> On 8/3/2011 12:38 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>> I work with four black men. At lunch the other day, they were
>> telling
>> me that, among their friends (most of whom are also black), most
>> people didn't believe in setting aside "wealth" in the form of your
>> house or savings and passing it on to your children. The idea is
>> that
>> life is short, you never know what tomorrow will bring, and you
>> might
>> as well spend it while you got it.
>
> If that's a general phenomenon, it sounds like it might be relatively
> recent development. Back in the 60's, Milton Friedman noted that
> blacks
> systematically had higher saving rates than whites (after taking their
> income level into account). He attributed it to an attempt to cope
> with
> the effects of discrimination, or something to that effect.
>
> SA
>
Yeah. As I said in my last sentence, there is probably a bit of
posturing going on in that conversation (the politics of
respectability) but, as far as they were concerned, the conversation
was about "kids these days". In this case, they were all identifying
with the older generation who they saw as once having aspirations
toward home ownership. They are in their 20s and 30s, but they were
representing peers of the same age group as irresponsible people
compared to their elders.... a bit of a Bill Cosby vibe to it, yeah. I
get yelled at for being a pansy-assed white liberal sometimes. :)
katrina hazard gorden documents what she thinks of as a similar phenom in terms of dance and music: a shift from dance forms that emphasized coupling up in the 50s and 60s, to the emphasis on single styling post 60s. Her argument is that there was an infrastructure that supported black het family life before that time, and it was reflected in the rates ofhetmarriage constantly rising througout the 20th century, then diving after the 60s. Hazard Gordon ties it to the same factors that Eli Anderson ties it to: the decline of infrastructure supporintg "traditional" het family, male breadwinner wages, deindustrialization, etc.
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