Preface: I'm black, and grew up in poverty in black neighborhoods Detroit, and rose up gradually through the classes to be around a 1%er now. I have also taken numerous sociology and psychology classes and read hundreds of related studies on social and biological influence on development.
I'm prefacing because people keep saying "you aren't black, so you don't know" in responses: I -am- black, and DID make the class jumps where other people haven't, and not only have I seen with my own eyes what happened, but have compared it with wide scientific studies on related issues.
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The BIG thing that people ALWAYS miss in these types of discussions is that no one is in control of the person that they are. People are just made up of a mix of the chemicals that make up their body combined with the influences that they have in their lives. Everything that makes you, you, is determined by outside sources. The right wing type "bootstrap" mentality is just egocentric self-fellation that ignores the reality; every success that someone has is based on a large amount of combining luck. For instance, yes, I worked hard to go from powdered milk and government cheese and a barely running Chevy Nova that I grew up riding in to the best steakhouses and the fastest sports cars. However, me "working hard" was entirely contingent upon the right influences happening in my life at the right time, combined with having the emotional and psychological makeup based on early developmental influences and genetics, to make the "right" choice at the right time. And even still, hundreds of people with more potential than me, all around me in various stages of my life, are now living in relative poverty or "the system" just for their lack of right thing/right time situations.
THAT'S why people attempt to attack privilege or point out how race holds people back. If you're talking about LARGE NUMBERS of people, a negative start will result in a negative finish for the majority. True, there are special butterflies like myself that get lucky enough to "make it," but on the flipside, there are equal percentages of people that start off with every advantage in the world and fail spectacularly. That's the high and low end of the curve, not the masses in the middle that generally follow the curve.
And since, in America, many black people in this countries are only ~4 generations from those directly affected by slavery, many of all races still alive that lived through segregation, etc. - its ludicrous to think that we can be "post racial" enough this close to those times where an average black person's life and perspective would not be markedly different from those of other races. This gets even worse in places where races compete for the same resources, as people's natural tendency to "other" due to visuals, combined with the relative recent nature of BLATANT oppression (with many in power still alive from that era who held negative viewpoints at that time and still do), creates a certain "boiling pot" of social-racial issues, that can easily explode.
Any people that constantly feels oppressed will lash out when pressed too much; normally over a specific, publicized issue that puts it over the top. This has been true throughout history, all over the world. It's an expected outcome. The people of Ferguson, along with many black people in America, feel constantly oppressed, for obvious reasons if you even attempt to empathize with their backgrounds and every day life, and what's happening now is a sad result of the social conditions that heated the pot in the first place.