How do we change our culture?

[Bill_7154]

I think that’s exactly the kind of question we should ask. But it’s not the only question I’m trying to ask. Racism and sexism are awful, but they’re only part of the problem. It’s African American male artists that are making this music, and it’s being played across America (and maybe the world), spreading the stereotype that women in general (and black women in particular) are some combination of materialistic, shallow, slutty, and crazy. But that message affects all women, and men, particularly kids who are just about to hit puberty, and portrays an image of what being a sexual person looks like.

I came of age listening to Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet” and “Apocalypse '91: The Enemy Strikes Black.” From those albums, I learned to think critically about sexism, advertising, stereotypes, racism, alcohol, the media, and materialism. Their strong influence on me convinces me that the music that children hear growing up shapes their views of culture. So songs like Cee Lo Green’s “Forget You” (“F**k you” on the internet and night clubs), and their historical predecessors (“Bth Betta Have My Money”; “Gold Digging Girls Drivin’ Me Crazy”, “Shake Ya Tailfeather”), leave impressions on society as a whole.

I certainly don’t blame all of this on hip-hop. The cheapening of human sexuality is a much broader issue than hip-hop. But I picked the title because in this culture, black women have been so maligned by the culture as a whole, black and white. In America, we are shown the images

And thank you for your gut reaction. I am sorry that my title offended. May I please ask your mind’s reaction? I’m a white guy who spends too much of my alone time thinking about this stuff.

Don’t forget that there are a whole lot of rock bands made up of white guys whose lyrics are filled with gore, evil, etc. What about the rock band black sabbath? What does that name convey?

I think that it’s problematic when you have a thread that in general is addressing moral decay in society, but you single out a minority race as the proposed topic of conversation.It brings me in a negative mindset but things do not have to be that way.

As far as solutions, I think they need to start at home. When I was growing up as a child I didn’t have restrictions around what I could and couldn’t watch on TV or what I coud and couldn’t listen to for music. Or what kind of posters I could/couldn’t have in my bedroom (well no naked ones).

I am now a father. My son 10 months old. We let him watch TV. I like the tv channel Nick JR. There are a lot of cartoons that focus on helping children learn lessons about sharing, helping, etc. These are the shows he will be watching as he grows. Not robots killing each other. Compare that to the cartoons I watched growing up. Like Tom and Jerry who killed each other like 50 times per 1/2 hour cartoon with bombs and stuff. or bugs bunny or that road runner and someone trying to kill him all the time…

I didn’t grow up violent at all, and don’t know if tv makes kids violent, but do think that it gets into a persons mindset to one degree or another. I consciously choose to not watch the news as it exposes me to seeing the daily reports of various isolated horrible tragedies that have happened across the country every day. I don’t want that stuff in my mind, so I don’t watch.

And I will guide and supervise my son with respect to what he watches. And we will have a strong bond so he will have a desire to please me and he will have a deep trust and respect for me.

So I think it starts at home, it’s a huge responsibility that I think must be taken very seriously. But it is common for parents to alllow their children to do whatever, not supervise them, not instill solid moral values in them, etc…

I really don’t have answers beyond that. My focus will be on raising my son to have strong moral values, empathy, respect, etc…so he can bring this out into the world and not be swayed by others who would have him involved in morally questionable activities. I will work to instill leadership qualities in him so he has the confidence to take a stand for what is right, hopefully he will be respected for doing so. Possibly he will influence others in a positive way also.

 

[Bill_7154]

A big problem in my area is single parents in very poor neighborhoods having kids they cannot afford. This was explained to me by one of the Baptist ministers who runs a soup kitchen.

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Years back I attended a lecture given by a psychiatrist addressing teenagers who kill. He had a map of the Greater Boston area shown via projector with dots representing where teenage murders were committed. He overlayed a map of the poor area’s of Greater Boston. Most all the murders were in the poor area’s, maybe every single one, but there were huge area’s of poverty where there were no murders and there were consentrations in other parts of the poor areas.

Then he overlayed another map and the coorelation was ridiculous. It was almost a perfect match to where the large cluster of teenage murders were committed. Turns out that this map was one representing poor single parent households. It was scary to see that.

 

[Crescentinus]

Your title is extremely offensive and unnecessary. I don’t care if it is sarcastic or made in jest. Blacks and whites tend to have different cultures. I don’t think whites can ‘fix’ black culture, nor do I want them to. Black people do not the great white savior to swoop in and help us fix ourselves.

The last time that happened, we were beaten into accepting Christianity and forced to conform to European traditions and customs.

Do not get angry at the title already! It’s already changed!

 

[Warandpeace]

No, they are not. But if you listen to popular music, much hip-hop and R&B refers to women as gold diggers, freaks, divas, babymamas, and plenty of words that aren’t fit to post here. Why?

I think we need to address these questions head-on if we’re ever going to build the Kingdom of God, which is inclusive to me of the term “culture of life.”

I don’t want to talk electoral politics any more. I think it’s divisive and makes adversaries out of people with common aims. Our country is divided more than it’s ever been, despite electoral outcomes hovering around 50/50 for decades. The Big Sort is a book from 2008 that I heard Boston College ecclesiologist Richard Gaillardetz cite in a talk I recently attended. It shows that if you look at locations that in the 1970s leaned one way or the other, they now are almost exclusively that way. This suggests that our culture is more divided that ever.

Here are two maps showing that on the county level, “landslides” in presidential elections have become vastly more prevalent over time, despite pretty close national totals.


See how many fewer competitive counties there are in the lower picture? The moderate middle is falling away. These patterns tell me culture is eroding, and reducing everything to a choice of two uniform policy positions represented by party platforms. Fundamentally, I don’t believe that government is the fix to most of our problems! To quote one of my favorite political books, Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, “Voting for the right is doing nothing for it.”

I’m a liberal, but that doens’t mean I’m in favor of big government and libertine sex. I don’t think that conservatives want children to starve, nor that they want to return to the Jim Crow era. But that’s the kind of polemic that we throw at one another.

I think we can learn from one another. One of the most enlightening conversations I had was with a conservative Catholic who pointed out that marriage trends in society mean that more single-person households are cropping up, meaning fewer people per home, which is consuming more resources and is bad for the environment.

Can we have a conversation about culture? How can we change culture in a way that young people will plug into?

A few random priors. By listing them, I don’t intend to imply any conclusions. They’re just things I’ve heard or researched:
-I had a recent conversation with a suburban Detroit high school teacher who told me that 80% of her sophomores were sexually active, and that many young girls think that sex is on the critical path to romance.
-Abortion rates are highest in the northeastern US, among African Americans, and among women under 25 years old.
-Children whose mothers at birth say they were result of a mistimed or unwanted pregnancy get less emotional and learning support than kids born of an intended pregnancy.
-In the last 30 years, women in the lower 2/3 of the income distribution have become much more likely to become single mothers than women in the upper 1/3 of the income distribution.
-The vast majority of children in Detroit, near my home, are raised in single-parent homes.
-Productivity gains have meant that fewer workers are needed to do the same work.
-The offshoring of manufacturing jobs that require a lot of manual labor has meant that it’s hard to get a stable job in America without some post-high school education.

How do we fix our culture?

How can we change culture in a way that young people will plug into?

There are young people that are trying!

 

[fnr]

For the haters:

I requested that this thread title be changed a day or two after the OP. I sincerely apologize for the offense my initial post caused. Now that it’s finally been changed, I hope that we can talk about changing culture without the hypersimplistic idea that we must elect our own politicians. I’m a "liberaltarian"guy who wants to stop abortion and make the Kingdom of God realized on earth. A song I love is “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy. Fundamentally, we can’t change culture by grabbing more political power. I firmly believe that as a result of our fallen nature, “power corrupts.”

All the best to all of you and God bless!