What’s Holding Blacks Back? What’s Holding Blacks Back? is it black attitudes, not white racism, that’s to blame?

Blacks aren’t the only people who’ve sabotaged themselves through victimology. Take the eerily similar case of the Boston Irish, the target of contempt and discrimination in nineteenth-century America. By the 1920s, when anti-Irish bigotry had receded greatly, historical memory allowed Mayor James Michael Curley to maintain power by stoking Irish resentment very like today’s black resentment. Curley found “anti-Irish” sentiment everywhere: merit hiring systems were “anti-Irish”; “Anglo-Saxon” culture was fatally diseased. Even today, the remnant of this mentality still traps members of South Boston’s Irish community in crummy housing projects full of idle adults who have high rates of substance abuse and even speak a local dialect it takes a little while to wrap one’s ears around. In South Boston, as in South Central, a fatalistic skepticism that you can rise above your community and a deeply embedded wariness of mainstream culture thwart ambition even where opportunity is available.

https://www.whytheracecardisplayed.com/post/what-s-holding-blacks-back-is-it-black-attitudes-not-white-racism-that-s-to-blame

Anglo-Saxon,

Blacks,

Boston,

community,

culture,

mainstream