Race doesn't necessarily predispose success or failure

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This isn't true. There is little association between parenting and success in life. Adopted children take after their biological parents, not their adopted ones.

Of course you're going to suffer if your parents don't feed you or provide stability or teach you how to select appropriate friends, and you're going to benefit if they pay for you to have a fancy education, but once the minimum needs are met it doesn't matter much whether your parents are traditional or liberal, whether they are together or not, whether they play you Mozart or read to you. Sure, these things may sometimes be associated with success, but not if you control for things like socio-economic status, education, and their background.

Aside from genetics + presence/absence of neglect, the biggest impact a parent can have on a child is controlling who they view as peers. I suspect this might be a major factor behind racial divides within countries.

There doesn't seem to be a correlation between families without fathers and crime. Crime has largely gone down and fatherless has gone up. However this is across the board. Such a study would need to look at areas where crime has gone up then look at what factors are involved.

I think the way you are brought up will have some impact on how you turn out. I mean if you had fred west for a father chances are you would be screwed up, but it is anyone's guess what the result will be. Lack of parenting, of not enough guidance.

A bigger problem is culture of crime and lack of belief or faith in law and order.

The thing is African immigrants didn't grow up in the same culture as African Americans did. Also, there is extremely high standards for Africans immigrating to the US, I know this because my father is American consulate officer in Africa.

My father was in the civil service. So yes it is true the immigrants are screened.

However we are also talking about people who work as taxi drivers, cleaners, etc, who then help put their kids through school. Not just rich people coming to to study.

However some of these figure refer to send an third generation. Nigerian Americans are doing as well as French and Dutch Americans.

The point w is it isn't simply a matter of skin colour. That is a very simplistic way of looking at these tensions.

Chinese and Indian immigrant in the 19th and early 20th century were treated very badly and in a form of legal slavery called indentured labour, now Asian Americans are one of the most successful groups.

So yes there has to be a cultural shift, but instead of activists lecturing people about internalised oppression, while exhibiting their own bigotry, it is much better that people just interact and get to know each other.

Your typical immigrant taxi diver is actually highly educated (my father met one who was a architect back in Ethiopia, though after we moved to Ethiopia we realized being an architect in Ethiopia is not quite as prestigious as it is in the US ), the problem is that the Americans don't recognize the education from African countries (not without reason because the standards are lower and corruption is more widespread, but they still teach you how to do the thing). Anyway, yes, it's more complicated than just skin color, culture and wealth are a huge part of it. Again, African Americans come from a fundamentally different culture than African immigrants. They have different customs, they live in different neighborhoods, ect. Also, indentured labor is incomparable to chattel slavery, you know the Irish were subjected to the same thing? Finally, while it's better that people just interact and get to know each other, actually making that happen is MUCH more complicated.


It's important to consider not the just the lack of a father, but what ends up filling the void. It's when gangs fill the role of father figure that it ends up leading to crime.