A lot of what we're teaching now is the opposite. It's like anti-CBT. Teach everyone they are helpless against the nefarious powers that be.
At the same time there is systemic unfairness both in the legacy of racism that has created inequality and in how society operates to this very day and I don't know how you solve those problems if you don't address them. The status quo is not acceptable to myself or a lot of other people
By conditioning people into believing that an outside force is the primary, if not only factor impacting their lack of success, you demotivate them from trying to adjust other factors that could improve their situation. The issue isn't that we address racism, it's that racism has become the end-all rationalisation for any deficiency at the individual level.
I get that you're of the opinion that telling people about racial inequality can demotivate them and make them feel fatalistic about their futures, but I don't necessarily agree with your assessment to the degree this is the case and you seem to think there is no room for nuance here. We must stop talking about this immediately. People are too simple to understand that there is still some unfairness that needs to be resolved, but that they should do their best regardless. No we must lie to them and tell them the system is fair and through their ignorance they will magically overcome the disadvantages they face.
You seem to think fear of systemic racism is a bigger obstacle to the success of black people than actual systemic racism and I just think that's absurd. Your basic premise that fear of institutional racism can be demotivating is valid and worth consideration. You're elevating it to the root cause of all problems is absurd. A black job applicant will receive half as many callbacks for job interviews compared to an identically qualified white applicant. There are little obstacles like that all over our society. Can they be overcome through tenacity and perseverance? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn't work to fix that %#@#? Hell No!
One encourages them to hold out as it gets better, the other for them to give up till it gets better.
I'm not calling it the root of all problems either, so please don't put words in my mouth. I'm saying it's not even a solution, it's the opposite, worsening the situation and feeding itself.
And to be specific here, I'm referring to the narrative around racism being the sole and primary cause of failure.
Principally because "the framing" isn't some well-defined objective thing, it's all a matter of perception, which means it's always possible to read whatever narrative you like into the facts.
Like this:
> the narrative around racism being the sole and primary cause of failure.
This perception is yours, not the facts on the ground.
Outside of very liberal strongholds identity politics can't get passed and they get in the way of any progress you want to actually make at trying to minimize the difference in outcomes between races.
People define systemic racism as different outcomes for black people than white people.
Basically no one denies that.
Which environment is easier to influence, one in which you are more aware of underlying factors, or one in which you are less aware?
In the case of that particular individual I'd say it's less laziness and more of systemic racism being deterrent to attempt self-improvement. In the "even if I try, I won't get ahead because these systems will hold me back" sense.
The point I was trying to make is that it's a lot easier to point the blame at something than admit to yourself that you suck - even if you're capable.
I don't know what your definition of systemic racism is, so I can't make a proper argument for/against it.
In any case, your comment has given me some food for thought in how I approach this person.
I would just say that anyone who claims they won't get ahead even if they try because of systemic racism is being ignorant. They might have to try harder than a white person would. They might face some adversity, but there really is no excuse for not trying. It would literally perpetuate the problem.
Not only does systemic racism exist, not only has the environment succeeded in inducing a victim mentality in this person, you are now blaming them for it? Classical "pull yourself by your bootstraps" bullshit. Do you really not see how dehumanizing your viewpoint is, and how such attitudes help perpetuate that person's inaction?
>As someone who also spends a lot of time thinking about global warming there is a tendency to have bouts of feeling doomed here and there.
Not to belittle your own existential fears, but feeling doomed due to global warming at least doesn't make you feel like there's something wrong with you in particular.
It's strange - people with a victim mentality are victims of their victim mentality. It's recursive and self-fulfilling, and it does take some amount of bootstrapping - which is, however, perfectly impossible in the absence of a bootloader and someone to push the power button.
Not really my point. But what you're saying is legitimate too. Though who are we to judge, considering we don't even have unambiguous language to discuss the subject without risking to offend each other's sensibilities.
>I was most concerned about pushing back on the notion that this subject should be taboo because somehow discussing systemic racism is the real cause of inequality.
I'm not sure if I can resolve the nesting of those clauses. IMHO, taboos are generally counterproductive because avoiding the taboo gives it more power. And enforcing a particular language, tone, or other mode of discourse about race relations can be used to perpetuate thinking that reinforces racism "in the name of fighting racism".
This whole thing is starting to look more and more like we need to find out if we're even capable of discussing systemic racism without freaking out, so we can try to conclusively establish what systemic racism is, so that we can look for a solution to systemic racism, so that we can finally stop cops from shooting civilians for being the "wrong" color. This yak shaving is truly the work of a higher intellect...
We went from "teaching about systemic racism might be harmful", to "systemic racism doesn't exist", to "Blacks are inherently different from other races, which will naturally lead to different outcomes" to "critical race theory might lead to nazism."
This is a wild rollercoaster of a thread and I want off of it. To jump off the original commenter's point, if you're concerned that there might be harmful outcomes from teaching students that society is keeping them down, why aren't you worried about similar outcomes that might come from teaching them that their race makes them inherently less suited for certain tasks?
I mean, think about what you're implying here. To claim that inherent race differences is the reason there's a Black wage gap -- ignoring everything else about that statement, it's way more fatalistic than telling kids that there are adverse social structures they should be aware of. Imagine being a teacher in a poor neighborhood and telling your class that the negative experiences in their life exist because of the fact they're Black -- not because of systemic racism, not because of laziness, not because of luck, but because of how they were born. You really can't get more fatalistic and harmful than that.
It's so utterly embarrassing to see comments like this on HN, directly under other comments that claim that racism is a solved problem. Sometimes this community really creeps me out, I'm watching people in the same breath argue that racism is solved and that Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor. How does this pass muster?
Because if they genuinely believe that blacks are inferior, then racism truly musn't exist from their perspective. They think that blacks will naturally be worse off and thus elevating them from there to a level where they're equal is actually unfair and racist to whites.
It's insane, I know, but it really is how people like that think.
Since racism is too shocking an idea for you, consider intellectually disabled people instead. How would you make them equal? We can provide special support services to improve their quality of life but we can't turn them into engineers if they're not capable.
There is zero scientific reason to believe that Black wage gaps exist because Black people are genetically inferior to whites, and there is a ton of scientific reason to believe that Black wage gaps are influenced by systems we have set up that have nothing to do with the individual. Equality means fixing those systems.
Equality means giving kids who are born in a ghetto the same education opportunities and investment opportunities as someone who is born in a rich white neighborhood. It means engineering our society so that success isn't a lottery based on the income level of your school.
The color of your skin has no bearing on your innate ability to be an engineer, so what when we try to address structural inequality we're not trying to suppress anyone's unique abilities. Quite the opposite, we are trying to remove the structures like racism, education gaps, and investment gaps that get in the way of people's unique abilities. How many Black engineers never get a chance to discover their potential simply because their school is too poor to afford computers or software?
We are also not trying to force everyone into a single uniform outcome, we are trying to remove systems that enforce uniform outcomes based on attributes like social connections and income that have nothing to do with innate talent. How many otherwise successful Black businesses were destroyed by openly racist policies like redlining, or because investors have an unscientific, biased view of what a successful businessperson "ought" to look like or what people they "ought" to know?
Now, separately, equality also means guaranteeing the same basic rights and social assurances to everyone regardless of their race and ability. That doesn't mean that everyone can do everything equally as well, it doesn't mean that everyone should have the same job or that success is evil. But even people who are not qualified to be engineers should be able to at least live normal lives without the threat of extreme poverty. They should be able to find housing. They shouldn't be put in situations where they're frightened of their local police. Equality means that Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness belongs to everyone, regardless of where you were born or what other people think about the color of your skin. So we're not looking to get rid of success, be we are looking to build basic social safety nets that guarantee that people are not left behind or discarded by society just because a company doesn't think they're useful enough to deserve a livable wage.
And yeah, that applies to intellectually disabled and differently abled communities as well. Being born with a learning disability is not a good reason for someone to be homeless. Those people also deserve dignity and a place in society.
That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school. Also, people have tried special high quality schools for poor blacks and it doesn't solve the problem. The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap.
You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems. So far, the only politically correct scientifically based reason I've seen has been that it's mostly due to the behavior of black mothers. There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life. If that's really the problem, then that's where the solution needs to be focused, not on whatever fits your personal political ideology.
You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic. I've looked for it, and asked people like yourself who I would expect to be motivated to find it, and it doesn't seem to exist. If there's no evidence either way, then you're not being intellectually honest by rejecting one hypothesis on ideological grounds.
Your research is out of date on these topics. General scientific consensus today is that nurture is as important as nature for IQ, particularly among younger children (the Flynn Effect alone makes this conclusion obvious).
You're also placing an over-emphasis on IQ, Black wage gaps exist in industries where IQ is not a strong measure of success. There's also good research indicating that Black wage gaps continue to exist after you correct for experience/education, and that hiring rates are influenced by non-intelligence based factors like how "white" your name sounds on an application resume.
This has been the case not just in Black communities, but in many of the "they're just biologically different" debates that spring up, particularly around gender. There's a statistically significant difference in how many women-created pull requests get accepted into Open Source libraries based on whether or not names are obscured/anonymized before the requests are submitted. I think it's pretty clear that IQ is not a sufficient explanation for those results.
So we're going to get into the IQ stuff, but to be clear, your view of IQ is skewed. IQ is not as important as you're making it sound for income (there's some correlation, but it's a lot milder than people assume). This is particularly true when you start looking at high-paying management roles where intelligence tends to matter a lot less than social skills. No engineering job has ever given me an IQ test before they hired me or asked me about one. Resumes are based on experience, which is largely determined by opportunity, connections, and free time. So I think it's really problematic to focus on IQ to this degree or to try to reduce success to a pure factor of IQ, but since you brought it up...
> The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap.
Check your research on this, it's actually the complete opposite of what you claim. Black kids raised in higher-income white homes have dramatically better pre-adolescent test results.
Interestingly enough, test results actually go down as they age and interact more with the broader adult world, indicating that there might be something about the surrounding world that makes those gains recede over time. I wonder what that could be?
> You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems...
Oh come on. I'm not the person here disregarding decades of research that say that socio-economic status is a leading indicator of school performance, influencing everything from teaching resources, to pre-adolescent stress, to nutrition, to exercise, to time spent on homework and extracurricular activities. Cut it out with the "you're just biased" nonsense, very few scientists seriously believe that poverty doesn't affect IQ.
> You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic.
First of all, that's not really how science works. You don't get to propose a ridiculous theory and then make it everyone else's job to disprove you. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence that this is not genetic, not the least being that genes for intelligence don't work that way and there is no single gene for intelligence, and also race doesn't work that way and there is no single genetic makeup of everyone who is Black. No one has ever found a set of genes solidly linked to intelligence that is shared across every Black community.
And people have tried. Race science was big in America's history. But it turns out, there is no good evidence for it, and there is a ton of evidence that environment is as influential as anything else for education levels. This is generally accepted science, and I don't understand how you're seriously arguing that environment doesn't affect education. It's not intellectually dishonest when looking at a theory that has never produced evidence in its favor and that doesn't really make sense based on our current understanding of genetics, to instead go with the theory that actually does have evidence.
But if you believe otherwise, I have a teapot orbiting Mars to sell you.
> There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life.
So you support free preschool, childcare, and increased resources for low-income parents in Black neighborhoods? Would you support enforcing maternity leave to make it easier for low-income parents to spend more time with their kids, since early-childhood parental involvement is a statistically significant indicator of future intelligence?
I mean, you seem to be pretty confident that you know what the problem is, so you must have a list of solutions.
I get kind of tired when people who are not lifting a finger to help Black communities try to guilt activists and argue that they'd be more successful if they just focused on the "right things." So I'm curious what you're doing to help.
> nurture is as important as nature for IQ
Yes, I know that but how does it show that group IQ certainly isn't determined by genetics of race?
> You don't get to propose a ridiculous theory and then make it everyone else's job to disprove you. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence that this is not genetic, not the least being that genes for intelligence don't work that way and there is no single gene for intelligence, and also race doesn't work that way and there is no single genetic makeup of everyone who is Black. No one has ever found a set of genes solidly linked to intelligence that is shared across every Black community.
Why is the idea that the effect of genes on life outcomes is correlated with race ridiculous but the idea that effect of genes on life outcomes cannot be correlated with race is not? How are you making the decision for ridiculousness?
Why does the number of genes need to be 1 or a common genetic makeup for every member of a race need to exist? You should explain that to link those facts to your conclusion.
(Some of) the reasons we're claiming that IQ is insufficient to explain racial disparities in the US are:
A) people have spent over 100 years trying to form this bullcrap correlation going back to the early days of slavery, and they've been disproved over and over again and we've started to notice a pattern here with how race scientists work.
B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics.
C) the disparities we're studying show up in contexts that can't be explained by IQ.
D) the disparities we're seeing are larger than we would expect to see given IQ gaps.
E) the IQ gap itself has decreased over time in ways that are inconsistent with a view that is purely biological.
You say you understand that both nature and nurture are a part of IQ. Then surely, there are policies we can pass that will affect the nurture side of things. You're not denying that nurture exists, so even if you genuinely believed that 50% of these outcomes were from biology, I'd still expect you to at least support housing and education policies that can help with the other 50%. I expect that you'd still be on-board with scientifically-backed improvements that have been proven to affect IQ.
And yet you're on here claiming that measures to reduce poverty in Black communities can't possibly help. That's not a claim that's consistent with an acknowledgement that IQ has a behavioral component, the only way you'd assume that factors like poverty aren't at least part of the problem is if you believed the gap was 100% purely genetic. So do you?
> Why is the idea that the effect of genes on life outcomes is correlated with race ridiculous but the idea that effect of genes on life outcomes cannot be correlated with race is not?
First, because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's not intuitive or expected that a biological adaptation to sun level would affect the brain to the degree you're claiming. Linking skin pigmentation to the brain is an extraordinary (and silly) claim, and you need to show some evidence for that kind of claim.
Secondly, it's a ridiculous claim because it's not being made in a vacuum. It's being made as the next step in a long chain of claiming that Black people on average couldn't possibly be educated, and then that they could never read well, and then that they could never own their own businesses, and then that they could never self-govern or take care of their own communities. And after a while of watching the same claim get disproved over and over again, you start to realize these people don't know what they're talking about and they're just making stuff up out of thin air. In this comment section, we follow Bayes.
So in that context, when somebody comes up to me and says, "okay, I know the last 20 arguments people made about biological inferiority in Blacks were wrong, and fundamentally I'm about to make the same argument again, but this time is special and you have to take it seriously..." Just, no, you're wasting my time at that point unless you're bringing some kind of real compelling evidence to the table.
And I don't see any compelling evidence you're bringing to the table.
> Why does the number of genes need to be 1 or a common genetic makeup for every member of a race need to exist? You should explain that to link those facts to your conclusion.
If there is a shared set of genes linked to intelligence that show up the same in every Black person regardless of their country of origin, or regardless of their percentage African/European ancestry, then I would expect people to be able to point to those genes. But they can't.
You're claiming that there's a shared racial genetic outcome. So what are the shared genes for people with that race? Where are they?
You don't know what these genes are, or how they affect intelligence, and how they're linked to skin color, or even what percentage of the Black community shares them, but you're super-convinced that there's a strong link between our brains and our ability to get a sun tan. And yeah, that's kind of silly and ridiculous. A comparatively small number of genes control skin color, and it's not really consistent with our current understanding of genetics to think that intelligence is based off of something so specific.
Measures to reduce black poverty can certainly help reduce black poverty, but I don't think it's known that they can bring blacks up to the same level of poverty as whites. So we may never completely solve the problem of black poverty with assistance.
> disproved over and over again
Can you identify even one of those disproofs? I've never found any and nobody who's tried to convince me they exist has ever produced any.
B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics.
How is that?
C) the disparities we're studying show up in contexts that can't be explained by IQ.
There can be other differences besides IQ, and there are environmental and cultural factors.
D) the disparities we're seeing are larger than we would expect to see given IQ gaps.
That's consistent with my idea.
E) the IQ gap itself has decreased over time in ways that are inconsistent with a view that is purely biological.
Straw man.
> It's not intuitive or expected that a biological adaptation to sun level would affect the brain to the degree you're claiming.
I'm not talking about skin color but "black" in the commonly used meaning of the word. Indians and Australian Aboriginals don't count regardless of the color of their skin.
> You're claiming that there's a shared racial genetic outcome. So what are the shared genes for people with that race? Where are they?
I'm not claiming there are shared genes causing it. It might have appeared independently for different black ethnicities.
If the idea of a correlation happening independently is too far fetched for you then another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA.
> You don't know what these genes are, or how they affect intelligence, and how they're linked to skin color, or even what percentage of the Black community shares them, but you're super-convinced that there's a strong link between our brains and our ability to get a sun tan.
You're putting words in my mouth. I'm not super convinced. I just think it's a realistic possibility.
Not knowing about the genes is not a reason to dismiss the possibility they exist. Even Darwin discovered evolution without knowing what genes were. Should that whole theory have been rejected until genes were discovered? Should dog breeders have stopped doing their job until genes were discovered? Of course not. This idea that we can't know it exists without identifying the genes is obviously ridiculous.
Can I identify a proof that Black people can read and self govern? I mean... the modern world? Are you arguing that early race science claims haven't been disproven? Are you familiar with the early claims that race scientists made? You should look up some of them if you're not.
The vast majority of early race science claims can be disproven by your own claims. A 10-15 point IQ gap is not high enough to render someone unable to read, vote, or understand mathematics. If early race science claims were true, then we would expect to see a much larger gap than we currently see. And we don't.
So what's been happening is we've spent a large portion of American history (and pre-American history) listening to people make strong claims that Black people were biologically unable to accomplish certain tasks. Then Black people accomplished those tasks, and scientific racists moved the goalposts a bit and said, "okay, they could accomplish those tasks, but they won't be able to do these ones." And that's continued basically unabated to modern times, where the goalposts are now at, "okay, but they can't achieve equal pay/productivity, they don't have the genetics for that task."
And at no point has the race science community had the presence of mind to take a step back and think, "maybe given that all of our testable predictions have been proven wrong throughout history, we don't understand genetics as well as we think we do."
----
> B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics. How is that?
See the remaining paragraphs I wrote in that comment. If you need more clarification, our modern understanding of racial categories is that they are more socially designated than genetically designated (more on that below). Our understanding of intelligence is that it is enormously complex and not likely to be controlled by a small number of genes behind, say, skin color. Increasingly, modern scientists don't even really think of genetic intelligence as being reducible to a single number anyway. Most modern geneticists have rejected a race/IQ link. There's still a lot about intelligence that the scientific community is still learning, but the people in the labs right now doing that research on intelligence do not think your theories are likely to be true.
> C) [...] There can be other differences besides IQ, and there are environmental and cultural factors [...] D) [...] E) [...]
So what's your objection to the equality movement and racial activism? It sounds like you agree there are environmental and cultural factors that suppress Black outcomes, so it should be easy to get on board with eliminating those factors. We can have a debate about genetics after we've eliminated the external non-genetic factors that you agree exist.
We've had a really long conversation at this point for you to just now let on that you think Black outcomes are in fact at least partially influenced by external factors that aren't related to innate ability (ie, systemic racism and/or inequality).
> Indians and Australian Aboriginals don't count regardless of the color of their skin.
??? I'm not sure how to respond to this. African American skin color exists for the same reason that Indian skin color exists, it's an adaptation to living close to the equator. This is a pretty weird objection. It also doesn't change anything about the fact that African American genetics are also not uniform at this point. A large percentage of the Black community is multiracial, and your "commonly used" definition of Black is primarily determined by who looks Black, regardless of the percentage of African American heritage that person actually has.
> If the idea of a correlation happening independently is too far fetched for you then another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA.
Your research is once again out of date, recent studies suggest that early African Americans also had Neanderthal DNA.
And again, if your ancestry claim was true we'd expect to see very different outcomes in individuals with mixed ancestry, and... we don't see that. So I'm still waiting for an explanation for why mixed-ancestor Blacks with European ancestors have the same outcomes as everyone else in Black communities. That is not a result you would expect to see if this was genetic.
----
> Not knowing about the genes is not a reason to dismiss the possibility they exist.
Yes, it is. I don't know how else to get this across to you, so maybe an analogy will work. I'll entertain your idea once you're able to disprove to me that the the liberal/conservative divide in our current country is based on innate intelligence.
You say there are other explanations for rural/urban income gaps and college demographics that fit that data better? You say that class divides, culture, and location are obviously better explanations? I'm sorry, I'm sure those are contributing factors, but until you conclusively disprove the genetic connection, then we have to entertain the possibility, even though the evidence is spurious and it doesn't really make sense as a causal relationship in the first place. You say that even if it was true, it shouldn't derail conversations about bias or political equity or censorship? That's certainly a perspective, but maybe we should bring the theory up on every conversation about liberal bias anyway. I'm not saying it's the reason, just that it's a realistic possibility that no conservative has ever conclusively found proof against.
Do you see the problem here? It's really easy to make silly and even outright harmful claims like the above and then retreat back behind "just asking questions". That's why (particularly when we're dealing with a field like race science which has a history of being incorrect and harmful) we demand a certain standard of evidence. Like a set of genes. Or at least a correlation that can't be better explained by external stimuli.
> Should that whole theory have been rejected until genes were discovered? Should dog breeders have stopped doing their job until genes were discovered? Of course not. This idea that we can't know it exists without identifying the genes is obviously ridiculous.
But not half as ridiculous as the idea that now that we know genes exist we should ignore them. We have better standards now. This is like arguing that we don't need to identify viruses because some people in olden times washed their hands occasionally.
And to be clear, we knew that dog breeding worked because we could run experiments and see it working. We knew that evolution existed because we could make testable claims and predictions that were proven true. Both of those things are a million miles away from "I have no evidence for this, but you can't disprove it." Evolution was not running around claiming that it should get the benefit of the doubt until it was disproven. It brought real evidence and testable predictions to the table that made sense based on what we knew about the world.
That's clearly not what we're talking about. Why would you mention that something obviously false has been disproven? It's a strawman. It's hard to read so much of your writing when you can make such extreme misinterpretations of what I'm saying.
> African American skin color exists for the same reason that Indian skin color exists, it's an adaptation to living close to the equator. This is a pretty weird objection.
That's quite simply not what black means in common language. It doesn't matter what the cause of the skin color is, the correlations with IQ and income are not the same.
> early African Americans also had Neanderthal DNA.
Yes. That's consistent with what I wrote. Again, you seem to be intentionally misunderstanding me. This is getting frustrating.
> So I'm still waiting for an explanation for why mixed-ancestor Blacks with European ancestors have the same outcomes as everyone else in Black communities.
Oh. didn't know that. Reference?
Anyway, still no clear evidence against "Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor.". So I assume it doesn't exist.
Look, it's not my fault you don't know the origins of race science or what the claims were that your predecessors were making. If the origins of your theory are embarrassing to you, then... I mean, I don't know what to tell you, maybe reflect on why those origins are embarassing.
More recently, the modern wave of race science has been largely driven by people like Murray, who posited in the Bell Curve that the 10-15 point IQ gap is primarily genetic and highly heritable. Murray suggests that social interventions are unlikely to significantly lower that gap, and that instead we should focus on eugenics (he uses nicer language of course).
You and I have already disproven Murray's theory in previous comments by noting that gaps decrease when race is hidden from hiring managers, and by noting that wage gaps persist in industries where success does not have a high correlation with intelligence. So we don't need to rehash that theory, you're already on board with me that Murray is wrong to say that the current IQ gap can be mostly explained by genetics. You've already softened that claim, and now you say that the current gap is partially explained by genetics.
The point is, the entire history of race science has been people like you making claims about Black inferiority, getting those claims debunked, and then shifting the goalposts a little and making the same exact claim just to a slightly lesser degree. There's a pattern here.
> That's quite simply not what black means in common language.
Yes, it really is; the person on the street is not using ancestry tests to determine what percentage "Black" people are, the common denominator is skin color. Black communities do not have the uniform genetic background you're assuming, and common metrics people on the street use to determine "Blackness" do not line up with ancestry.
This is broad scientific consensus, the position of the AAPA since the late 90s can be summed up as: "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. [...] Notably, variants are not distributed across our species in a manner that maps clearly onto socially-recognized racial groups."[0] This is the general consensus of people who are actually studying genetics and anthropology in the real world.
And in fact, when you actually go over the studies even from race scientists, what you find is that in the majority of cases the racial phenotype even they use to categorize their subjects also lines up with the AAPA's view. You know how the majority of these race science studies determine who is and isn't Black? Skin color and heckin self-reporting of racial identity. So it's just pure revisionism to claim that "actually, we meant something different by Black the entire time".
If you are trying to make a claim here based on purely percentage of African American heritage, then you need to throw a lot of existing race research out and start over, and that includes books like the Bell Curve which were almost entirely based on metrics like self reporting and not actual measurements of ancestry.
> That's consistent with what I wrote. Again, you seem to be intentionally misunderstanding me.
My deep apologies. Just to make sure I understand, when you said that "another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA", what you actually meant was that African Americans do have recent Neanderthal DNA?
And not to keep harping on this, but "shared" is putting in a lot of work here, because as I keep mentioning, African American populations do not have the genetic uniformity you claim.
> Oh. didn't know that. Reference?
Take a look at stats released from companies like 23AndMe and Ancestry. Our best guess is that the average African-American genome is about 20-30% European (although we've only recently started really measuring this, so those numbers might change over time). That range can vary drastically as well, it's not that all Black people are uniformly 25% European, they might be close to 50%, or as low as 10%. I'm not sure what kind of reference you're looking for with that, but there have been a couple of press releases and cooperative studies using 23andme data that go into detail on their findings.[1]
It's pretty clear that the Black IQ gap is consistent across demographics and geographic regions in the US, which... like I said, leads us to question why we're not seeing more variation, even in studies from people who believe in scientific racism -- because the actual racial makeup of those groups is not consistent across geography.
----
> still no clear evidence against "Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor.". So I assume it doesn't exist.
And still no clear evidence against "Conservatives are genetically predisposed to being lower education/poorer than the average population", so I also assume that evidence doesn't exist.
I will make you understand how burden of proof works. If you believe that it's my job to disprove that Black IQ gaps are genetic, then I want you to disprove to me that rural/urban Conservative/Liberal IQ and wage gaps are genetic -- or I want you to explain to me why you think that theory shouldn't be factored into every discussion about university bias, voting rights, and industry discrimination against Conservatives.
And of course, I'm still waiting for a response to the below quote:
> So what's your objection to the equality movement and racial activism? It sounds like you agree there are environmental and cultural factors that suppress Black outcomes, so it should be easy to get on board with eliminating those factors. We can have a debate about genetics after we've eliminated the external non-genetic factors that you agree exist.
You say that you agree with me that a purely biological difference, even if it does exist, is not enough on its own to explain the gap we see. So you should be fine with progressive policies that attempt to eliminate the non-heritable reasons for inequality.
----
[0]: https://hysanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement...
[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/genetic-study-reveal...
No doubt there is also discrimination. Especially if there's a real effect, it's easy for people to be aware of that and exacerbate it with discrimination. Same as women can't do X man's job until they could.
> dramatically better pre-adolescent test results.
Childhood interventions to raise IQ are known to wear off at adolescence. It's not necessarily because of the adult world but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use or something like that. I don't know but you have to look at post-adolescent IQs for the effect on adult-income.
Then what are you arguing about? You're calling into question the entire concept of equality activism for job/housing/education opportunities, and you don't disagree that discrimination exists?
> but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use
That is an extremely worrisome trend if you're trying to argue that IQ tests measure innate intelligence and not training. The whole point of an IQ test is that you shouldn't be able to "cram" for it, you shouldn't be able to "cheat" and temporarily influence the results so that they don't accurately reflect intelligence.
So at the very least, this puts your claim that IQ is a permanent number that can be accurately measured before adolescence into question. You're admitting here that you don't believe IQ is a static number. You're suggesting that external interventions can bring out latent abilities that won't be captured or accounted for in a normal IQ test. That's an idea with pretty big implications. Essentially, what you're saying is that given the right environment/early-education/nutrition/etc, that test results can be artificially primed.
So given that claim, why are you so certain that IQ is set in stone before preschool? How do you know that there aren't external factors that can lower IQ over time? What makes you sure that an oppressive or high-stress environment couldn't suppress or encourage those latent abilities even later in life?
You don't really have any way to know that IQ tests given later in life wouldn't be subject to environmental effects that could dampen or inflate results, do you?
Not my claim.
As you surely know, IQ tests are scaled by age according to how normal people develop. So an individual who undergoes unusual life experiences can easily have their IQ change with age since their development would deviate from what the rest of the population has. If every person had all the best IQ enhancing interventions, then I would expect IQ scores to be more consistent with age since the environmental factors are controlled, leaving the inherent factors to dominate. But that's not the world we live in, and you can "train for the test".
> That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school.
I'm not going to waste my time on this if you're not going to stand by your claims.
The IQ gap that appears and is measured before school age can be reduced by external intervention. Therefore, if the tests are accurate, then something is happening to those kids as they age to make their skills regress. If the early tests are not accurate, then it stands to reason that adult tests could suffer from the same problems and should be similarly distrusted.
Either way, your claim that IQ tests prove that the sole cause of gaps must be introduced before children reach school age is unsubstantiated.
If that's the case, the parent comment, while embarrassing for this site, has a valid claim - that at some point blaming everything on the system could become detrimental to everyone.
This video goes over a lot of the problems with the book.
Where's the evidence that there is no significant inherent biological such as genetics? Just because it's a popular belief doesn't mean it's strongly supported by evidence. I haven't seen any. I even saw an adoption study that attempted to answer that, and when it embarrassingly turned out that black kids still had lower IQs despite their white adopted families, the authors suddenly discovered they'd forgotten to control for age at adoption and that must surely have been the cause of the differences. They were silent on the effect of the race of the biological parents even though it could be clearly seen in the data that the more black biological parents a child had, the lower his IQ despite the race and income of his adopted parents.
No. You're confusing group outcomes with individual ones.
To avoid the emotion of racism, you can look at all Americans instead. Average income in the US is $30,000/year. Is it wrong to teach that to kids? No. Does it cause them to fatalistically assume they can't earn more than that because they're unlucky to be American? No. Each individual kid might not be one of the destined-for-low-wages people.
This is a weird kind of selectivity. You weren't making this argument when OP claimed that teaching about systemic racism would be fatalistic. You were perfectly fine with the conflation between group outcomes and individual outcomes on that front.
So why the sudden change in heart?
You just hopped onto it to say you want off of it?
That is not what Nazi Germany believed. Also, coincidentally, German Jews were not more rich then average, there was no persistent difference like that. They were lower middle class that clustered in the few cities. Portion of them were refugees from Eastern Europe.
Also, Germany had actually very small Jewish minority which was very integrated.
Though anecdotal, I know several adults who have fallen into the "it's because systemic racism that I can't get ahead" trap. One example is a low-achiever socially awkward friend of mine that complains about not being able to find a tech job, yet spends the vast majority of his days playing video games. Instead of recongizing that his skills (social and coding) are subpar and addressing it, he chalks it up to systemic racism, makes an angry post on Facebook and calls it a day.