for the sole purpose of having more labor for their manual tasks. When those kids show desire to become something more than simple workers, they are punished.
None of this addresses the fact that reading rates are declining from 20 years ago, right alongside a similar drop in reading comprehension...
Not to derail completely, but this isn't quite true. One of the big socioeconomic stories of the last decade is that there's a large and growing black middle class that's being completely underrepresented in popular culture in large part because they don't help to sell expensive shoes and CDs to white kids. Not to say that the poor-black community isn't rife with problems, because it is, but a lot of that shit is just straight-up minstrelsy.
It does if the drop in reading rates is based on the influx of non-native speakers. If.
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There's a decent-sized "minority" middle class in general, they're just not that culturally-significant from the "majority" enough to be that noticeable. The whole "white-washed" thing.
That's interesting. I've only begun reading him recently, though I did join the Urth mailing list and am reading it now. (I have a big post in Writer's Block about Wolfe, btw.)
Sure. It's Terry Brooks' fault.
(Not really.)
A few things happened: fantasy/science fiction ideas managed to get accepted into mainstream literature, so that you started to get books that were great books first and speculative fiction second. (See Midnight's Children.) Furthermore, scientific reality punched us in the face and said "Guess what? Interstellar travel is basically a stupid idea. Enjoy the rock you have." That meant that pulp SF lost some of its appeal, and a lot of those pulpy writers basically said "Screw it. It's easier to write fantasy anyway," and started writing generic fantasy product. There's no pesky "reality" to worry about when you're doing fantasy.
I'm going to say this, and then I'm going to bed:
NEVER. EVER. Read fantasy by an author who makes references to world-building. Holy Goddamn.
Not a Dune fan?
Absolutely. My roommate in college, as well as a couple of my suitemates and several of my friends fit this "forgotten" demographic. Trouble is, they're not a huge part of the black population, and the black middle class has a low generation-to-generation retention rate: even among the children of the middle class, falling into poverty is relatively common. This is at least partially attributable, I would argue, to the lack of community support.
If you have black students dropping Honors classes because they get bullied for "trying to be white," something is stupid.
Loved the first book, the latter ones are pretty terrible. I'm thinking more along the lines of the ten thousand fantasy authors who start their novel writing process with drawing a map.
That's more of an EPIC JOURNEY thing, like the crap in Game of Thrones.
World-building is usually a reference to making a workable setting with decent mechanics, though the narrative should be part of the process. No point in fantasy unless the setting is integral to the story, after all.
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So I guess we're saying that between BET and Blue Collar Comedy, we're fucked?
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Anyways. Bottom line. The national culture needs to learn to respect genuine intellectualism, both cultural and scientific, which will promote reading, because documentaries just can't pump out the information fast enough or deep enough.
How do we do this without murder?
This is orthogonal to your point, not necessarily disputing it.
I would argue that calculus is a poor analogy to reading, insofar as it's fr more similar to analysis than, say, enjoyable product. Doing calculus for fun is akin to studying grammar for fun. Some people are interested in that sort of thing, but I suspect a great deal of people are more content to simply enjoy the fruits of their knowledge, by reading appropriately interesting or difficult things, or engaging in activities that are appropriate to possessing knowledge of calculus (there may not be many of these, however, although I would argue that certain games certainly benefit from strong math skills).
Because we're talking about the culture having a problem with reading and black people are a part of the culture that has problems with upward mobility and academic achievement?
Do you think I'm sitting here saying "them negroes is damn stupid?" I'm not. I'm saying that the current black culture rewards ignorance and punishes learning in a way that it did not in the middle part of the last century. This is in response to a question about whether or not the "keeping it real" attitude has ever been better than it is today. It has been.
Am I "blaming them for their problems?" Partially. The culture of ignorance is endemic in black culture just as it is in working class white culture. Is discrimination also part of the problem? Yes--but you can be discriminated against and still develop a desire to learn and improve yourself. As noted above, look at Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, and so on, all of whom came out of an era of much worse discrimination. Black culture is on a downward trajectory.
You just have a soapbox you want to stand on, and while I might normally engage you because I think your point is idiotic, I don't think this is the thread for it.
This thread is about reading, and the fact that Americans in general are doing it less.
Huh? Wtf? How does Game of Thrones qualify as an "Epic Journey" book, or even one written after the map was made?
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As dynamic a nation as America is, I don't know that you can say jackall about it without about twenty different cuts of demographics.
Just off the top of my head, we have educational divides between:
-States
-Cultures
-Races
-Socio-economic classes
-Political Affiliations
-Religions
-Citizenship Status
-Gender (Uni has so much cleavage these days
-Age (people live longer these days, lots of the ones who couldn't get out of things died in wars, etc)
You cannot generalize the most varied nation in history. I mean cripes, we have Rome beat.
I brought up this topic because ege02 mentioned anti-intellectualism--the fear of peers or children surpassing yourself. It's a topic I've studied a great deal. You might think my point is "idiotic," but you actually have no information to back up your opinion. You don't "engage" me because you aren't interested in actually knowing anything about the topic; you're just one of the millions of reactionaries who assume that any discussion or acknowledgment of the problems of a minority community is tantamount to racism. It's not, and I'd appreciate it if you'd read my posts and think about them before calling my points "idiotic" with no basis.
(1) reading rates are down from previous highs. It isn't just a general complaint, it's verifiable against previous date. Americans are reading less. It isn't whiny old man bullshit, it's a statistical survey.
and
(2) reading comprehension rates have gone down in the same time.
It's pretty basic. People are reading less, and they're doing worse on reading comprehension tests than previous points in American history. Unless you have some other explanation for that correlation besides "every statistic can be massaged" and "it's that old pro-book bias" I don't think you're adding anything to the conversation, either.
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FYI... again, eh heh... : http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/341447_incomeonline29.html
?? Most of the book takes place in 1 city. There's odds and sods elsewhere, but that's because it jumps between the view points of 10 or so characters. None of it involves a journey. I have no idea wtf your talking about or if you even read the book I did.
And I'm gonna have to agree with Edge here. The best decription I ever heard of it was from the Jamaican guy in my physics program. He was also the angriest about it I've ever seen anyone.
He grew up in one of the poor areas of town. He was talking one time about all these really smart guys he knew, who did nothing with their lives. They dropped out of school, became "gagnstas" or whatever the shit those people do. Why? Because they were always told, by the other black people in the community, "You'll never amount to anything cause the white mans gonna keep you down. So don't even try." And they don't. They give up. They do nothing with their lives, because the people around them convince them that success is out of reach anyway, and besides, succeeding at school or anything intellectual is "acting white".
It's a pervasive culture of failure, and it's fucking up tons of bright young minds.
People should be reading something, whether it's Dostoevsky, someone's blog, or a Harlequin romance novel. Some reading material is better for developing your reading skills than others, obviously, but something is better than nothing -- and often you'll see people move on to more challenging material after stretching out their brains a little.
Edit: Also, some people here have clearly been paying too much attention to Bill Cosby.
just so we're clear, this is absolutely not a problem that is unique to "the black experience"
While black literacy rates are below white literacy rates, the point of this thread is discussing the fact that reading rates are down in the general population from 20 years ago. Can you tell me exactly what happened to reading rates in specifically black communities in the same time span? No, you can't. You can only assume that they went down at the same rate that the general reading rate went down. There, of course, is the possibility that reading rates amongst the black population went up during the same period while the overall reading rates declined. Can you disprove that possibility? No, you can't, just like I can't say anything about whether or not the black reading rates are dropping precipitously or at the exact same rate as the rest of the general population or what the fuck ever because we don't have statistics for that.
So to begin with you're an idiot for not understanding statistics.
If you want to make a thread called "I blame black people for being so dumb," please do so, and I'll continue the discussion with you there. As it is, this thread is about reading you dumb fuck, not about the fact that you dislike Nelly's music and think Al Sharpton is a huckster.
Damn you and damn this attitude. Your dismissive, ignorant reaction toward criticism of a real and valid problem of a culture has been the norm for reactionaries who want to feel righteous for the past forty years. Guess what? I am not a racist. I studied Southern & African American literature in college. I studied regional and minority dialects and their development. I have read most of the African American philosophical and political canon. I have tremendous respect for the great minds their community has produced, the great artists and leaders who have inspired generations.
The problem is that the progress those great minds and leaders made is being lost. You should be pissed off, too, if you legitimately care about ending racism and encouraging equality.
I didn't think it was, but I didn't wanna generalize outside the area I'd been told about. I didn't really think it was unique to the "black experience".
How was the culture which produced the most inspiring American thinkers of the mid-Twentieth Century any less a "culture of poverty?" Please do not ascribe inevitability to these issues.
Considering the entire country is going to crap, this almost goes without saying.
It's just been the most successful crushing of the larger groups.
I'm guessing Hispanics are next, since I've been seeing the media latch on to them like mad lately, along with the redneck crowd.
Then again, with all these horribly bad "science"-based shows...
I hate this species.
You come off as racist because your frustration is misdirected. As far as problems for African Americans go, pressure to not "act white" from within the community pales in comparison to the immense external hardships black people have faced throughout this country's history.
There's a lot to talk about here. Maybe we should split off a new thread?