Why do they not take the free money?

[slakjaw]

When I was in college There was tons of financial aid available only to black people. How come they don't take advantage of this? I am sure some do but it seems like its a low percent. I am guessing it has to do with the "man" keeping them down or some such thing.

This makes me angry. its out there, for free, but untapped.

Oh, and, Obama is an a$$hat.

[Moses]

Originally Posted by slakjaw

When I was in college There was tons of financial aid available only to black people. How come they don't take advantage of this? I am sure some do but it seems like its a low percent. I am guessing it has to do with the "man" keeping them down or some such thing.

I think you got it wrong. I have worked with a lot of black physicians over the years. I never knew any that had to take a lot of student loans.

[slakjaw]

Thats what I meant. Grants and what not. (glad to see some are being used)

EDIT: I am not angry that these grants are specifically for black people. I just cant understand why they don't use them.

[djmcmath]

There's a cultural thing here that bugs me. One of my friends lives in South Carolina, deep in the South, and this cultural detail comes from his experience. Apparently, back in the days of slavery, some slaves were field workers, while others were inside slaves. The field types did all the hard manual labor, really bore the brunt of the pain of slavery. The inside types generally ate better, dressed better, and were more well cared for. Because of this, the outside people had a general bitterness towards the inside people, a general hatred and resentment towards what they referred to as "house n*****s."

That term is alive and well today -- anyone who pushes for higher education, material success, stability, raising a family out of the ghetto, etc. is referred to as a "house n*****," not by whites, but by blacks. The culture works very hard to provide peer pressure against improvement.

Another interesting anecdotal bit ... there was a study involving a group of monkeys. There was food dangling near the top of a long rope, such that any monkey who saw fit to climb the rope could eat all he wanted. The researchers promptly applied negative feedback to the entire group any time that any monkey started climbing the rope, however. Pretty quick, if any monkey climbed the rope, the other monkeys would attack him and drag him back down. ...Then the researchers started changing out monkeys, and they stopped using the negative feedback. Each new monkey in the group would rapidly learn that you don't go for the food -- despite the fact that the feedback was gone. Eventually, the researchers had swapped out the entire group -- not a single monkey present had actually experienced the negative feedback, and yet the training in keeping each other down had been so effective that they still did not climb the rope.


So, yeah, that's my $.02.

Dan