View attachment 49861
I don't understand things.
So, there's a couple of things at play here:
1) The groups that are up in this breakdown tend to be part of the least educated groups in the country. Not because they aren't capable, but because they have the least opportunities for it. (see also: poor whites). This is sadly by design in this country. Therefore, a lot of their education and information tends to be centered around religion, and those groups tend to be toxically patriarchal. Along those lines, we have also removed Civics from required education, which honestly destroyed thing across the board for generations.
2) In schools, unless you take advanced or supplemental courses, we rarely focus on modern American history, aka the last 100 years or so. We give some lip service to WWII, we talk about the civil rights movement, we downplay Vietnam, and hardly ever mention the Korean War. What almost never gets brought up is the Immigrant Act of 1924, or the Johnson-Reed Act. To put it bluntly, it imposed quotas on immigrant groups who could enter the country, to insure they could limit the number of "undesirables" entering the country. Southern and Eastern Europeans we more restricted than Northern or Western ones. Italians, Russians, anyone from a predominantly Catholic country, Jews, and banning all Asians, which included the Middle East. We teach kids to praise the US for what we did in WWII, but forget to mention how many fleeing Jews the US sent back to Nazi-occupied countries because "the quota" had been met. Also, mysteriously unmentioned, is these restrictions actually hurt the average American rather that help them, "
wages fell for U.S. workers in labor markets that were most affected by the decline in immigrant numbers while ongoing industrial and labor market transitions were accelerated.
"- Princeton Economics. One of the promises of JFK's campaign was that he would repeal the Johnson-Reed Act, although this never happened during his presidency. It was actually repealed by his successor.
So why am I bringing this up? Because when the act was repealed in 1965, new immigrant groups began to enter the US, and previously established groups were seeing less confinement to ghettos, and being excepted more by... The Establishment, for lack of a better description. I grew up hearing the myth repeated over and over again that this happened because the previous immigrant groups worked hard and proved themselves worthwhile. But if hard work was all it took, wouldn't the generations of Blacks and ancestors of slaves made leaps and bounds in society? What I've discovered through lots of digging on the subject is that the previously established groups would gang up on and look down upon any new group, pushing themselves up by knocking others down. They used racism and fear against others the way it had been used against them. It was never about "working hard"; almost everyone worked hard. It's a long winded way of saying they voted "face-eating leopard party won't eat my face because I'm shifting the blame to the people who aren't me". And because we don't teach that truth, it's just going to keep happening over and over again.