While Data significantly shows that poorer people experience great disadvantages in the education system and job market, some people still feel offended to be confronted with their privilege. Why is that?
Ok, I get it. It’s hard to be confronted with privileges you supposedly own. I mean how unfair is that? You struggle so hard at university, you work long hours at night, you have your individual problems with family, love, and friends that you solve for yourself too and suddenly a person of color comes along and gets extra recognition for being born poor and with darker skin. How unfair…
I get the psychology behind that and I also understand that richer folks experience hardships too they don’t want to dismiss. However, it is quite peculiar whenever I talk to some of my white friends and they suddenly make a competition about whose lives are more messed up.
White people would actually want people to see them as someone who came from a poorer background and had hardships in life but they would indeed never want to live the life of a poor person and when I say poor, I speak of a pretty complex topic of course but in general, the government considers you poor if you are under the federal poverty line that is based on the size of a household and the annual income.
Some of my white friends live in a house and had married parents growing up who both work and are both academics and yet they claim they had been raised under financially lower conditions. It’s their try to compare their upbringing to that supposed less privileged poor man. Only when they are confronted with the fact that some people live with an only parent, that is also a single provider to the family and a non-academic, they start sweating. It seems that is somehow hard to compare your suffering to those of an actual poor person.
Look, of course you got your issues, regardless of what other people endure, but we need some objective standards here man and luckily we got data to provide the evidence we need here.
A 2018 study published in the Journal of Children and Poverty found that poverty was associated with lower academic achievement, particularly in math and reading, and that these disparities were more pronounced for students from racial and ethnic minority groups.
Another study report from the Southern Education Foundation (2017) found that more than half of students in public schools across the southern United States were living in poverty and that these students were less likely to have access to quality education, experienced higher rates of disciplinary action, and had lower academic outcomes than their higher-income peers.
Do you really believe it is all coincidence that most poor people stay poor and that these poorer people often belong to ethnic minority groups?
Well, of course my white friends can’t accept that defeat. They already had to admit that they had an easier upbringing than some other folks in society. But that’s only “because they don’t try hard enough” and even better “it’s their culture”.
Yes, to take responsibility for one’s situation is indeed important to improve your life. But you really want to deny that some social structures make it very hard for certain people to succeed? You know I live in Germany and here Muslim people (that share Muslim culture) belong to the less educated and poorer group of society. That’s different, however, in the US.
According to a 2017 report from the Pew Research Center, Muslims in the United States have levels of educational attainment that are similar to the general U.S. population. The report found that 35% of Muslim adults in the U.S. held at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 30% of the general population. However, the report also noted that Muslims in the U.S. were more likely to have higher levels of educational attainment than Muslims in other parts of the world.
So why do the same people, perform so differently in two different countries? Because it’s about the access of quality education that some people actually have to achieve themselves, it is not just given to them. I work 20h per week while attending university and all that money I spend for education and my career. Other people are being supported by their parents and I don’t get why that is so hard to admit for some of you guys.
Look, no one tries to dismiss your success just because you had it relatively better than other people in society, and in the end, no boss cares about your upbringing but the skills you have. The only problem is that we need to support minority groups to develop these skills and offer them opportunities they don’t get anywhere else. Is it that hard to accept? So if the black guy that was raised in a Trailer park, gets his bachelor’s degree than yes, he had to work double as hard as you to achieve that which doesn’t mean your success is not admirable it simply means that we shouldn’t always just look at results but also question the background of a person before we judge them.
“Wait, you don’t have a degree? (Laughing in disgust)…oh you were an orphan…sorry”
That is something to think about for today: Don’t you believe that there are some things in the world that are even bigger than your egos?
