PostBourgie: The Podcast #8: N-word, Please!

PostBourgie: The Podcast #8: N-word, Please!

In this week’s podcast, Monica, Joel and Jamelle discuss the way people misunderstand culture and poverty, “emerging adulthood,” and Dr. Laura’s hilarisad use of the n-word on her radio show.

Key Links:

A Daily Dish reader blames the disparate life outcomes between blacks and whites on a dysfunctional culture, to which Monica responds over at the American Prospect.

The New York Times Magazine looks at “emerging adulthood,” a phenomenon in which twentysomethings are taking longer and longer to put away childish things.

And Dr. Laura shows her ass.

Shout-outs:

Monica shouts out some bourgie beer. Joel shouts out the PostBourgie running challenge. Get It! Jamelle shouts out the idyllic town of Kennebunk, Maine, not to be confused with the town with “port” at the end.

quadmoniker

Monica is a reporter who lives in Washington D.C.

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  • April

    That NYT magazine article totally ignores history and cultural differences: namely, that moving out of your parents’ house at 18 (and getting married post-haste) is hardly universal. Even in the US, many 20-somethings, especially women, lived with their parents if they weren’t married. That should be enough to poke a wide, gaping hole in the theory of “emerging adulthood” put forth in the story.

    • right. in college, I knew plenty of people who had every intention of moving back home after they graduated. In their families, it was expected that they would live with their parents until they got married.

      (that some of them are 30-plus, unmarried, and still at home is a source of constant tension, as you might imagine.)

  • Love that you folks are podcasting again on the regular.

    Great points about the barriers to upward mobility out of poverty being real vs. imagined for minorities. I also couldn’t agree more with Joel’s description of the so called systemic problems in Appalachia vs. homies in the hood who choose to be broke all on their own. I think the “white” establishment uses culture as both a weapon and an excuse for poverty especially as it relates to denying opportunities to black and Hispanic minorities from the inner city.

    Twice a month I teach a sales class to a group of inner city H.S. kids with all that in mind. I’m not teaching them how to sell stuff as much as I’m teaching them basic human interaction skills they haven’t been taught before in order to better help them understand how to sell and control themselves and to control and manipulate their environment. The issue with these kids isn’t cultural, it’s educational. The vast majority of inner city kids are supremely prepared instinctually to tackle the “real world” but they aren’t being prepared to 1. Feel like they belong and 2. get equal access to opportunity. My belief is that if we take care of #1 to the point these kids are empowered and prepared instead of intimidated they will have a better shot at crushing #2.

    • “The issue with these kids isn’t cultural, it’s educational.”

      Sorta. These behaviors are behaviors that kids who occupy very different social locations are taught gradually over their lifetimes, and reinforced by their environments. The reason the kids you’re teaching don’t feel like they belong is because they’re not acclimatized to those cultural skills that middle class kids take as a given. So many programs for the urban poor focus on refining those unfamiliar skills. A lot of middle-class Negroes, for example, take code-switching as a given, a skill in their cultural toolkit that helps them navigate different spaces. But it’s a skill you don’t learn if you never have to navigate those different spaces.

      But yeah, Mike. You’re right. It’s hard to separate #1 from #2.