Below is another example of what Scott Adams has called "cultural gravity".
That is, the weight — the gravity — of cultural mores dragging down some groups of people. He was thinking in particular of American blacks. (A better term, by the way, than "African-American", because not all American blacks trace back to Africa).When black students jeer a black classmate who is a prize-winner at the school's graduation ceremony, that's cultural gravity. When blacks call a successful peer an "Oreo" - black on the outside white on the inside - that's cultural gravity. When blacks mock their mates for "talking white", that's cultural gravity. Cultural gravity arises from allowing your victimhood, your hatred for past injustices, to trump your prospects today. In fact, to trump your best interests.
The clip below notes that black kids in white schools do better than black kids in black schools. That's because (me speaking now) instead of cultural gravity, they're being lifted by the hot air balloons of higher expectations. It's not inherent ability or IQ. It's the culture, stupid.
And that culture includes the family, as the survey below also showed. There's now plenty of evidence that if you want kids to do well, they need a stable family with a father at home. Then: Finish high school, get married and stay married. That's the recipe for sure-fire success.
We find the same effect of cultural gravity in the Australian Aboriginal community, aka the First Australians or indigenous community, and we find it most in evidence each Australia Day (yesterday) when we saw all sorts of anti-colonial, anti-white, anti-British, anti-Australia Day protests, rooted in victimhood and resentment. Started as Invasion Day marches in 1938, these days they're usually called Survival Day protests.
Some brave Australian Aboriginal representatives like Jacinta Nampijimpa(*) fight against cultural gravity in their community. Sadly their usual reward is to get savaged in social media, with the classic contumely: "porch monkeys", "coconuts" (Aussie version of Oreos). But they fight on, and good on them, for only when the community decides to hop into the hot air balloon's basket of higher expectations will there be real progress for the indigenous community. Progress to be proud of, not paternalistically handed to it.
********
(*) Turns out Jacinta was nominated for 2019 Australian of the Year; she lost out to two men who had helped in the Thai cave rescue. Pity.
/Snip:
Some of the findings [of the US 1964 Racial Equity Survey] were surprising. One was that predominantly black school districts got roughly the same level of government funding as predominantly white districts, contrary to the widespread belief that white districts were favored.
Another was that black students in predominanely white classrooms did better academically than black students with similar characteristics in predominantly black classrooms. The most surprising finding was that the main variables affecting educational outcomes for individual children were not the amount of money spent on educating them or the professional credentials of their teachers. Instead, they were the students' family backgrounds and the number of days they attended school. [my emphasis].
