the condescension in this thread is telling in terms of the reception to most of these messages by most people, and speaks to the way that some of the racist ideologies of years long past have been internalized...of course there are, always have been & will always will be, those that are ignorant willfully, of every creed...however for most there are
real structural things that affect their lives adversely that have less to with ignorance than really that the economy in many places (maybe especially in the western countries) that make it very difficult to move up the way people did even a generation ago.
it may be that there will always be some portion of people, who for whatever reason, don't fit with the economy at a particular time, it used to be that one didn't need much education to get a gig, that not only was well paying, but pretty stable...and that isn't really true of most anyone these days; such as there is now the expectation that even the most educated will likely have multiple different & perhaps tangentially related (if related at all) careers. add that to the increasing efficiency of technology many people & jobs are getting displaced and that the cost of education is increasing at just about every level despite the seeming ubiquity & potential of the internet as a learning tool...if you don't need as people to do things, what happens to people?
as to solutions? typically it has been education but the idea of 'creative destruction' is or has become just apart of the churn of capitalism/ thought, the system is kinda built around the idea that cycles of boom & bust and that people & capital will move accordingly, new replacing the old...it may just be that the cycle is/ has been moving too quickly to for people to adjust at a reasonable investment both economically & time put in...this video gets at what i mean in ways, sometimes people don't have the luxury (for various reasons) of developing a thing over time to the point of mastery, get discouraged or move on to something more lucrative, some countries are even thinking about experimenting with giving every citizen of their country a
livable stipend or 'basic income':
it isn't that 'race' doesn't play a factor in things, it most certainly does and in some places it is more pronounced than others but it seems to certainly be less of an issue now than it was decades ago; and that is not to mean that things are all sweet now, just seems to be shortsighted to think of issues in terms of 'race' when the problems are much bigger than that...because we don't exist in a vacuum, and i'm generally skeptical of anyone who frames things in those terms, but probably more importantly i think history has shown that 'race' is a rather weak point of connection, self-interest & culture probably go further...and to that point the issue(s) that concern a person living on the east coast are different from those faced in the south from those in the midwest, from those on a different continent; which contributes to the ways the cultures themselves already differ...
i don't begrudge trying to getting together with like-minded folk to do whatever, granted it isn't harmful to others, my question is why put down others because they don't follow your agenda? to call another man (or woman for that matter) lost is the epitome of condescension, people make decisions based on the options they see or can create, and the problem in a many communities is that there are too few of them...