Also, "idiots". That study demonstrates nothing, because not enough of its methodoloy is revealed. It is based on criteria that are purely subjective on the part of those conducting it, and I don't see how you could possibly run such a study with legitimate controls. It also shows absolutely nothing about the motivation behind the employers who call them back. The article notes that the addresses seemed to a much more consistent factor in callbacks, whatever the race or racial name of the applicants. They are judging the racial attitudes of a culture based on whether or not Company A is more likely to call back Shaniqua Molumbo than Company X is to call back an otherwise identical applicant named Kevin Jones. If the latter is more likely that only tells you that X will be interested in a guy with Kevin Jones' qualifications and CV, while B will not be interested in a guy with Shaniqua Molumbo's identical data. Since those two companies almost certainly have two different individuals making those decisions, even that doesn't prove as much, because we don't know how an individual determines how an applicant best fits the criteria by which a company might determine whether or not to hire him. And who decides what sounds "black"? How do they know that the people making the calls back have the same standard of what sounds black? For that matter, recent immigrants with African names are more likely to have names that sound black, rather than the long-time descendants of slaves.

The nature of the study alone implies the mindset of those conducting it was one of people looking to demonstrate racism, which raises the issue of confirmation bias.

I could go on for pages more about how ludicrous this article is. Even if it DID prove racism, that STILL does not have anything to do with slavery. The conditions of blacks in the US today, are not necessarily connected to slavery, and having one misfortune does not automatically entitle you to compensation for another one. In the early 20th century (in other words, in between slavery days and the time they did the study in the article), blacks actually had lower rates of unemployment than whites! This was several generations closer to slavery, when people were still alive who could remember when slavery was a thing. But now, assuming for sake of argument that there is any validity to the premise of the article (that blacks have fewer opportunities for employment than whites or blacks who can be mistaken for whites), ther prospects have gone down, and you say it's slavery's fault, so this article purporting to demonstrate their decreased employability supports the concept of reparations for slavery? That's like blaming the guy who robbed your great-grandfather for your current misfortunes, while ignoring the detail that inbetween your times, your grandfather was rich, and your father wasted the family fortune.

We actually have that. In fact, there are rungs on the ladder exclusively reserved for the use of black people alone.

I don't think you understand banking well enough to make statements like that. No one is "steered toward" sub-prime or high risk loans. Subprime and high risk are terms that describe the BORROWER! A "sub-prime loan" is money that is leant to a person with a bad credit score! Credit scores come from your history of paying bills and repaying debts. The only way one person with a certain income would be "steered toward" a sub-prime loan, while a person with the same income would receive a prime-rate mortgage, would be if that first person had a history of not paying his bills promptly and of defaulting or missing payments on loans & credit cards. The loan rate for which you qualify depends on how you meet objective criteria that assess the likelihood of your repaying the loan. Income might reflect a significant aspect of your ability to repay the loan, but other things, like your expenditures and savings, also come into play with that. So rather than toss their depositors' money willy-nilly at anyone who asks for a loan, the bank will assess your history of repaying loans (which is what paying your credit card bill is, basically), and determine the rate of interest at which they will loan you money. They charge higher risk borrowers and subprime borrowers higher rates of interest, because they want as much of their money back as soon as possible. When you loan money, you are taking a risk that you will not get that money back. Charging interest alleviates some of that risk, and adjusting the rate of interest to reflect a borrower's history of repayment encourages people to make prompt repayment so as to qualify for lower interest rates. Whatever the reason for the alleged phenomenon you describe, it is not racism. While it is generally true that blacks have a harder time getting approved for loans, Asians are even more successful than whites, and have been for a long time. Or do you assert that the banking industry is made of people universally prejudiced AGAINST black skin, but in FAVOR of yellow skin? Has white America deliberately created a system in which Asians outdo them, or is it a case of setting up a set of rules which apply to everyone, but at which blacks happen to be less successful than whites and Asians happen to be more successful?

Even things like the housing scams noted in Coates' article were not necessarily racist, they were preying on people who lacked the means to obtain a loan and the experience or judgment to realize what a bad deal was being offered. Race-baiters love to go around citing the lower rate of success obtaining loans by blacks compared to whites, and citing the comparative poverty of blacks to whites, without ever realizing that those two things SHOULD go together. Loans are granted on the basis of the likelihood of their being repaid with interest. The son of a poor farmer in with little or no collateral is not a good candidate for a loan, whatever his skin color. And frankly, a man whose house is more likely to be burned down by the KKK is a man who was less likely to be able to repay the loan on that house.

You cannot turn on the TV without being inundated with commericals for banks trying to entice people to take out loans. My parents' phone rings off the hook from banks soliciting their business in refinancing their mortgage. If there really was a nationwide conspiracy to charge blacks higher interest on loans, all it would take is for just one of those companies so desperate to loan money to break ranks and offer slightly better deals to black people while still making profits. If every bank agrees they're going to charge blacks 50% interest, the first bank that offers blacks a rate of 45% is going to make a fortune in the flood of business he's going to get. Betting against the greed of corporations is not a smart play. If a lot of blacks are charged higher rates than a most whites, it's because they have less available collateral, lower incomes, lower FICO scores, or some combination of those qualifications. There are other factors as well which come into play. The well documented disintegration of the black family is one. For example, a young white person from an intact family has an advantage if his parents are willing to cosign a loan for him, whereas the majority of blacks have been born out of wedlock for some time. Single parent families are inherently less financially secure, and even if just as willing to help grown children, might not make much of a difference in securing such a loan. The only racism at play in such circumstances is the absurd mentality of blacks rejecting traditionally successful practices as "white" or embracing such non-starter behavior like irresponsible reproduction as a part of "black culture".

Your sentence here does not make any sense. You seem to be stating that your birth place SHOULD determine your economic outcome, and when it does not, you are owed reparations! That is arrant nonsense, and unrelated to the article you cite. Even if I assume that you mean people are owed reparations because they live in bad neighborhoods, neither your point nor your citation of this article in particular hold any water. The article itself is, like the first one you cited, and Mr. Coates diatribe, also an invalid complaint. While the first anecdotal individual cited faces a neighborhood situation, the study on which the article is based describes nationwide trends, not those of racial neighborhoods, and which suggest location is more significant than race.

"But the researchers’ analysis suggested that [lower upward-mobility rates of blacks] was not primarily because of their race. Both white and black residents of Atlanta have low upward mobility, for instance.

"The authors emphasize that their data allowed them to identify only correlation, not causation."

You are citing an article that is all about how a particular characteristic is MORE IMPORTANT than race, to make a point about racially-determined reparations! You are citing a study whose authors deny proves any causation as evidence of the cause of black hardships! Are you actually stupid, or just illiterate?

Does Seattle have an upward mobility rate superior to Atlanta's, because the state of Washington (a free state) got rich off of slavery, while Georgia (a slave state) did not?

To return to (largely irrelevant to the study cited) issue of Stacey Calvin, the woman mentioned in the beginning of the article, and people like her, and the neighborhood descriptions, "The low-income neighborhoods here often stretch for miles, with rows of houses and low-slung apartments, interrupted by the occasional strip mall, and lacking much in the way of good-paying jobs", what is indicated here has no racial component. There are not going to be a lot of well-paying jobs in a primarily residential area, with only a few strip malls that primarily service those residents. Commuting is a part of life, and many people, of all levels of income, including my brother, a highly paid lawyer at one of the top firms in NJ spend hours on the train every day. Maybe to some NY Times writer, who takes a subway for ten minutes from the Upper West Side to the Times office building, that seems an unconscionable hardship, but there is not a lot of money to be made opening up a business in a lower-income neighborhood. Liberals are the first ones to cite the correlation of poverty and crime, usually to erroneously assert causation, but always act surprised at facts which fit that correlation, like increased police activity in poor neighborhoods, or businesses avoiding those same neighborhoods.

Why is it wrong to expell more black children? Given the wide array of sociological differences between blacks and whites the only thing suspicious would be if they were being expelled at exactly proportional rates.

Setting all that aside, the article is a shallow piece of muckraking that offers no evidence or relevant facts about the types of offenses that induce suspension. Is the same behavior being punished the same way? Are white children receiving lesser punishments for the same behavior for which black children are suspended or expelled? What is the race of the teachers doing the suspending? Are white teachers more likely to suspend black kids or are these black teachers and principles who are suspending them? The only individuals quoted are two politicians and partisan cabinet members and not a single preschool teacher or researcher. Hell, no one would even put his name on that bare bones article!

How slavery has anything to do with the comparative expulsion rates of children from preschools, with no evidence cited behind the reasoning or cause for such measures, is beyond me. That might be evidence of discrimination, except we don't know who is doing the discriminating, and there is no evidence even remotely offered that blacks are being treated differently than whites. Given the partisanship apparent in the article, it is pretty safe to assume that any data supporting the implication that blacks are held to tougher standards would have been included had it existed. One of the left-wing politicians mentioned in the article calls for sensitivity training for teachers - in other words, he wants teachers to treat blacks differently from whites. What other form could sensitivity training relevant to this case take, other than orders to be more tolerant of misbehavior by black children? If everyone is being held to the same standard, then those responsible for holding that standard need objectivity, not sensitivity.

What about when ANYONE can walk through a black neighborhood at night without getting killed by a random resident? Jesse Jackson himself has admitted he would rather encountered a white person on the street at night than a black person. Assuming your absurdly slanted response refers to the Trayvon Martin case, there is no evidence of racism there, except for some slurs on the part of Martin himself, quoted by his defenders, whose own racism was so deep she didn't realize what she was admitting about him. The only evidence of Zimmerman's racism was a falsified recording. Furthermore, if we are going to be citing history to make the case for contemporary people's reactions to things, Zimmerman had personally experienced multiple thefts and robberies in his neighborhood by black youths meeting the description of Martin.

And as with every other example you offer, there is no correlation, let alone evidence of causation, that slavery is responsible for the alleged injustice you imagine in each case. Furthermore, given the leap to side with Martin by blacks at all levels of society, based solely on the skin colors of the individuals involved, plus the political pressure exerted by the police investigating the shooting, who initially declined to press charges against Zimmerman, in a country whose highest ranking law enforcement officer is a black man infamous for his partisan enforcement policies, suggest that all reparations would do is empower such devisive individuals who have seized power as leadership and representatives of the black community.

Without being familiar with the particular circumstances to which you are refering, the phrasing of your statement would appear to indicate that you are upset that someone was judged for his behavior, instead of his Stanford degree. I thought that was the ideal, for people to be judged solely on their behavior. You seem to be implying that someone's antics on TV should be ignored, and that people should concentrate on his college degree.
What is the difference? There procedures by which Trayvon Martin's family can sue Zimmerman for damages. There are procedures by which any wronged party can seek redress from those he believes wronged him. The problem with such procedures is that alleged victims must make a convincing case. If their claims are as weak as the arguments you present here, they are not going to get very far. What it sounds like you are calling for in your high-on-moral-arrogance, low-on-specifics-or-facts rhetoric, is an absurdly low standard of proof for black people to randomly get money in exchange for claims of hardship, regardless of whether or not there is any provable racism behind that hardship.
chance for opportunity? Who is asking for a chance for opportunity? Is that the same thing as a simple chance? Is it the same as an opportunity? Can you actually string together any coherent thoughts, or are random emotionally-inspired wishes or assumptions the only things your brain is capable of coming up with?
A history of which you are absurdly and completely unaware if you can make a statement like that. A black man today has vastly superior opportunities than those available to white people for 99% of history. At no point in history have blacks (or whites, for that matter) ever enjoyed superior rights to modern American blacks. There are not words to describe the degree of idiocy in the assumption that any but a tiny number of white people have "had it easy" over the course of the history of that race, and most of them at the expense or exploitation of other white people. Even in slavery, the sufferings of American blacks are a drop in the bucket of that institution. The very word "slavery" is derived from the name of an all-white ethnic group, the Slavs, who, at a much earlier point than blacks, were the main group enslaved in Europe. At the same time blacks were being exported to the New World as slaves, a much larger quantity of blacks were being death-marched across the Sahara desert for sale in the Middle East, along a trail easily identifiable by the bones of prior human chattel who died on the way. The men who survived were almost all immediately and roughly castrated, which bolstered the demand for a constant supply of fresh slaves, and for the women, sexual exploitation was the rule, rather than the socially-disapproved exception. For the slaves in America, they had superior shelter, clothing, life expectancy and a more balanced diet than a contemporary peasant in Ireland.

Comparative opportunities and situations are very tricky things, and picking and choosing specific anecdotal examples is no proof of the realities of conditions.

Every race has been enslaved, every race has held slaves, and slavery has been practiced on every continent in every century in the history of the world, except North American and Europe in the 20th & 21st (but there's still 86 more years, so I wouldn't bet on it), where white people held dominance. Slavery was only ever explicitly outlawed and suppressed by violence, in places where white people exerted influence. The United States of America sacrificed over half a million white men to rid ourselves of the institution and have bent over backwards looking for excuses to praise, glorify and encourage black success. At the point when efforts started to be made in that direction, along with significant quantities of federal largesse being showered upon them, is when the economic prospects of the black community as a whole began their nosedive. Also at that time is when blacks started voting overwhelmingly in favor of the Democratic party that had supported slavery, every form of discrimination since, held an overwhelming political dominance in the region where blacks were legally second class citizens, and steadfastly opposed every civil rights legislation to pass through Congress up until the 1960s.

Judging by trends of the last 50 years, reparations to the black community as a whole would only be contributing to a self-destructive cycle.

Now, have these groups been given the same opportunity or the same chance for opportunity?

What, specifically, were they given that blacks were not? The immediate antecedent to the Republican Party, which was formed in opposition to slavery, was an anti-immigrant party known as the "Know Nothings". The anti-slavery people made common cause with the anti-immigrant people in the 19th century, and there have always been anti-immigrant groups. The Irish were in a similar situation over 100 years ago, with similar social pathologies as those besetting the black community, including disproportinate criminality, broken families, substance abuse, perceived violent behavior (throughout the 19th century, the common element in most large scale inter-group ethnic violence was the Irish, who frequently rioted against blacks, Italians, Asians, Jews and others. Blacks and Asians moved to new neighborhoods to avoid the Irish). The most successful Irishmen were politicians, and community organizers. They were so prevalent in government jobs, that such jobs were once known as "Irish welfare" and the main private spheres of occupation at which the Irish did enjoy noteworthy success were entertainment and sports, with celebrities like George M Cohan, John L Sullivan and Jack Dempsey. They were openly discriminated against, and came to this country fleeing a situation every bit as bad materially as blacks suffered in the South after the end of Reconstruction.

That's the opportunity white people get. To tie the problems currently experienced by blacks to racism, and ONLY to racism, means that in the 1940s, when blacks enjoyed superior rates of employment to white people, had higher rates of marriage, lower rates of family dissolution or out of wedlock pregnancies, and outscored southern whites on intelligence tests, there was LESS racism than there is today! The increasing rates of these problems suggest that the more explicit measures taken against racism, the more blacks elected or appointed to high office, the more jobs set aside for blacks, the worse black people do.

There is nothing to concretely tie the problems of the black community to racism, except the self-serving claims of those who stand to profit by either finding it where none exists, or by stirring up racial grievances.

Please go on! I would be fascinated to hear exactly what special chances for opportunities for prospects for options "many Asian cultures" were granted in this country! So, I am sure, would "many Asian cultures". All that I can think of is the opportunity to bust their asses, building businesses up from nothing, having their homes and businesses confiscated because of a war, and starting over from scratch once released from concentration camps after said war in which an Asian-American unit won the greatest proprotion of medals.
Cute.

Your claim that you have made a case does not make it true. All you have done was provide citations of slipshod articles, or tangetially relevant studies, which demonstrated only your own blind commitment to a concept, to such an extreme degree that all an article needs is a picture of a black woman for you to leap to the conclusion that it supports your position, even when the words of the article specifically refute any racial element, much less any racist cause, still less any cause derived from slavery.
A "myth" supported by much empirical evidence.
What the hell does this empty rhetoric even mean? What is "cultural maturity"? Who determines such an absurd thing? My "culture" to the extent that I identify with any such categorization, is the one which has produced the highest degree of scientific, political and social development in the history of the planet, up to and including the mores you are citing with your claims of what black people are entitled to.

Name one specific instance of discriminatory practice that "continues to this day", aside from affirmative action quotas, or the President's habit of rushing to comment in favor of the black person in any given dispute. Since you have clearly demonstrated a complete and utter incapacity for logic or rational assessment, disparity of an outcome is not evidence of discrimination. The fact that blacks experiencing any particular hardship in greater numbers or proportions than whites is NOT proof of discrimination. This is not politics or ideology, this is logical FACT. The numbers of black children expelled from preschool compared to white kids similarly punish is meaningless regarding the question of discrimination without known the circumstances under which they were expelled. That datum alone, ONLY proves discrimination, if it is factually established (or assumed) that members of both groups behave identically, and are being treated in different fashions. Furthermore, the people DOING the expulsion have to be established. Simple facts of demographics and hiring practices suggest that black teachers and principals are more likely to be the ones expelling the black students, and that those students are expelled because they are disrupting classes of predominantly black students, who really don't need anything else interfering with their education.