'Hey, my daddy overcame adversity by working hard! You can too!'
Have you ever heard of the Nature vs Nurture argument? Not everyone is the same, and people are often shaped by their environment. It's not an excuse, but it is a valid reasoning. Some are more suceptible to their environment's influence than others.
Long story short, no one person is the same.
Lol, you talk about 'opportunities' and shit. When you clearly grew up in a nice family. What gives you the right to speak as if everyone would have the same opportunities as you?
When you don't have clear opportunities you go out and make them. ET's point is that people in his family with little or no opportunity worked their butts off and made things better for the next generation, who did the same, and so on.
Nature or nurture makes no difference. If the hand you were dealt is no good you everything you can to build a better hand.
What happens when the person living in such poor conditions can't find a job? What happens when you're in desperate need of money, but you're not sure if the job interview will even get you a phone call back?
You keep looking for more jobs. More and more, and any job. There are jobs out there that go begging every day, even as bad as the economy has been for the last few years. It's not pretty and the job may even suck.
Seriously, read over the stuff he's said in this thread.
Plot twist: I'm a fucking idiot.
How many of them are actually looking for jobs?
This is what goes on in the city I come from. At night people stand out in the streets selling drugs, getting drunk, going to clubs, fighting and killing each other, some of them even let their kids roam the streets at night when they have school to go to the next morning. Do you know where my Mom would've been on a night like this? Working overtime. In the event she didn't have a job, you can bet your ass she would've been in front of the computer applying for dozens of positions doing everything humanly possible to find one. The internet is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, honey. You can search for jobs morning, noon, and night instead of twerking on the sidewalk.
Oh my bad, I forgot. It ain't they fault, it's the white man that's forcing them to act like buffoons all hours of the night. If you just remove the racist white mans, all these people would have PhDs and be raking in $100,000 a year.