A guest post from commenter King:
The kids at a certain summer camp didn’t like Rodney because he was different. Around the pool one of them overhears Rodney telling a camp counsellor that he can’t swim. So an idea is born.
Late the next night they tell Rodney that all of the guys are going on a secret adventure, and that he is invited to come along. This is the first time that Rodney has been shown any sign of friendship from any of the popular guys, so he jumps up excitedly and starts getting dressed. They all silently walk down the hill through the trees and begin untying the camp rowboats. Rodney looks a bit nervous, but when everyone else jumps in, so does he.
The boys quietly row out into the lake now. Rodney asks, “Where are we going anyway guys?” Nobody says anything so he just looks ahead and keeps quiet. As they reach the middle of the lake, the larger boys suddenly grab hold of Rodney who is now terrified! In one swift movement they throw him overboard in the middle of the lake. In the darkness they can hear his little voice begging in terror over his thrashing arms. But soon, his voice is silent and the sound of his desperation is replaced by low gurgling noise, and then dead quiet.
Here is a question: What was the cause of Rodney’s death?
Some of the boys said,“He died because he was too lazy to take the time to learn how how to swim.” (He died because he was LAZY)
Another said: “He died because he was afraid of the water” (He died because he was a COWARD)
And yet another boy said: “He died because he never took any swimming classes.” (He died because he was UNEDUCATED)
But the real answer is that he died because he was pushed.
Any other answer is dealing only with secondary circumstances. YES, knowing how to swim might have been a solution to his dilemma, once he was in the water, but NOT knowing how to swim was not the CAUSE of his dilemma. The CAUSE was the callous treachery of those who set upon him.
Same thing with Black Americans – yes, becoming doctors, dentists and accountants would help matters. Yes, having intact families would be a huge plus! Yes, avoiding teenage pregnancy would be very good too. BUT those are not the primary CAUSES of our dilemma here in the United States. The CAUSE is:
- Slavery
- Forbidding an education
- Then under-education
- Refusing to hire us
- Portraying us as buffoons or criminals in the media
Etc. etc. Those are the CAUSES.
Overcoming these historic wrongs with education, family restoration, therapy, rebuilding of self image, rebuilding of community image… etc may be the SOLUTION, but the failure to do so will never be the cause.
Those two concepts need some separation.
See also:
- Evasive Action – a counterpost by commenter Unamused on his own blog, the Unamusement Park
- black shame – where this post first appeared as a comment
- black pathology
- just world doctrine
- white privilege mindset
- whites-only swim clubs
I definitely see your point, but I would add that he died because he was trusting, and excepted friendship from people who would rather do him harm then see him learn how to swim.
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Essentially, in these debates about race, I’ve often come across this slight of hand in many a long discussion. There is this tendency to try and avert attention from the racist cause of the current effects of Black social dysfunction with statements that basically boil down to this:
“The cause of your condition is your lack of willingness to implement my solution”
This is, of course, is a logical misrepresentation. A solution and a cause are two separate concepts.
If a bully is beating up a 3rd grader, the CAUSE of his black eye is not that he didn’t try hard enough to fight back. The CAUSE is not that he couldn’t run fast enough to get away. The CAUSE was not he couldn’t negotiate a deal with the bully not to hurt him. Those all represent SOLUTIONS, not causes.
Similarly, the CAUSE of the present condition of Black people in the U.S. is not that they haven’t availed themselves of any number of possible solutions, the CAUSE (for the most part) is still racism.
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@ Ken
The CAUSE of his death was not that he was too trusting or naive.
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Yes and no. This seems to be the black version of white arguements from their bigotry. Some people want to live in ignorance and even profit for it. For example, Tyler Perry. He know that knowlegde and the fact that a lot of bp in america are so thristy to see any represention of themselves. He doesn’t have to try hard.
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The cause is: An initial race based system of governing people and their activity.
The cause is: The maintenance of this still existing system, constantly being REFINED by the beneficiaries of said system.
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Interesting post –
But never mind the causes. Four hundred years worth of discussing the cause has not brought racism to its end.. and it won’t.
As some in the Neely Fuller Jr camp might say: replace racism/white supremacy with JUSTICE. Justice – in this case means that no person is ever mistreated (intentionally or otherwise) AND those who need the most help, get the most help. It doesn’t get any simpler or plainer than that!
So how does this idea of “justice” get planted and strongly rooted in the minds of others? Umm.. Good luck with that.
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“So how does this idea of “justice” get planted and strongly rooted in the minds of others? Umm.. Good luck with that.”
I think most of us pick up the idea of Justice along the way if left to our own devices. It’s called the golden rule and it’s basically hardwired into almost all of us. But so is us-them thinking which can easily circumvent that wiring depending upon the circumstances. Racism does a good job of it, so does nationalism and any tribal type thinking really. All we really need to do is make our tribes more inclusive and accepting of differences.
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I’m wondering King,
Did you get the parable of Rodney from a source? Or had you just kind made the story up yourself? It’s a fairly good representation of cause versus effect versus solution. (And from my lil’ folklore anthro nerd-space I’m a little fascinated where you got it from/what inspired you about it.)
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I’m having a Lord of the Flies moment right now…*sigh*
Okay; we know that the state of black Americans isn’t our fault, but how do we claim what we’ve never had? I think that we have to separate ourselves from the Jack Merridew-esque ideas that shame us into believing we can’t do better, and reaffirm our values. We have to start teaching black people that education has merit and value, and telling ourselves that we ourselves have value and deserve to have education. This should start with the diversifying of blacks in the media and showing them in a variety of roles, with a variety of personalities, and dissolving the stereotypes that we believe about ourselves. Only when we do this can we really start to change the American, especially the black American mindset.
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It is good to discuss the causes but it is also necesary to discuss the solutions as well. I believe the ONLY way for blacks to get their life in order is through UNITY. All this colorstruck nonsense and self-hatred has to stop. I was just recently discussing with Usagi how many African Americans, as well as other blacks from all over the world, have adopted racist beliefs, usually against their own people. And like I mentioned earlier, they usually don’t want to admit it to themselves. How can a house divided stand? For blacks right now, one of the biggest problems is self destruction. Some want to say that we are not educated enough. Some say we don’t work hard enough. But that is bs to me. We are just as intelligent and hardworking as any other group of people. But we are not as unified as other people! We put each other through so many changes!!! And sometimes, we are too hard on each other. I am glad that we discussed the topic black shame because I think way too many African Americans have it and it is hindering us. We have to be more accepting of each other, even when it is obvious that some of us have our shortcomings.
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King,
Great analogy!
There’s another one. “Black people are born with more muscle mass, and therefore Rodney sank to the bottom because of that. It’s HBD.”
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Abagond:
Racism may set up roadblocks for black people on this planet, but, it’s not an excuse for black people to hate themselves. As an individual blackman, I know that killing another sista or brotha is wrong, I know that selling drugs to my people is wrong, I know that promoting strife and heartache amongst black people is wrong. That being said, It doesn’t give whites and others a pass to stab us in the back as it relates to law-enforcement, education, employment, religion, athletics, etc. I strongly believe that black people should be unafraid to be intelligent, educated, proud, self-sufficient, competitive, and so forth. But, if the system is poking us in the eye, we should highlight the problem and correct it with no shame.
Republicans want to ignore race, and Democrats want to exploit race, but, it doesn’t matter what either of them think at the end of the day. No one can tell black people how to feel as it relates to race. We have ownership over our thoughts and opinions, Not Others! Black people have to put up with a lot of bulls**t on a daily basis, but we’re blessed beyond measure. Abagond, defeat is not an option!!!
Tyrone
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No, I don’t mean that we should accept ruthless behavior from each other, like violent crimes or extremely immoral behavior!!! But lets be honest. All of us fall short. None of us are perfect and we are way too hard on each when we see another black person falling short of perfection. We allow whites to point out our shortcomings as an excuse for their racist and sadistic behavior. If you call me the n word or refuse to treat me with respect, then you are the one with the problem, not me. They will often say, “well I feel that you are a n@#### because you don’t pick up your garbage or because some of you committ crimes or because some of you have had OOW kids. ” And my response to that is; Okay, so what!!! Some of you make mistakes too. And not only that, but white people have committed some of the most atrocious crimes against humanity!!! And did for centuries!!!! But when you bring THAT up, they want to say that is the past or say that all whites weren’t involved in such behavior!!! So yes blacks have shortcomings but quite a bit of the problems that blacks face STILL has to do with racism, both from whites and blacks!!! My concern is getting rid of racism that we do to each other. Plus, I am also very concerned with white racism and I believe we must fight against it. But self-hatred is a toxic thing and it usually results in self-destruction. We must learn to be more accepting of each other, even when it is obvious that some of us have made mistakes or are simply not perfect!! If you see your brother or sister in trouble, don’t turn away your head in shame but reach out to help him/her. We must learn to love each other. And we must learn to accept ourselves, shortcomings and all. We must also learn to love our hair, skin color, features etc. Love yourself!!! Or else how can you accomplish anything!!!We must also put our faith in God. And seek His ways!!!
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“Did you get the parable of Rodney from a source? Or had you just kind made the story up yourself? It’s a fairly good representation of cause versus effect versus solution. (And from my lil’ folklore anthro nerd-space I’m a little fascinated where you got it from/what inspired you about it.)”
Actually, I just made it up last night to help Randy to get the point. In that regard, I believe that I have miserably failed.
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As for whites, If you see a white person trying to do the right thing by fighting racism, then we shouldn’t condemn him. Like Malcom x said, some whites can help and benefit black people. It may seem that all of them are racist but I am sure that there are some who are decent people or are at least trying. But blacks have to examine their own hearts and minds on a regular basis. If we find ourselves being racist against one another in our thoughts or actions, we must correct ourselves. Self help and self love is very important.
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@King
I agree with what you are saying about white racism. The most effective solution for ending the many problems that blacks face, other than black unity and self love, is that whites simply STOP BEING RACIST. We must always address white racism and call it for what it is. So I agree with you. We can’t allow people to constantly get off the subject of white racism by trying to change the topic to something else, like black crime and OOW children.Yes we have our problems and we need to address those problems. But white racism is still a major problem for black people. For whites to say that our inability to overcome racism is the REAL problem doesn’t make sense. Every individual must do his or her own part, whether they are black or white, to end racism. No excuses. You did an excellent job in trying to make others understand that.
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@King
I know I said that the ONLY WAY for blacks to get it together is through unity but I believe that ending all racism, both black on black and white on black , is important!!! So you made an excellent point in letting people understand that everyone should examine their own hearts and behavior, not make excuses by blaming the victim for his inadequacies!!!
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@ Jeri
Well, the thing is that Whites are not going to stop all racism, and neither are Blacks for that matter. Of course, we do our best to openly debate it, to pursue policies that minimize it, and most of all, to be examples ourselves of anti-racist conduct.
But causation simply establishes the historical precedent as to how the problem got started. It is not meant to say that Blacks don’t bring their own problems to the table. It also doesn’t mean that we don’t concentrate strongly on promoting education, renovating our communities, giving young people better examples to follow, and speaking out against Black pathology whenever we encounter it.
The problem is that many racists want to begin the discussion based on Black pathology with no acknowledgement of White causation. They want to make the CAUSE the fact that Blacks aren’t doing this or that instead of beginning with the White pathology the brought us to this point in the first place.
Once you correctly identify the CAUSE, this gives you a better perspective, and you can then move on to the prescribed SOLUTION.
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@ WoWo
“Black people are born with more muscle mass, and therefore Rodney sank to the bottom because of that. It’s HBD.”
Lol! Yeah, he wasn’t buoyant enough… survival of the fattest.
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I always say that in order to know what the problem is and how to fix it, you have to know what caused the problem.
As shown in this brilliant example a major problem is people unable or unwilling to accept any responsibility for their actions. In the case with racism too many racist people want to blame the victims of racism for the sins they (racist people) inflicted upon them (the victims).
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I wrote a post entitled ‘Lunatics who post Bullsh*t!’ , tears of mirth rolled down my cheeks while doing so! Anyhow I love parables. They help one get a grasp of an idea! Don’t feel bad about not getting through to Mr. Garver, it’s like f*rting in a wind tunnel, Hahaha!!!
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Can you at least throw in there that “Rodney” sort of takes solace in the fact that he was pushed? I mean, the parable is not bad, but the fatalism of it doesn’t allow us to deal with the fact that “Rodney” is still here.
There’s also this question: since “Rodney” is not actually dead but instead flailing in the water, why haven’t his brothers helped him out? Why does Rodney only need a white helping hand? You say that whites didn’t hire blacks, but when will blacks start opening their own businesses to employ other blacks?
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This is a great analogy for distinguishing causes of a problem from things that would help you deal with it. And spot on for the history of race in the US. Thanks. I plan to use it.
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@G.L. Piggy-
“There’s also this question: since “Rodney” is not actually dead but instead flailing in the water, why haven’t his brothers helped him out? Why does Rodney only need a white helping hand?
2009-A Black Teacher can bring little black children to water, but white people won’t let ’em learn to swim. So much for that ‘white helping hand’ huh?
http://www.inlookout.com/2009/07/08/children-denied-access-to-private-swim-club-because-they-werent-white/
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Right now, I’m thinking of a lot of different things this parable brings to mind but I just have to agree with everyone else… Great Analogy, King!!
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“BUT those are not the primary CAUSES of our dilemma here in the United States. The CAUSE is”
Whatever the ultimate causes are, one important proximate cause is the average deficiency in general mental ability. By adulthood that deficiency has a magnitude of 1 SD. For a nice review of the issue, refer to the following articles: (Do a google scholar search)
“High-stakes testing in employment, credentialing, and higher education: Prospects in a post-affirmative-action world”
“High-Stakes Testing in Higher Education and Employment Appraising the Evidence for Validity and Fairness.”
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@G.L Piggy
Yeah, I agree with you. Sometimes I think we give white people too much credit. I admit that white racism is horrible. I would never say that we should underestimate it. But yeah, when will black people support black businesses? You said that blacks need to hire other blacks but how can they if blacks don’t buy products or use the services these businesses offer?!!!We must spend our money at these black owned businesses in order for them to be successful!!! Then, these businesses can hire more blacks. Like I mentioned earlier, when are we going to take our destiny in OUR HANDS. Are we saying that white’s are keeping us from spending our money the way we want to spend it? Sometimes I think that blacks have lived in fear for so long that we don’t know just how sucessful we can trully be. At some point we have to stop living in fear and take a chance on doing something different, something that will allow us to be free.
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I can’t understand that type of feeling. I never wanted to lighter and/or had main issuses with my hair. Long hair and different textures are in my family, so I never had that complex. The most experience with racism I had was with black americans or west africans. Yes, I know that some whites are very evil but some aren’t bad. Most blacks don’t consider true black because I don’t have western features and I don’t like “black” culture at all. I have friends that listen to it and are into it. I tried listen in the music, the food and and the feelings, but I just don’t get it. Some people just understand that and believe everyone has to be the same. That’s my problem with black unity. I wouldn’t mind being black if I didn’t have to do act or like certain things. I can’t stand R&B music, melismatic sounds godawful, greens,cornbreand,beans,cornbread are gross, I have no rythnm,hate the though of going to chruch,Baby Boy and Tyler Perry movies are too simple and sexist, Jill Scott isn’t not attractive at all and Fantaisia is one the uglist women I’ve seen. I don’t care that much about my hair, can’t imagine spending a whole day in a hair salon and I don’t a “black” accent at all. I say like, totally, and f**king a. I don’t care this is me and alot of people don’t like it. I get laughed at and get called ugly because my lips are very dark . Some people want to be stupid. It’s an excuse. What’s makes this article any better than white people trying to realize slavery and downplay racist. It doesn’t explain the homophobia, sexism and culturism in the black community. Gay people in Africa and West indies are put in jail and killed.
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@ Chuckwiththehippo
Sorry to disappoint, but this thread is not going to degenerate into yet another HBD nonsense thread.
But I’ll give you this, you are religious in your attempts to evangelize people into your faith. The born again HBDer.
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@Usagi
I don’t think you have to like everything about black people to support them in the ways that matter. I will say this. I hate hip-hop!! And no I am not crazy about all black entertainment neither. I would probably say I don’t have alot in common with alot of black people. I love jazz and reggae music and I don’t wear weaves. I speak with a very proper accent and I am far from the “super strong black woman” stereotype. I am actually very sensitive and I cry often at movies, and after listening to tender love songs. I am way more sensitve to others than they are usually to me. But that is life right? So we are all individuals. For those who think that blacks are all the same, I have news for you. That is nothing but hogwash!!!Sometimes you find yourself lonelier with your own people than with anybody else. But there are some things we have in commom. And racism is one of those things. That is why we must unite in order to SURVIVE. It is not about all of us acting or behaving the same. It is about using our power to help us get out of a very bad situation. No, I don’t believe in hating white people. And I don’t believe in only choosing black friends. Be yourself!!! Don’t ever change that!!!! But it couldn’t hurt to help a black owned business from time to time. Just to help another black person get a job they desperately need.
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@Usagi
And yes I understand what it is like to be rejected by your your own people. It is extremely painful!!!! People are very cruel and that is something all races and cultures have in common. Some people are just mean spirited and shallow. Finding a true friend who loves you for you is very difficult and sometimes those friends may not always be black. I have had alot of friends who are white, Asian, hispanic, you name it. And they helped me in ways that I still think about today. I still love them and I always will. I wish I could say that blacks weren’t colorstruck or shallow. I wish I could say that life was easier. But it can be trying at times. But we still have to do what we can do to help other blacks from time to time. NOT just help blacks exclusively but more often than what we are doing now. Don’t stress yourself out about it. Do what you can.
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@King
But I’ll give you this, you are religious in your attempts to evangelize people into your faith. The born again HBDer.
LMAO!!!
This was a nice story, however, it isn’t helpful. Racist are delusional for a reason. They wont budge unless they HAVE to. I say we ignore em. I like the first post by Ken. I don’t hate whites or have strong prejudices towards them, but from all I have seen on the internet, history, and society I don’t trust any of them! All us black ppl have is ourselves. We can’t trust or depend on whites. It’s sad, but true. The only ppl we should teach about institutional racism is ourselves, so the future gens know how to avoid it. It’s unfortunate, but white denial is here to stay.
Before ppl jump on me realize this, my post is not cynical, it is PRAGMATIC!
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@Usagi
I decided to answer your question that was on “black women that white men like” on this subject. It was taking 20 minutes to type on that subject!!! So this is what I have to say. Don’t worry about your lips!!! People use lipstick all the time to make their lips darker. You are probably a very beautiful girl and you just don’t know it. When I was young, I had alot of insecurities about my full lips. I didn’t know that I was attractive. But when I look at old pictures of myself, I realize now that I was very pretty. So don’t sweat the small stuff. Look in the mirror and tell yourself everyday that you are beautiful. And be yourself!!! Don’t worry about trying to fit in with this culture or that culture. All I was saying was that we should help each other from time to time in how we spend our money. But don’t change who you are!!!
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“Before ppl jump on me realize this, my post is not cynical, it is PRAGMATIC!”
You DO realize that you are The Cynic, don’t you? 🙂
I trust people of any color who prove themselves to be trustworthy. There are White people on this site who I both like and trust as far as you can trust an internet acquaintance. That is to say, I don’t mistrust them for a lack of melanin.
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@King
Yeah, I agree that I think there are some whites who are decent people. God can work though all kinds of people!!
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There’s also this question: since “Rodney” is not actually dead but instead flailing in the water, why haven’t his brothers helped him out? Why does Rodney only need a white helping hand? You say that whites didn’t hire blacks, but when will blacks start opening their own businesses to employ other blacks?
This is another SOLUTION (to use King’s vernacular) rather than a CAUSE. Blaming people for not implementing the solution doesn’t change what caused the problem that needs solving in the first place. It’s also victim-blaming. But I wonder: why is it the responsibility of random bystanders to save Rodney and not the people who pushed him into the water in the first place?
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zek:
i’m white, but i was taught how to swim. i was also told which parts not to swim in.
but back to abagond’s argument, *not* teaching someone or *not* hiring someone does not cause something. you can’t cause something through non-action.
thus, rodney wasn’t pushed; he fell into the water and couldn’t swim.
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“but back to abagond’s argument, *not* teaching someone or *not* hiring someone does not cause something. you can’t cause something through non-action.”
If you withhold food or drinking water from someone, you will (by *not* allowing these things) CAUSE their death. Especially if you are the reason why they are hungry and thirsty in the first place.
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@King
Well I do not believe all white people are untrustworthy. After all that I have seen I just don’t see how I could ever bring myself to trust one. I know for a fact that many of them are good people, but I cannot read minds. In the back of my mind their will always be doubt, no matter how much I love that white person. It’s sad, but that is how I feel
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king:
so you’re saying that black people can’t feed themselves? seems that you’re the one buying into the notion of white supremacy.
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(Heavy sigh)
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@ Cynic
Do you trust Black people?
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The Cynic:
you don’t trust white people to do what exactly?
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MinnieB said:
I did a post on that:
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Is this a parable about race relations? Two points:
1. In reality, “Rodney” isn’t dead. This is an important distinction since no actions can be taken on behalf of the dead.
2. Once Rodney finds himself in the water, he’s got to swim to survive. What difference does it make whatsoever how he got in there?
Whether he fell or was pushed, the actions Rodney needs to take once he’s in the water are exactly the same. Incidentally, these are the same actions that everyone else in the world needs to take if they find themselves in the water.
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@ jeri
“I would probably say I don’t have alot in common with alot of black people.”
it sounds like you hold quite a few stereotypes about American Blacks yourself. Were you born in the states?
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If this were to really happen, I wonder if people who blame Rodney for dying would allow those who deliberately drowned him to get away with murder.
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Point made.
The next question is: what do you do with knowledge about the cause? What use is that to finding or crafting a solution?
At the individual level, do you choose to wallow in victimhood or do you choose to forge ahead?
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@King in the main post wrote:
“Same thing with Black Americans”
No. That’s not true. There is no analogy.
I do agree with you that black Americans are victims of racism, that racism is the cause, but that’s an opinion. You are not proving it to be true with the Rodney story.
The very first sentence of the main post is the most important one. “The kids at a certain summer camp didn’t like Rodney because he was different.” Because of it, we know that Rodney is innocent. His innocence is a fact. It’s a conclusion.
If we ignore the first sentence the moral evaluation of the story is much more difficult. Without the first sentence it’s not the same story anymore. Maybe Rodney did something horrible to the kids who killed him? Maybe he wasn’t the victim at all? Maybe he deserved what he got?
Black Americans’ innocence isn’t something you can prove. You are assuming that they are being mistreated. That’s not an undeniable logical conclusion.
That’s why there is no match between Rodney’s and black Americans’ situations. In one case innocence is a fact and in the other an opinion.
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@Blanc2
“Point made.
The next question is: what do you do with knowledge about the cause? What use is that to finding or crafting a solution?
At the individual level, do you choose to wallow in victimhood or do you choose to forge ahead?”
Most definitely forge ahead, make sure the story is told about Rodney, learn the strategies to swim-then be the best swimmer out there! And then go into the community and teach others to swim.
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King said–
If you withhold food or drinking water from someone, you will (by *not* allowing these things) CAUSE their death. Especially if you are the reason why they are hungry and thirsty in the first place.
I wonder why there’s so much focus on CAUSE because we could trace CAUSES all the way back to the garden of eden with all of those “begats.” No one can undo a CAUSE, but future Rodneys could make it a point to never be thrown in the pool again. They should all learn that lesson and make it a priority to learn how to swim, just in case.
Another thing is why would you expect or DEPEND on someone who threw you in the water and drowned you to have a turn of heart to get you out and bring you back to life? How smart is that? If that happened to me, I would know I have to get out on my own. That’s what I’d be thinking about all the time and I would spend a lot of effort doing that. I wouldn’t ever depend on my drowners again.
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watching people try to fit their pre-conceived ideas into this analogy makes for some entertaining imagery.
As I see it everyone needs to take responsibility for their own lives and for their communities as well. Because not only are we individuals, we are also a society. Human beings have responsibilities to ourselves AND to each other. That means not throwing people in the water on one hand and on the other hand everyone needs to learn how to swim. That’s how one hand washes the other.
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@G.L. Piggy
you don’t trust white people to do what exactly?
I don’t trust white people to not be prejudiced towards black people. I know not all whites are prejudiced, but I cannot read minds. Prejudice affects so many spheres of life, so here are some things I wouldn’t trust a white person to do:
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to report the news w/o prejudice.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to do business w/o an anti-black mindset.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to teach my kids with the same expectations he/she gives a white child.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to have political motives that aren’t tied to race.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to marry.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to raise my kids.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to look at me as human and not my race.
There’s prolly more to that list, but I think I’ve covered the basics.
@King
Do you trust Black people?
I trust black ppl to look at me as a human, an individual and not my race. Even if they were the Uncle Ruckus type, if they can separate themselves from their negative prejudices, than I am quite sure they can do the same for me. Personally, I have solace in knowing someone can see me as myself & not a group. Trusting people is hard enough by itself, why would I extend this trust to someone who can’t see me as a person first?
To bring this back to the post I’ll reiterate the main point of my first comment. Blacks are alone in this world. Many whites do not and will never look at blacks as individuals. Their is nothing to be gained in attempts to explain ourselves to them.
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blanc2 said: “The next question is: what do you do with knowledge about the cause? What use is that to finding or crafting a solution?
At the individual level, do you choose to wallow in victimhood or do you choose to forge ahead?”
Perhaps the reality is that more people would prefer to sit on the river bank arguing about who is to blame than to actually do anything to help Rodney.
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King, good points. Great post. Thank you.
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@ Lifelearner
“Most definitely forge ahead, make sure the story is told about Rodney, learn the strategies to swim-then be the best swimmer out there!”
Previously enslaved peoples have been forging ahead and jumping through countless hoops and mazes created by Racism/White Domination for generations. There are a those of us out here still swimming because the generations before us decided not to drown themselves or throw their offspring into the sea.
“And then go into the community and teach others to swim.”
Really…teach others to swim?I have been “swimming” for a long time, and my Parents before me, and their parents before them and so on. I don’t want to keep teaching others to swim.
I want the reason they NEED to know how to swim eliminated.
@Eco
“That’s why there is no match between Rodney’s and black Americans’ situations. In one case innocence is a fact and in the other an opinion.”
http://www.inlookout.com/2009/07/08/children-denied-access-to-private-swim-club-because-they-werent-white/
In your opinion, are these children innocent?
Appears to be a match and a fact to me.
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I find it fascinating that what the self-haters say is virtually identical to what the ‘race realists’ and HBDers say… 🙄
They also missed the point of this parable, perhaps deliberately.
Interesting, no?
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This parable is about causality.
Cause is important because we exist in a cause and effect reality. It is by understanding cause, that we can more fully distinguish the anatomy of its effects. In this particular case, the study of cause removes blame from the victims of oppression and assigns it instead to the perpetrators of the offense.
However,
– The parable is not about being rescued by anybody
– The parable is not about Black self reliance
– The parable is not about swimming lessons
– The parable is not about resurrection or revenge
The very nature of a parable is that it has a NARROW and LIMITED application to the subject it is addressing. A parable cannot be pressed too far beyond the main point to which it is meant to be applied.
THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE
If the race was short enough for the Tortoise to complete (even in a entire day) why would the Hare have stopped to sleep? It couldn’t have been more than a half a mile.
THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANT
Neither an ant nor a grasshopper have a lifecycle long enough to see a change of seasons.
THE SCORPION AND THE FROG
Frogs swim underwater, they do not float across the top. Therefore, a scorpion could not reasonably ride on a frog’s back across a river… besides, scorpions and frogs don’t speak the same dialect.
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King,
I get what you’re saying about the scope of the parable. What I don’t understand is why people care so much. Does this blamecasting feed or educate a single person?
For example, consider the ratio of “blame” related posts versus “solutions” related posts on this blog.
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@ Minnie B
“I want the reason they NEED to know how to swim eliminated.”
Yep, me too! But I don’t see that coming anytime soon, so I will keep pressing along with many other black folks that already know how to swim!
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Randy, it’s important because it shapes the perceptions of both the of both the oppressor and the oppressed.
If you caused a traffic accident that broke the leg of your coworker, you feel a sense of responsibility to try and help that person out as best you can. And if they’re out injured for a few weeks, you don’t mind doing a bit of extra work to help fill the gap while they’re recovering.
But if your coworker broke their leg in a collision because they were driving while intoxicated, then you might feel quite differently about having to work harder, and stay later, in order to make up for their prolonged absence.
The difference in attitude is entirely based on who is to blame for the accident.
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“Does this blamecasting feed or educate a single person?”
lol
So blame is only constructive when leveled at POC huh randy?
Ridiculous.
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Human beings have responsibilities to ourselves AND to each other.
This is a nice, sweet sentiment but it doesn’t reflect lots of what’s happened in history or now. It’s not the law and therefore it can’t be enforced. I don’t want my life to depend on someone else’s niceness. That’s stressful.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to be in the position either of constantly of trying persuade anyone to be nice to me. I think this is what’s responsible for some of the mysteriously different health stats between Black Americans and White Americans of the same income and social classes. Worrying whether a white person is going to be fair or nice is really not good. I wish BA people could see the need to have their own strategies to keep themselves from drowning just in case White people are not nice to them.
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@Randy Garver
Ppl who don’t understand the lesson this parable conveys often turn to racism in order to understand the world we live in. I don’t think the purpose of this “blamecasting” is to directly find solutions. I believe the blamecaster’s goal is to simply combat racism, which they feel is a big part of the problem. I wont say I completely agree w/ this tactic, but I do understand why ppl care about it so much.
Ppl who use this tactic tend to believe racism can be ameliorated or cured. I can see why someone who adheres to that belief would take to this method in an attempt to spur social change.
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@ Cynic
“I trust black ppl to look at me as a human, an individual and not my race.”
Interesting. So what other races do you trust?
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“This is a nice, sweet sentiment but it doesn’t reflect lots of what’s happened in history or now. It’s not the law and therefore it can’t be enforced.”
are there other people where you live? do you have a job? I go to an office everyday and exchange services for monetary compensation. Do you have a significant other? A family? friends? acquaintances? a doctor? a plumber? a dentist? a grocery store you go to to buy food that comes from various farms and manufacturers full of employees with friends and families?
What i’m referring to is called society at large and if everyone was constantly trying to screw one another over it wouldn’t be able to exist. Human beings tend to need one another and to cooperate with one another. This idea that we are all individuals is only partially true. If you disagree imagine how happy you would be on a desert island alone for the rest of your life.
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So you guys must think it’s cool to just walk into someones house and take all their crap and kill them for fun. I mean morally you’ve done nothing wrong you could just say “well they should have had better security”
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Sepultura,
My thoughts exactly. They’re attempting to twist the parable to allow for even the tiniest excuse for why Rodney deserved to be pushed into the water, or why he was pushed shouldn’t be important, or to derail our attention from cause and focus on solutions that don’t address the aforementioned cause.
GL Piggy,
Non-action is still an action. Not doing something is still doing something. Any zen master can tell you that. But then again, that’s supposed to be something we all learned in grade-school too.
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@King
Interesting. So what other races do you trust?
That’s it really. Some mixed race black ppl, but that’s all.
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@ Cynic
Hahahaha! Ahhh! Thus the name.
Now I get it. Lol!
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” Non-action is still an action. Not doing something is still doing something. “
Culpability for certain non-actions is a well-established principle of our legal code. You are expected to at least report certain offenses if you witness them. Usually, the greater your position of responsibility, the greater is your culpability.
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jas0nburns: “So blame is only constructive when leveled at POC huh randy?
Ridiculous.”
The terms “blame” and “responsibility” have different meanings.
Have you ever needed physical therapy? The success of a therapy program is a shared responsibility between the care giver and receiver.
The determination as to whether or not a care giver provided sufficient assistance is never made solely on the condition of the patient.
And yet in this context, Abagond and others conclude that pernicious racism still exists based only on metrics such as income and educational attainment. Half of the equation is missing.
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Cynic,
Just curious: do you advocate racial segregation, owing to your mistrust of other ethnicities?
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@Randy G
Umm… no. That is taking it a little too far. There is no need for that. I just keep my eyes and ears open in diverse settings. It’s not as if I hate people of other races or brand them all as bad people. All I am saying is that I am afraid of people’s perceptions of my race trumping my own individuality.
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I don’t trust blacks anymore the whites or non-blacks. Just because someone is the same color doesn’t mean there are trusthworthy. People don’t consider that people are different. I tend to get along more with non-blacks and africans. I do have ba friends, but they’re open minded.
“-I wouldn’t trust a white person to report the news w/o prejudice.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to do business w/o an anti-black mindset.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to teach my kids with the same expectations he/she gives a white child.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to have political motives that aren’t tied to race.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to marry.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to raise my kids.
-I wouldn’t trust a white person to look at me as human and not my race.”
I would say the same for blacks. I’m not black in the sense of culture. Some will not speak to me and would laugh at my accent. I couldn’t imagine marry a black man. It’s never been a huge issuse in my family. 50 persent marry outside their race and some of my blood relatives are white. Some of my closed friends that I relate to on the most personal level are white or non-black. I can’t relate to that at all. But I’m not blinded to racism, but it’s not always whites fault. You guys the same bulls**t reason and biases. Blacks helped slavery in Liberia. Whites brought colorism to west africa and india. It goes both ways. Egyptians enslaved Jews.
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@Usagi
“I don’t trust blacks anymore the whites or non-blacks. Just because someone is the same color doesn’t mean there are trusthworthy. “
I never said I think blacks are trustworthy. This is what I said to King: *“I trust black ppl to look at me as a human, an individual and not my race.”
That is pretty much ALL I give to blacks at face value. That means a lot to me, but at the same time it’s not much.
I also said this: “Trusting people is hard enough by itself”
When I say that I’m pretty much saying trust is not something I easily give away. This includes black ppl.
Usagi:“it’s not always whites fault.
You’re mistaking me for somebody else. I have never said, nor implied this in any comment I have ever made on this blog.
When I said that I can’t trust whites, I was not applying a character trait to an entire group. I wasn’t even giving an estimated percentage. All I said was that I can’t read minds. It takes about a year tops for me to sniff out whether somebody is a good person. Whether they are a criminal, greedy, deceptive, etc. What I don’t like is discovering loved ones are prejudice against my race. Why? Follow the asterisk.
Personally, I don’t think every person can help pre-judging. In fact, I actually have white friends that I KNOW are implicitly prejudice. I do not believe that makes them a bad person. It just makes it harder for me to become closer to them.
I’m not attacking anybody, so chill… please. All I am saying is that when it comes to race issues in America blks can only depend on the blk community to solve their collective problems bc it’s not coming from anywhere else.
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@ The Cynic:
Co-sign.
I’ll go one step further: I trust nobody implicitly, except for myself. I’m the only person I know who has never let me down! 😎
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jas0nburns: “So blame is only constructive when leveled at POC huh randy?
Ridiculous.”
Randy: The terms “blame” and “responsibility” have different meanings.”
Oh really?
(exerpt from the black shame thread)jas0nburns replied: “I think black pathology and black shame both have something in common. They are both evidence that black people have bought in to the racist ideas that whites created to justify slavery and segregation. Put simply, BP seem to be almost as racist against themselves as whites are against them.”
Randy:
“Oh good, so it’s really not their fault after all. Glad to hear it.
Jas0n, what about dirty white, hispanic, and chinese neighborhoods? Who do we blame for those?”
So here is an example of you blaming POC for their problems, yet when blame is leveled at whites all the sudden blame “isn’t constructive” anymore. This is extremely hypocritical of you and it’s a good example of how slippery people can be in these discussions. It’s disgraceful.
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That is perfect analogy. I would only add a few more things to apply it to africans in general:
-Colonialism (wich is a form of slavery to)
– Explore all of our resources, promote wars between us (because the more divided we are the better they control/reign)
then pretend to care showing us on media as the eternal needy who can’t even feed their own children.
This last topic is the one that realy pisses me off!
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jas0nburns,
I was attempting to use your paradigm. As repeatedly stated, I don’t see how blame (past) changes what people should be doing (future) to improve their lives and communities.
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“I was attempting to use your paradigm.”
sure.
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@JasOnburns
Well, sometimes I do have stereotypes in my mind about black people but most of the time I see blacks as individuals. But the reason why I said what I said is because I think that everyone is unique. No one is exactly like me and no one is exactly like you. So I am sure there are alot of black people I don’t have anything in common with. I have met and spent alot of time with black people I had VERY LITTLE in common with. That is based on my real life experiences. Are you saying that you haven’t met blacks you didn’t have anything in common with? So no I don’t have to believe in stereotypes to know that what I said is true. What? Do you think I think that most blacks are thugs and on welfare? Come on now! Give me more credit than that. No. I don’t mean that. I mean that I have met blacks who I couldn’t talk to, people that I couldn’t relate to because they have very different interests. That is all I mean. I was trying to explain to Usagi that you don’t have to have something in common with every black person that you meet in order to care about the future of black people. Because the main thing we have in common with each other is racism. Blacks are very diverse so if you wait to feel accepted by all of them, you are in trouble. People are different. But we (blacks ) have common issues that effect our everyday lives. And that is why we must unite. That is all I am saying.
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@Usagi
Well, I agree that not all blacks are trustworthy. I think it would be foolish to think that everyone in your race is wonderful and true. But I do think that blacks should depend on each other more business wise. I am talking about political and economic power. I am not talking about personal relationships necesarilly. So if you think that having white friends is enjoyable to you, then no problem. We are all different. But I think it is our duty to look out for one another when it comes to the injustices in the world. Sidney Poitier, Diane Carroll, Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, and other famous blacks had white companions and even married white, but many of them still spoke up against racism. In fact, I think it is healthy to have all kinds of friends. But don’t forget that the world can be a difficult place and we still have to be pragmatic. So Civil Rights issues are still important.
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@Usagi
And yeah, If you are dealing with a very corrupt black person who does bad things, then it is obvious that you shouldn’t associate with them. Heck, I don’t like modern day entertainment as much as I did the entertainment of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. I love the music of the old days and I think that many black people sold each other out with this modern day hip-hop. It is like a modern day minstrel show. I am very disappointed with what some of these young people have done. All the years of fighting against racism, all the people who died and struggled only for them to be sabatoged by some of those in the modern generation. I hate it. So NO, I don’t believe in supporting everything that a black person does. Certainly not!!! You have to use the common sense and wisdom that God gave you in these matters. Everybody black is not a brotha!!! Believe that!!
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@Usagi
You are African right? Well, in the African American culture there is a musical group called The Ojays. They had a song 40 years ago called “Don’t call me brotha”. They were saying “Don’t call me brotha unless you really really mean it”. So talking black, walking black, acting black don’t mean nothing if you don’t sincerely from your heart love those in your community. And understand that some people can care less about doing what is right! So of course, you don’t just trust everybody. Look at what a person does, not what they say!
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@Usagi
You have heard of Sting right? White English guy who song jazz and rock in the 80’s. Excellent artist!!! Well, he has a song called “Englishman in New York” You should listen to it. In the end of the song he says, “Be yourself no matter what they say” You must have the courage to be yourself and not be ashamed of your decisions. So I love individuality but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t concern yourself with those who are suffering and who are suffering in ways that are common to your own. I am not African but I care about what happens to them. I may know very little about them but what matters is that I respect them and I care about what happens to them. You don’t have to try to fit in with everybody. That is tedious and often a waste of time. And nO you can’t fight every battle! You have to wisely choose your battles or else you will wear yourself out. Do you understand what I am saying? I hope you do.
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@G.I Piggy
Well, it appears that we agree about the black business thing. But possibly for very different reasons!!! I can’t read your mind so I don’t know how you feel about the subject. I do believe wholeheartly that blacks must support one another in terms of money. NO doubt. But that doesn’t mean that it is right to practice racism. It doesn’t let whites off the hook when it comes to issues of morality. It would only be fair if both black and white businesses have a diverse workforce. No doubt. I think if we had more businesses, we could hire more blacks, but that is not an excuse for blacks or whites to practice racism when it comes to hiring. I do believe in quotas and affirmative action.
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@G.I. Piggy
So black independence is not an excuse for white racism. We have all have to be accountable to each other!!!
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@MinneB
“In your opinion, are these children innocent?
Appears to be a match and a fact to me.”
Those kids did not deserve what happened to them. They were mistreated, but that doesn’t prove that most black Americans are generally mistreated. I think the are, you think so too, so does King, but we cannot prove that. It’s our opinion.
To prove it we have to show that the so called “black pathologies” aren’t black Americans’ fault. That means proving that high rates of poverty, crime, imprisonment, unemployment, drug use, dropping out of high school, etc. are not their fault.
I think proving that is impossible. You could show evidence supporting your opinion, but you cannot prove it’s true.
@King
“Cause is important because we exist in a cause and effect reality. It is by understanding cause, that we can more fully distinguish the anatomy of its effects. In this particular case, the study of cause removes blame from the victims of oppression and assigns it instead to the perpetrators of the offense.”
It also passes a moral judgment. You just did that again. Some people are “victims”, this is “oppression”, that is an”offense” – it’s right there. In Rodney’s situation he is in fact a victim. In black Americans’ situation it is your assumption that they are being oppressed. Without it, the causes of their problems are much harder to determine.
Effect: blacks commit crime at a higher rate than whites.
If we assume that black people are victims of oppression then the cause is racism.
If we assume that they are treated fairly then the cause changes – black people are the only ones responsible.
You are trying to prove that the cause of the problems black Americans struggle with is racism, but that reasoning works only if you are assuming that black Americans are victims of racism. You can’t do that. This is circular logic.
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One more example.
Imagine a white supremacist saying:
“the legal system is fair.
Since it is fair then everyone gets a fair trial.
Since everyone gets a fair trial then black people are the only ones responsible for their high crime rates.
Since they are responsible for it and everyone gets a fair trial then the punishment they are getting is fair.
Since the punishment is fair then the legal system is fair to black people.”
That’s circular logic. You cannot prove that the legal system is fair if you assume that the legal system is fair.
This is what King did. Black people are mistreated because of their race thus racism is to be blamed for their problems thus they are victims thus they are mistreated because of their race.
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Usagi,
With all due respect, it sounds like you have a lot of personal issues to resolve, and I hope you somehow take care of them. I understand; that’s why I wrote the Black Shame articles in my blog. Still, you must learn more about the real America, Black America’s history (including our achievements), and learn to love who you are.
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But on the topic at hand.
The reasons the boys gave after they pushed Rodney into the lake is similar to the personal responsibility idealogy many people preach. People, mostly conservatives, advocate personal responsibility usually towards the poor and underpriviledged. However, they hardly ever practice what they preach, and they almost never wag their finger to the rich and overprivileged.
Those boys don’t want to accept a hint of responsibility that they were responsible for Rodney’s death. That is the problem with most whites today when it comes to racism.
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jeri:
But quotas and affirmative action favoring blacks are racist.
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I’m so dumb that I trust people to certain extent. Have I been cheated? Yeah. Have I been robbed? Yeah. Have I been swindled? Yeah. Have I been beaten? Yeah. Have I been attacked? Yeah. But So what? I survived. I’m not blind, I’ve seen things, I can handle most situations and I have.
I’ve been here and there and met some really devious persons, people who are worst snakes in the planet, cruel and viscious people, sneaky thieves and swindlers, all colors and all ages, sizes and shapes. They are everywhere.
BUT I have met honest guys in places were everybody said there were none. I have been backed up by a murderer recently released from prison in a tight spot. I have been enjoying leasurely time BS:tting with a bunch of known robbers. My vallet was kept safe in a bar full of underworld guys. I picked it up the next day.
I have been adviced and safely escorted by a prostitute with very bad rep out of harms way. I have been supported by well know criminal in an argument with his buddies. When one guy tried to make a move behind my back to my wife, he was stopped by a outlaw biker who never told me about this. I heard from another guy, actually from the guy who was told to lay off.
So I give people a benefit of doubt. People say these guys are such and such, look out for those guys, do not trust this or that, blablabla. What they say to me is this: “do not trust Me. I’ll talk behind your back too, I spread rumours, I have an angle”…
Somebody said pretty well: “Treat me good and I treat you better. Treat me bad and I treat you worse.”
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@ G.L. Piggy
So is actively refusing to call a black/non-White applicant back because their name isn’t Euro-Friendly, and other discriminatory practices.
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1. It is hard to come up with good, lasting solutions unless you know the causes.
2. If Rodney knew how to swim it would not have made a difference – they would have simply found some other weakness to take advantage of. So knowing how to swim has little to do with either the cause or the solution.
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Great point, Sam.
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@ Eco:
MinneB: “In your opinion, are these children innocent?
Appears to be a match and a fact to me.”
Eco: “Those kids did not deserve what happened to them. They were mistreated, but that doesn’t prove that most black Americans are generally mistreated.”
In your opinion, are these black children innocent?
http://www.inlookout.com/2009/07/08/children-denied-access-to-private-swim-club-because-they-werent-white/
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@Blaque Ink
I know about black history. I’m sorry that you feel that way. I don”t like american black culture. It’s too simple. I’m different. I don’t care about the feelings of whites. I guess you feel that Robert Deniro has issuses, too. White people been taking and using other people’s culture for a long time. Why do say that ? Because don’t find hip/hop beautiful. You kinda pissed me off. You’re the one with issuses. Rock on!! I’m Black of east african descent/native american and scottish/irish. So, what are I in denial about. Some black need to stop being afronazis. I love my East African culture. I’m not changing, so hope all you want. People like for I am and that’s all the matters. I don’t won’t “act” black for anybody.
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For Blaque Ink and anyone else that wants to be black.
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Edit: For Blaque Ink and anyone else that wants me to be black.
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@G.I Piggy
To refuse to hire someone only because of their color is racist. Affirmative action is a policy that forces people to have a diverse workplace. If it wasn’t for affirmative action, some people would NEVER hire someone who was of a different ethnicity than themselves. It keeps people from being racist, not the other way around. When people say that affirmative action is racist, I think they are purposely missing the point.
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@Usagi
Alright Usagi, whatever. But being black isn’t a choice for most people. I appreciate your “we are world” or “lets love and trust everybody, race means nothing” philosophy. I think we should give everybody a chance, regardless of race. But what happens if you encouter someone who doesn’t think like you do? That is what we are trying to say. But whatever, Usagi.
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@Usagi
Oh, that is right. You don’t trust everybody black. Well, if you want to feel that way than that is your personal choice. I personally feel that their are decent people in every ethnicity, but there are very mean, shallow and racist, (also sexist) people in every culture and it is these people that we must fight. Ignoring the situation won’t solve anything.
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@Usagi
And understand, what we are talking about has nothing to do with trying desperately to be or relate to black people. You can try your best to ignore your color or ignore racial issues or ignore most black people but that won’t stop some people from disliking and mistreating you based on your color. And understand, not all racist who hate blacks are white!!! Some are black people!! Or other people of color. So what I am talking about is fighting all racism, regardless of who is practicing it. And I believe wholly in fighting sexism as well. There are alot of sexist people both black and white. But, I am done discussing this subject with you. I guess we just have to agree to disagree. Take care.
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@Jansoburn
But I was just thinking about something. IF I DO HAVE A STEREOTYPE about black people, it is the one that African Americans don’t appreciate or like each other the way they should. I think blacks are diverse when it comes to education, philosophies, musical interest, tempermant, attitude, knowledge, hardwork etc. But one thing most African Americans have in common is that I feel they don’t support or respect each other the way they should. It like crabs in a barrel. And I think blacks, who are children of the diaspora, are the worst. And I think African Americans are the worst out of that group. We don’t marry each other like we should. We don’t respect each other like we should. We don’t trust each other like we should. Many of us are extremely colorstruck. Many African American men are extremely sexist against black women. Black women are constantly demeaned and mistreated. And blacks don’t support our own businesses like we should. Like I mentioned before, self destruction is a possible way for the future extinction of black people and that is real!!! I believe in discussing white racism but what about black racism!!! Both are extremely dangerous when it comes to hurting black people. And both forms of racisms MUST be examined. Many of us ( myself included) must rid ourselves from the effects of slavery. People should read the book “The Psychiological Effects of Slavery”. Free your mind and the rest will follow!!!
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@Abagond
And you should do a post about “The Psychiological Effects of Slavery” by Naim Akbar. It was written either in the 70’s or 80’s. I am not sure. I read it when I was a child. It is an important book and I think people should read it!!
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No, the causes of black failure are race differences in intelligence. Simply put, blacks are less intelligent than whites. Slavery etc. are clearly not to blame, because every other race has managed to overcome similar discrimination.
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“because every other race has managed to overcome similar discrimination.”
That’s a new one. haha
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Haha… we must have come to the point in the discussion where random dummies begin pitching in their “thoughts.”
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“No, the causes of black failure are race differences in intelligence. Simply put, blacks are less intelligent than whites. Slavery etc. are clearly not to blame, because every other race has managed to overcome similar discrimination.”
LOL! What a troll. There wouldn’t be any open heart surgrey, if there’s wasn’t for blacks in america. The Moors from North Africa brought over math to Europe. They’re a very interesting group of people. They should talk more about them and slave unrising. They should to hightlight that good thing in black culture. Why ONLY on slavery, like it was the only thing important that happen to blacks?
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abagond said: “1. It is hard to come up with good, lasting solutions unless you know the causes.
2. If Rodney knew how to swim it would not have made a difference – they would have simply found some other weakness to take advantage of. So knowing how to swim has little to do with either the cause or the solution.”
1. I’d amend that to say “current causes”. If you cut your hand and it gets infected, you may die if the only treatment is to close the wound.
2. That’s a surprisingly fatalistic statement to make when Rodney is still in the water, splashing.
When someone is rushed to the ER after a car crash, do the doctors care one bit who caused the crash? Knowing who caused the accident doesn’t change the treatment plan one iota.
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@Unamused
Trust me. I am probably way more intelligent than you!! Blacks are not less intelligent. And how many ethnicities have been enslaved by the millions in recent times for hundreds of years?!!! Native Americans were mistreated and they are still suffering to this day!!! But even they were not enslaved!!! But since you like to talk about race, let me say this. You think blacks are less intelligent but I believe thats whites are some of the most cruel people of all time!!! Look at your history!!! Racism, slavery, forced segration, lychings, rapes(especially during slavery), harressment, name calling ( calling people N@##@@ and apes), just to name a few of the things whites have done. Intelligent people don’t act that way nor do they need to act that way!!! If you guys are so superior ,why do all these horrible things to get what you want? I would think you would concentrate on hard work, not racism. So if you guys are so superior, why don’t you ACT superior?!!!
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@Abagond
I think there is a real need for definitions. If you have a post covering definitions, please direct me to it. I am seeing a lot of misunderstanding, misuse, stumbling, while discussing racism.
Thanks
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Edit:They should talk more about them and slave uprising. They should to hightlight that good things in black culture.
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“Native Americans were mistreated and they are still suffering to this day!!! But even they were not enslaved!!!”
Just a correction. Native Americans were often enslaved by the Spanish. Also see Christopher Columbus for examples of this.
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@King
You are right. Many native Americans were enslaved. But I don’t think it was nearly as bad for them as it was for us. I don’t know a whole lot about Indians enslavement but I am certain it didn’t last as long. And I am also certain that they weren’t enslaved by the millions like we were. Nor were they forced to leave their nation or abandon their culture like we were.
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@King
Native Americans did suffer alot. Extermination, false treaties, land being stolen, and to a lesser extent slavery were all things that Native Americans had to live with. The point I was making is that they suffered alot and to this day they are still suffering. I have read that they are suffering from alcoholism, depression, and poverty just to name a few things. But blacks were stolen from their nations, forced to be at the bottom of a slave ships, lying in their feces and blood, sold as property, raped, beaten, forced to abandon their culture, and humilated. I don’t want to compare which group suffered the most. I really don’t know for sure. But what I am saying is that what blacks experienced was extreme to say the least. And millions died on their way to the Americas while on the slave ships!!! We just had it bad. And it is amazing that people can’t understand how that could affect us to this day!!
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But despite all we have been through, we have come very far!!! And that is a testimony to how brilliant we are!!! God has blessed us in so many ways. We are trully remarkable people. But we still have a long way to go!!! Unfortunately, the more things have changed, the more things stay the same.
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@unamused:
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Due to enslavement, disease, and the extreme cruelty of their taskmasters (the Spanish), the indigenous of the Caribbean were virtually wiped out in less than 50 years. That was the reason enslaved Africans were brought into the region in the first place — to take the place of the murdered Indians.
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@ jas0nburns: You believe that blacks are the only race to suffer discrimination in the USA? Not the Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Irish? Hm. I wonder, if discrimination explains black failure, shouldn’t Jews be worse off than anyone? You know, because of that whole Holocaust thing. Of course, they have an average IQ of 115, versus 85 for American blacks.
@King: I notice you have no counter-argument to this random dummy.
@Usagi: Oh my goodness, a black person invented open heart surgery?! Well, that obviously disproves years of research showing a 15 point IQ gap between blacks and whites. Oh wait, no it doesn’t. Also, blacks did not “bring over math to Europe.”
@Jeri: Do you know what an average is? An average is when you take a bunch of people and look at them as a whole. See, blacks have a lower average intelligence than whites (by about 15 IQ points). So even if we grant your dubious premise (that you are more intelligent than me), that doesn’t really tell us anything about the average IQ of millions and millions of black Americans. But science does.
The rest of your argument makes no sense. Historically, people of all races have been brutal and cruel. Every race has enslaved pretty much every other race. That really has nothing to tell us about race differences in intelligence in contemporary America. But science does.
@herneith: I notice you have no rebuttal.
Read more about race differences in intelligence (RDI) at my blog. It uses big words, but give it your best shot. Here I rebut a “rebuttal” of RDI, here I address income and IQ, and here I discuss the kind of idiotic tactics race denialists use, many of which are on display in this comments thread and elsewhere on this blog.
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@Herneith
That was funny!!! HaHaHa!!!
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You believe that blacks are the only race to suffer discrimination in the USA? Not the Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Irish? Hm. I wonder, if discrimination explains black failure, shouldn’t Jews be worse off than anyone? You know, because of that whole Holocaust thing. Of course, they have an average IQ of 115, versus 85 for American blacks.
This would make sense if it weren’t for that small little hitch whereby Jews in America weren’t subject to the camps and ghettos in the Holocaust, nor were they enslaved, followed by being systematically segregated like Black people. That kind of makes a difference when talking about Black Americans.
I get really annoyed that every racist and his momma tries to use my people and our collective sufferings (who they still hold in prejudice anyways) to back up their pseudo-scientific racist nonsense which has been disproven over and over again. I mean, how many times do we have to point out that you can’t compare the suffering and/or success of two different oppressed groups of people without taking into account the various ways in which they were oppressed??
Some days I feel like the last sane man alive on the interwebs =(
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Is this unamused guy serious? In what sphere of fantasy he lives on? Where the heck these boneheads pop up?? 😀
I find it very moving listening guys like him randy or other “race realists”. It is like listening my daughter explaining the world when she was about 3 yrs old. Of course she made more sense than these guys, but she had the same self assurance as this unamused dork. It is somehow very touching, like “how on earth these dudes survive in real life” etc. 😀
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@herneith: I notice you have no rebuttal.
Oh but that is my rebuttal to your post.
Of course, they have an average IQ of 115, versus 85 for American blacks.
I thought it was a 70 IQ, make up your mind!
@King: I notice you have no counter-argument to this random dummy.
His response is a non-response to your tomfoolery!
See, blacks have a lower average intelligence than whites (by about 15 IQ points).
Oh really? And did these scientist test every man woman and child to draw these conclusions?
That really has nothing to tell us about race differences in intelligence in contemporary America. But science does.
What, the science according to the modern day eugenicists?
Read more about race differences in intelligence (RDI) at my blog.
Oh, I see, you are promoting your blog! No thanks! Besides, we are too dumb to understand what it is you are espousing so why waste our time? Why are you wasting your time pontificating to a bunch of dumb kneegrows and purportedly self-loathing whites? What does that say about your intelligence? If nothing else, you provide comic fodder for the reader here! Carry on!
Some days I feel like the last sane man alive on the interwebs =(
You probably are!
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Is this unamused guy serious? In what sphere of fantasy he lives on? Where the heck these boneheads pop up??
Yes, they are full of gaseous anomalies are they not? I would hazard a guess and say they were from Uranus!
It is somehow very touching, like “how on earth these dudes survive in real life” etc
They come to blogs like this so they can flaunt their superiority and remind black folk of how dumb they are. The whites who disagree with them of how self-loathing they are. After all, one has to something to keep themselves amused! Ironically they provide the amusement.
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zek said: “I mean, how many times do we have to point out that you can’t compare the suffering and/or success of two different oppressed groups of people without taking into account the various ways in which they were oppressed??”
“Pointing something out” and proving it are entirely separate concepts, with markedly different burdens of proof.
You’ve crafted a narrative which fits your viewpoint. You have no proof whatsoever that the greater relative success of Jews in the US vs black folks in the US is related to the level of suffering they experienced.
How does the internment of Japanese-americans and the experiences of disenfranchised indentured-servant Chinese coolies fit into your worldview?
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@Unamused
I think it is amusing that people keep discussing this IQ nonsense. I personally don’t believe that IQ measures innate intelligence. If that was the case, how can you explain the fact that the average Iq of various groups have increased over the years. If it was based on innate intelligence, that wouldn’t happen. I believe I read years ago that Southern whites had Iq scores that were less than northern blacks during the days of forced segregation. The educational system in the south must have been considerably worse than the northern one even for whites. Do you believe those southern white were less intelligent than the blacks who lived in the north? Well, I am sure you don’t believe that. Most blacks were deprived of an adequate education for centuries in this country!!! During the times of slavery, educating enslaved blacks was against the law!!! Even after slavery, the amount of money that was put into public education for blacks (primarily southern)was far far less than the amount of money used to educate southern whites. So southern blacks were far more likely to be deprived of a good education. Educated parents usually raise better educated children. And vise versa, uneducated parents are more likely to raise uneducated children. So, in my opinion, that is why blacks are slightly behind in terms of test scores. It has nothing to do with their innate ability. But it has more to do with the circumstances of their upbringing. I am sure you can understand that right?
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@ zek j evets: I notice you assume I’m prejudiced toward Jews. I also notice that you haven’t actually disproved race differences in intelligence. You’ve just declared that it has been disproved “over and over.”
@ sam: You have not presented any counter-argument or listed any facts that contradict my claim that blacks have a lower average IQ than whites. I, on the other hand, am not totally ignorant, and therefore am aware of the extensive literature on the subject, and the general consensus among psychologists: the IQ gap is real.
@ herneith: @herneith: “I thought it was a 70 IQ, make up your mind!” I never said it was a 70 IQ. Perhaps you should consider reading what I write, then trying to understand it.
African blacks have an average IQ of 67; adjusting for malnutrition, it’s about 80. American blacks: 85. These are the facts.
“Oh really? And did these scientist test every man woman and child to draw these conclusions?” Oh my… let me see if I can explain this. There’s something called “statistical significance.” It’s what lets scientists test a smaller group of people to figure out stuff about a bigger group! In this case, we have IQ test data on about 800,000 individuals (source: Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence). This is the reality of the matter: a 15 point IQ gap between blacks and whites in America. Discuss.
“What, the science according to the modern day eugenicists?” The IQ gap is acknowledged by most mainstream psychologists. Sorry if it bothers you, but the gap exists.
“Oh, I see, you are promoting your blog! No thanks! Besides, we are too dumb to understand what it is you are espousing so why waste our time?” It does appear that you are not open-minded enough to attempt to understand what I’m explaining to you. What a shame.
@ herneith again: “They come to blogs like this so they can flaunt their superiority and remind black folk of how dumb they are.” No, I come to blogs like this in a futile attempt to get people like you to think critically, honestly, and scientifically about race. Clearly I did not succeed.
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Why do these HBD numbskulls insist on making every thread about their stupid religion?
I’m going to have to apologize to the Jehovah’s Witnesses for calling the overly persistent!
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@Unamused
What are saying? Are you saying that a child’s upbringing doesn’t have an effect on his/her test score? Are you saying that poverty doesn’t have an effect? Are you saying that divorce, single parenthood, living in dangerous neighborhoods, and having an uneducated parent doesn’t have an effect? Suppose one or both of your parents are illiterate? Suppose the education that your parents had was inferior to those of most white parents? Suppose your parents weren’t steered towards a college preparatory program in high school by counselors and teachers BECAUSE of their color? I believe this happened to Malcolm X and I know it happened to many blacks during the 50’s and 60’s, even in northern schools. Suppose your mother is more likely to work outside the home? Suppose your parents were more likely to experience racism? Wouldn’t that cause tension in a child’s home? Couldn’t that effect how the child is raised in some way? ? No, you don’t strike me as someone that can’t understand the effects that a child’s upbringing can have on their performance in school? Haven’t you heard about the argument of nature vs nurture?
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Usagi,
First off, if you know black history, beyond the text book editions of black history restricted to American achievements, that’s great.
Second, I can respect if you don’t like Black American culture, but it seemed to me that you have a limited view of what it is. I’m just saying. If you don’t, forget what I just wrote.
Third, if you don’t find hip hop beautiful, cool. I don’t care for mainstream hip hop myself. No need to jump down my keyboard.
Fourth, I never said you were in denial about anything. If you love your culture, that’s great and I admire you for that.
Fifth, what is acting black?
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One more thing Usagi,
I wasn’t trying to piss you off. If I did, I apologize.
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@ Jeri: You do not understand behavior genetics or psychology. The reason for that is you never bothered to study them. You have decided what the answer is, and no amount of evidence is going to change your mind. Nevertheless, I’ll give it a shot.
You say: “I personally don’t believe that IQ measures innate intelligence.” The experts disagree with you: IQ measure intelligence.
You continue: “If that was the case, how can you explain the fact that the average Iq of various groups have increased over the years. If it was based on innate intelligence, that wouldn’t happen.” Your analysis is exceptionally simple-minded. There are many competing explanations for the Flynn effect you’re referring to. Improvements in nutrition is one of them; test familiarity, another. Either way, it doesn’t account for the fact that black IQs are consistently one standard deviation below white IQs in America. And it’s ridiculous to jump from “IQs are rising for everyone” to “IQ doesn’t measure intelligence.” Total non sequitur.
“Most blacks were deprived of an adequate education for centuries in this country!!!” Depriving someone of an education does not lower his IQ. And of course blacks are deprived of nothing today, yet the gap persists.
“Educated parents usually raise better educated children. And vise versa, uneducated parents are more likely to raise uneducated children. So, in my opinion, that is why blacks are slightly behind in terms of test scores.” Your opinion is ignorant. The effects of shared environment on IQ are negligible. Intelligent parents tend to be educated, they pass their intelligence to their children through genes, and this makes their children more likely to be educated. Blacks fall behind for genetic reasons.
@ Jeri again: “What are saying? Are you saying that a child’s upbringing doesn’t have an effect on his/her test score? Are you saying that poverty doesn’t have an effect? Are you saying [blah blah blah]”
Yes, I’m saying those things don’t have an effect. The reason I say that is because I’ve studied the subject. After you’ve read that post, you can tell me allllllll about the effects of environment on human behavioral traits.
“Haven’t you heard about the argument of nature vs nurture?” Yes, I’ve heard about it. And I’ve read books and essays and scientific research papers about it. And that is why I am telling you: race differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. The counterarguments don’t hold water.
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@Blaque Ink
Well, I think she is struggling with what alot of blacks struggle with. Fear, insecurities and misconceptions about other blacks. Like I said earlier, many blacks are like this and probably don’t want to be.
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Jeri,
I understand that, and I agree. That’s what I meant to say to her. Still, having a condescending view of blacks will only make it worse.
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@ King: I can’t help noticing that you still have absolutely no counterargument to anything I’ve said. Odd. You would think that someone throwing around terms like “numbskulls” and “stupid religion” would have, y’know, some kind of rebuttal. Anything. Anything at all.
Otherwise, that person would look like a pretty stupid numbskull themselves! And their beliefs — unsupported as they are by any kind of evidence — would seem to fit the definition of “religion” better than mine, which are based on decades of mainstream scientific research.
You’re not alone, though. This thread is full of people who (a) don’t understand any of the issues under discussion, (b) have absolute faith in their beliefs about them, and (c) are totally unwilling to listen to reason/evidence/logic/etc.
Only Jeri seems to be trying. They’re wrong, but at least they’re trying.
Here’s a little hint for you: insults are not arguments! Better luck next time.
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@Unamused
People here don’t feel like bothering to actual argue out your HDB beliefs bc we have talked about them enough already. I have only been only this website for a little of a month(I think) and I have had to repeat myself numerous times. There are like a thousand blog post on HDB. Go find one, read the comments, and argue w/ yourself. You are not saying anything we haven’t heard b4, so your attempt to convert us to your religion is useless.
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@ Cynic
Especially when his lone link is to a blog from a guy named Yggdrasil (I wonder it that’s his real name!) with a Stormfront sponsorship link at the bottom.
Will they ever learn? Anything can be “proven scientifically” on the internet…
http://www.ufoevidence.org/topics/abduction.htm
All you need is enough time, a few wayward science professors, a lot of time on your hands, and an infinite amount of misquotations and misunderstandings of legitimate studies to wade through.
Now let me see… Why don’t I start trying to disprove all of those abductions?
HBD Loosers!
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@ Cynic: Oh, I’ve tracked down rebutted plenty of race denialist idiocy — some of it from this site — on my own blog. The problem is, none of you are actually willing to discuss anything.
You’re all happy to rant and rave about racists, and if you try you can probably dredge up a study or two that you can misinterpret as evidence against some race realist theory — probably one of the studies I’ve already refuted — but you never actually try to learn anything.
That is why I’ve never had any difficulty rebutting the arguments of race denialists. They have no understanding of the issues, nor do they want any. Instead they have their article of faith: human skin cells and muscle cells and heart cells may have been evolving ever since our species first walked out of Africa, but human brain cells haven’t.
PS You still haven’t actually given or cited or linked any kind of counterargument to anything I’ve said here.
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You guys do know that Unamused is just as wrong as King, don’t you?
They both are constructing reasonings based on assumptions they can’t prove. King assumes black Americans are generally victims of racism. Unamused assumes black people are generally inferior to other races. Both reasonings are worthless as long as the assumptions remain unproven. They are just opinions.
@MinneB
“In your opinion, are these black children innocent?”
My first answer wasn’t specific enough. It didn’t really answer your question and frankly, I didn’t notice that fact. Sorry!
They were mistreated. They didn’t do anything to deserve the reaction they received. So, clearly, in that situation they were innocent. In that situation they were like Rodney – innocent and mistreated.
I have to admit, I do not see how this statement is relevant…
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@ King: Aw, what a shame that you didn’t bother to actually read what I linked. (It’s not a “lone link” either; there are three others. You can count, right?)
It’s from the Wall Street Journal (1994), it’s called “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” and it’s signed by fifty professors, all experts in intelligence research. (Not exactly “a few wayward science professors.”)
Unfortunately, you were too lazy or stupid to check that, so you look like an idiot.
PS I notice that you have no examples of this “infinite amount of misquotations and misunderstandings of legitimate studies.”
PPS That’s not how you spell “loser.”
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@Unamused
Way too many assumptions made in that comment
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@ eco: “Unamused assumes black people are generally inferior to other races.”
No, I don’t. Please read and try to understand the things I have written here. “Generally inferior” is not the same thing as “lower average IQ,” which is my only claim about blacks, compared to one other race, whites.
If you would like to see me prove my case, it’s available on my own site, along with rebuttals to the more common race denialist “arguments.”
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I want to mention that I did not see eco’s comment right above my last before I typed it up. The use of the word assumption is purely coincidental and we are talking about two different things
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IQ is now off topic on this thread unless you tie it to the post itself. Like the Cynic said, I got a ton of posts on IQ and scientific racism and all that. We do not need posts like this one to be derailed by it.
Here are my latest posts on IQ:
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Randy said:
Of course, but in the Randyverse there would be no stop lights, speed limits or traffic laws. Because those who try to look at the broader picture are told that they are being fatalistic, disempowering and trying to blame others for their own shortcomings. Since no single person can put stop lights, speed limits and traffic laws in place, they are not worth talking about – and those who do talk about them do not have the true interest of drivers at heart.
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Alright, I’ll try to tie this one last comment into the original post. Then I’m done here.
Ahem. I believe one of the causes of black Americans’ problems is our politically correct society’s unwillingness to talk honestly about race. As an example, please consider King’s last comment.
@ king: “dummy… too stupid or too lazy… inbred information incest… ‘cut and paster’ of the first order… clueless member of the HBD circle jerk… knows as little of the implications of the totality of work in the field”
Please, stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.
First, it takes Google 0.29 seconds to find like a thousand other sources for the same Wall Street Journal article, and they’re all exactly the same as the one I linked. Like this, or this.
Second, my original source for the article was Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence. It’s a book, not available online. Have you read it? No, you have not. Do you have anything to contribute to a discussion of IQ or the causes of blacks’ problems today? No, you do not. “Go on to the intelligence discussions and read,” indeed.
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Abagond have you ever read “The Ethnic Myth” by Stephen Steinberg? If you have, have you ever written anything on it? It does a great job discussing the causes of the American black underclass. The book is primarily about “the ethnic myth” that the reason behind disparities in outcome is some cultures have better values than others (e.g. Jewish culture valued education and blacks don’t, and that’s why blacks are where they are). He traces the outcome disparities to significant differences surrounding the respective groups arrival in America and subsequent treatment. It’s not because some groups worked harder than others and had better American values. However, America’s ideology of racism and prosperity through oppression requires that some groups be the ethnic heroes and others the ethnic villains.
I know you’ve already written a lot about HBD and others who point to biological differences as the cause of racial disparities, but then there are people who claim that it is cultural differences and not racism. They are the ones who have bought the myth that some ethnic groups were willing to work harder and that’s why they have had more success.
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@unamused: I could answer for you but, like abagond pointed out, this thread is not about your ideas of race IQ. This is about something else, if you can read and understand it in your racial superiority. 😀
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I think this latest commercial message from our deluded HBD sponsors makes the point as to the amount of malice that is out there. If you doubt that there are many willing to give the murderous shove to Rodney, I beg you, reconsider.
I don’t wish to debate the endless religious propaganda of HBD on this thread, which is why I’ve sidestepped most of those comments. But grant for a moment that (in Bizarro World) HBD claims were actually true. Imagine if Blacks, Mestizos, and darker-skinned South Asians, actually were genetically less intelligent (on average) than Whites.
If that were truly so, think, what purpose would there be in some random, White blogger showing up and Black websites saying, “Hey, you people are less intelligent (on average) than self-identifying White people, and the differences are GENETIC, so you can’t really change it. I can prove it too, do you want to see my endless statistics on the matter? Just so you know…” What would be the purpose of that?
I mean, would you go up to someone and say, “Hey you’re ugly and I just wanted to let you know that because I believe that it’s it’s true!” Now, how would that help either you, or the other person?
How about walking up to someone and saying, “You’re genetically short, and according to the statistics, men of your stature have a 5 to 1 disadvantage in ever finding a wife. I just wanted to let you know that.” Again, I ask, what good would that do for either of you?
To be certain, it surely doesn’t help the person you are informing. There’s really nothing that they can do about it, if what you say is true. And think if the person you were talking to didn’t accept your statements. Maybe they didn’t think of themselves as short but average, or they didn’t see themselves as ugly. Would you come back day after day arguing with them, “No, you ARE ugly, don’t you see… you ARE!!!”
For most of us, that kind of behavior hinges upon the insane. If we think that someone is short, or ugly, or unintelligent, we don’t feel some kind of compulsion to go and convince them of it. And we certainly wouldn’t make a second career of trying desperately to prove to them their inferiority. Why would you do it?
And the answer is that people like that NEED to do it. It’s not about helping another person, or society, or the world, but about helping themselves. People who are balanced, happy, and successful, don’t have time to go around and try to convince strangers how inferior their group is. No, such obsession are for losers, and social misfits—more deserving of our pity and our than our scorn.
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I think this parable is mostly true in today’s world when it comes to hiring practices. Denying employment based on race is probably like throwing a guy in the water to drown. Many Whites would simply choose to not hire Blacks for reasons they would overlook with other Whites or they would just prefer to hire someone from their own culture who thinks, talks and acts the way they do. They don’t think this is what they’re doing but it is. Many Whites just do not want to be around Blacks so they will violate our civil liberties when hiring (discriminating based on race) to remain in their comfort zone. They just say that the Black candidate is not a “good fit” for the company but this problem with “fit” is usually something that is ultimately a cultural difference whether they realize it or not.
The way many Whites perfect this crime is by only hiring through recommendations from other Whites instead of the standard resume/interview process. Many jobs are already reserved for someone before they even get posted. They just post it and go through the interview process for legal reasons but the job is often already taken. And as many Whites do not have close Black friends, the person recommended is almost always White. This is how they get to sleep well at night, by helping out a White friend and at the same time solely blaming Blacks for our high unemployment and the social ills that come with it, not seeing how they contribute to it. Yes, they may not have put this system of nepotism in place because of Blacks, but because it works for them, they prefer to continue on this way despite doing an end-run around the principles of non-discrimination in the very constitution they claim to love so much (or maybe they just care for the original constitution and not so much for the amendments.)
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@Danila
I have not had the opportunity to read “The Ethnic Myth” or even this book I am about to drop here. However, the most informative snippet I have probably ever read on the economic history of blacks was from Stephen Steinberg’s chapter entitled ‘Occupational Opportunities and Race’ in his book, Turning Back. It was the best summary of the enduring job crisis for Blacks in the United States. A MUST read for anybody interested in this issue.
http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/node/254
^that is not the actual excerpt, but it contains most of the same info & arguments Stephen lays out
@King 100% co-sign. I’ve noticed the same thing, asked my self those same questions, and came up with the same conclusion.
@Unamused we have covered all that and more in previous post. You should visit them & see how some of us explicitly interpret the US racial/ethnic IQ gap
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@Daniella “but then there are people who claim that it is cultural differences and not racism”
I don’t believe the two are mutually exclusively. From the little I have read of Stephen Steinberg I don’t think he believes that either. The latter created the former and the two currently play off of each other in contemporary American society. Now-a-days culture is more than likely the bigger problem, but racism hasn’t gone out the door. Not to mention factors that exacerbate the issue while having nothing to do with race, like economics and government policies.
If African American culture is not the same as African culture than where does it come from???
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“The way many Whites perfect this crime is by only hiring through recommendations from other Whites instead of the standard resume/interview process. Many jobs are already reserved for someone before they even get posted. “
You’re right. I know this one well and have seen it work from the inside. But I’m not sure that the intent is ALWAYS malicious. Some people just think it works better to hire by referral, since it puts pressure on people to only recommend candidates who will reflect well on them. And conversely, the new hires realize that they have a responsibility to validate the trust and assumed risk of the person who recommended them.
HOWEVER, when most of the working force in an office is White, it often has the same practical effect as racism, because they simply don’t know enough Black people, so they never get recommended. And of course, some companies still do it on purpose.
On the other hand, in large metropolitan areas, it is no longer acceptable to walk into a big meeting as a large bunch of White males. If you know what’s good for you, you better have some women and minorities in the mix, or a lot of people are going to make some rather negative assumptions about your firm. That was not as true even 15 years ago, so some progress is being made in that regard.
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@ Cynic: “If African American culture is not the same as African culture than where does it come from???”
Much of it created to survive the constant barrage and mistreatment in the System of Racism/White Domination.
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[…] racist blogger abagond declares that the “primary causes” of the black “dilemma” (i.e., all their problems) […]
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Unamused wrote a counterpost on his own blog:
http://unamusementpark.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/evasive-action/
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Unamused’s comments, counterpost and general mentality is the exact reason why I wrote this upthread:
“This was a nice story, however, it isn’t helpful. Racist are delusional for a reason. They wont budge unless they HAVE to. I say we ignore em. I like the first post by Ken. I don’t hate whites or have strong prejudices towards them, but from all I have seen on the internet, history, and society I don’t trust any of them! All us black ppl have is ourselves. We can’t trust or depend on whites. It’s sad, but true. The only ppl we should teach about institutional racism is ourselves, so the future gens know how to avoid it. It’s unfortunate, but white denial is here to stay.”
Now somebody plz tell me Unamused is proving me wrong! He is not an exception. There aree literally millions of ppl in the society we live in that think like that. That is truly sad!
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“Unamused wrote a counterpost on his own blog:”
And a rather long one, at that. But had Unamused come here, commented on-topic, and in a thread related to his pet penchant, then his reception might have been quite different.
The problem is that guys like this think that HBD is at the heart of EVERY topic. It becomes simply impossible to indulge every HBDer every time that they get a taste for debate. If we did so, we would scarce do little else than to repeat the same rebuttals to the HBD mythology ad infinitum.
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@ Cynic
This parable was originally in response to Randy, not Unamused. But I always assume that there are many more people reading a blog than commenting. For those who follow these online debates, it may be useful for them to have some examples as fodder for their own thought.
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@Eco: “They were mistreated. They didn’t do anything to deserve the reaction they received. So, clearly, in that situation they were innocent.
In that situation they were like Rodney – innocent and mistreated.
MinneB: We agree. They are black children. Black children are people. And they are innocent. Facts.
Eco: I have to admit, I do not see how this statement is relevant…”
Back to the beginning.
Eco: “That’s why there is no match between Rodney’s and black Americans’ situations. In one case innocence is a fact and in the other an opinion.
MinneB:The relevance is being correct about facts, and basing one’s opinion on them. In my opinion, based on the facts; Rodney’s and Black American’s situations are a match.
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Eco said: “Black Americans’ innocence isn’t something you can prove. You are assuming that they are being mistreated. That’s not an undeniable logical conclusion.
That’s why there is no match between Rodney’s and black Americans’ situations. In one case innocence is a fact and in the other an opinion.
Innocent children. Innocent black children in particular is why I am against the System of Racism/White Domination.
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Oy vey,
It seems like every day a new HBDers crops up with a theory in their pocket, and a bunch of nonsense to back it up. I often wonder WHY people NEED other races to be smarter, dumber, less attractive, less masculine, better at sports, better at math, This, and That, and everything else that has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with Feel-Good prejudicial ignorance. It always seems to come back to James Baldwin’s rhetorical question of why some people need Black people to be n*****s? And not just Black people, but Latinos, Asians, Jews, ethnic Whites, Indians, Native Americans, and so on.
I mean, do guys like Unamused go around patting themselves on the back for being universally despised as racists? It’s like Pig-Pen from The Peanuts, rolling around in the dirt with a smile on his face. Has the cognitive dissonance gone so far as to make them value bigotry as if it were realism?? Who are these people? Where do they come from? And how are they so obviously broken?
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@King
I’m not trying to put down your guest post. I actually thought the parable was rather nice. I just think it’s sad that you even have to make one! This is something I believe ppl should simply understand. Idk why it is so hard for American society to admit that
1)Black ppl are the victims of racial oppression and are still suffering as a result of that oppression and
2)Everything else being equal different groups of people(blacks in particular) are NOT given the same opportunities in American society.
Those are facts and not assumptions. Even if you did believe that certain racial groups are inherently unequal that does not change 1 & 2. Hopeful some ppl will learn something from Rodney. I just doubt the deniers are ever going away.
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For most of us, that kind of behavior hinges upon the insane.
Insane and then some. It’s like he cant’s help it and has a compulsion whereby he must educate the lower IQ people as to their inferiority. But wait, this guy ain’t a racist, everyone else is who don’t see his points.
And the answer is that people like that NEED to do it.
He has a compulsion I tell you! Besides, why spoil his fun? Meet his nonsense with more nonsense I say!
more deserving of our pity and our than our scorn.
You forgot hilarity also.
“Unamused wrote a counterpost on his own blog:”
Hahahahahahahaha!!!!! Will the jokes never end? In the words O Superstore:
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I believe the reason King wrote that story is because of the reality of living in a society in pathological denial. Certain people like the HBDers that pop up in blogs like this prove they care only about what’s “different” and who’s “better” than everyone else in order to make themselves feel superior. It’s no different than a schoolyard bully that picks on other kids whom they feel is different or “strange” from everyone else. That bully wants to feel better by making others feel bad.
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@King
It is strange. I tried to find an actual Iq test that people actually take, not those online ones, but I couldn’t find one. Yeah, I agree with you, King. I find it strange that people need to go on every black website, on every youtube video, etc trying to convince blacks of their stupidity and ugliness. It is just a mind game to convince blacks that they are inferior because they want blacks to lose their confidence. People who are trully intelligent, ambitious and harkworking don’t need to do such things. But people who are sick, evil and perverse play these sort of games.
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The point is as long as we continue to live in a world where injustices like racism continue and are denied by many people, then those who recognize that it’s injustice WILL NOT be quiet and WILL NOT stop being active.
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“I’m not trying to put down your guest post. I actually thought the parable was rather nice. I just think it’s sad that you even have to make one!”
Oh no! Any criticism is fine and certainly not taken personally.
“Hopeful some ppl will learn something from Rodney. I just doubt the deniers are ever going away.”
No, of course the won’t. They will continue brandishing around minority opinions in an academic field that utterly disavows every major conclusions that they have drawn.
And again, why would it be SO important to try and convince Black people of their inferiority? What difference would it make if they believed it or not, if it was true? It’s illogical. And there’s the rub. ONLY if it’s NOT true does it become important to try and convince Black people that they are genetically less intelligent.
It is a last gasp of stupidity from a dying branch of false science. They are already a laughing stock in the world of real science. In the decades to come, they will be the museum clowns of the future.
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Hey Herneith, you should show them the other end of that laughing donkey!!!
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abagond
“It is hard to come up with good, lasting solutions unless we understand the cause.”
You seem to be a rather sensible fellow. (When I originally posted here, I didn’t realize that this was a “blackish site.” I figured that it was a SWPL site.) Since you are interested in the cause, I would you suggest that you read up on the IQ literature. Everyone who is familiar with this debate agrees that there are socially significant, predictive (average) IQ gaps* (between NE Asians, Europeans, “Hispanics,” and African Americans). The disagreement concerns the various gaps’ meaning and origin.
Flynn — of the Flynn effect — argues that the B-W gap is due to gene X environmental interactions (which implies average genetic differences). See, for example, Flynn 2010 [1]. He nonetheless maintains, as does every serious environmentalist (Nisbett, Hunt, Ceci, etc) that the gap is socially important. For an overview of literature refer to these open access articles :
a. Sackett, et al., 2008. High-Stakes Testing in Higher Education and Employment Appraising the Evidence for Validity and Fairness.
b. Schmidt and Hunterm 2004. General Mental Ability in the World of Work: Occupational Attainment
and Job Performance
c. Sacket, et al, 2001. High-stakes testing in employment, credentialing, and higher education: Prospects in a post-affirmative-action world
Now, that IQ difference — ~1 SD between adult Bs and Ws –is clearly the PROXIMATE cause of (much of) the disparity you discuss. What is debated is the ULTIMATE cause. The wiki article on race/intelligence has a list of some of the possibilities. I found a much more extensive (environmental) list, which may of may not help you in your search: Wiesen, 2009. Possible Reasons for the Black-White Mean Score Differences Seen With Many Cognitive Ability Tests: Informal Notes to File. (You can rule out everyone possible explanation that implies that the gaps are not real and that the tests are biased.)
* More specifically, GMA (general mental ability).
zek j evets,
I’m not surprised that you’re a Jew.
Everyone,
When it comes to Jews and IQ, it’s worth reading John Glad’s “Jewish Eugenics” (Google Scholar it). Jews have a tenancy to dissemble about IQ (a measure invented by a Jew — hence the NAZI claim that it was a product of “Jewish science”) out of fear of persecution. (It’s obvious that Jews, zek j evets aside, have higher IQs; Go Google scholar the following paper: Burstein, 2006. Jewish Education and economic success in the united states: A search for an explanation.
If IQ is the product of education and SES, that would cause them to have higher IQs; on the other hand, if education and SES was the product of IQ, their success would be evidence of that. Either way you go, you can’t avoid the conclusion.
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I’m not surprised that you’re a Jew.
You’re not surprised because I’m smarter than you? Or because I don’t claim a degree in chair-building as qualification for expertise in race, genetics, and IQ,! Please… go design me a wrist-rest. I’d get carpal-tunnel typing out all the ways in which you fail ; )
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“You’re not surprised because I’m smarter than you?”
I find that the most fervent anti-(white)-racists tend to be hyper ethnocentric Jews, masquerading as real European people (i.e non-semites). They denounce European meta-ethnoracial identity (i.e. Western civilization — or whatever is said to be “Eurocentric”), while fiercely defending their own ethnoracial identity (e.g “their” “people” defined by a mix of religious, ancestral (read: “racial”), and ethnic ties).
Most of them are even fierce defenders of ethnoreligioracial nationalism (read: Zionism). (Oddly, when talking about race and African-Americans, they tend to not mention the over-representation of Jews among slave traders — unless they’re in the “race realist” camp, in which case they brag about it). More generally, they tend to get rather nasty when they are proved wrong.
Ya, not uprising at all. You fit the stereotype (read: generalization) quite well.
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Do HDBers deny the fact that their is a general anti-black prejudice in America? Do they deny discrimination in hiring, housing, media, and the criminal justice? Even if what they believe is true(it’s not) how does that make anti-black racism/prejudice non-existent in the USA???
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Chuck,
I’ve also noticed that many of the “environmental determinism” proponents seem to be Jewish phDs.
Many if not most of them grew up in cultural environments which heavily favored the pursuit of education, a trait which they ought to be proud of. Why wouldn’t they be? People who excel deserve the esteem they’ve earned.
Furthermore, the data on Jewish academic achievement compared with non-Jewish whites and minorities is incontrovertible (bachelor degree attainment 180% of non-Jewish whites, and 340% of black americans).
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@Chuck
How many followers of the Jewish faith have you met in your actual life? How many have been to your home? How many live in your neighborhood? How many have you had deep and/or casual conversations with? Can you give some real life examples(from your life that is) of Jewish ppl fitting Zionist ethnocentric anti-racist(white???) stereotype?
How is being an anti-racist being anti-white?
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“… It is just a mind game to convince blacks that they are inferior because they want blacks to lose their confidence…”
Mmm, it isn’t about blackness people. It is the continued need, and refined way the System of Racism/White Domination propagandizes for the next generation of little oppressors. Randy,Chuck,Unamused and the others like them (who aren’t afraid) to spew their racist rhetoric. Don’t be distracted from the truth. They are simply the foot soldiers of the larger System…Follow the money. It’s not personal. It’s profit.
Black people have ceased to be profitable in the System of Racism/White Domination. They’re just bringing their campaign to the blogs. The don’t care if black people engage with them or not.
They’re recruiting. Constantly. Attempting to recruit White and non-black people with anti-black propaganda.
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@Chuck
“How many followers of the Jewish faith have you met in your actual life? How many have been to your home? How many live in your neighborhood? How many have you had deep and/or casual conversations with? Can you give some real life examples(from your life that is) of Jewish ppl fitting Zionist ethnocentric anti-racist(white???) stereotype?”
Judaism is not just a faith. It is an alliance between a faith, ethnicity, and breeding population. [1] As for me, I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood (University Heights, OH); it borders on a somewhat atheist Jewish neighborhood (Beechwood, Ohio). Many of my friends were Jewish (self-identifying non-religious). Some of my extended family is Jewish (self-identifying non-religious). I have been a member of Jewish athletic clubs (My “look” and my surname are Jewishish enough — so I am told, so no one asks about my actual faith — catholic). I know my Jews.
A real life examples: One of my friends, Dan Eisenberg, helped craft the Zionist ethnocentric anti-(white)-racist stereotype in my mind. He was Zionists and he was rather defensive of “his” “people,” yet he would go on and on about the racism of “white people.” As he did not identify as a white person or as he had an alternative ethnic identity, the “sins” of the white man were no skin of his teeth — god forbid, however, when I pointed out the irritations of Jewish man. Dan was firmly antiracist. What did this mean? He thought that “ethnic”/”racial” identification was stupid. For Blacks? No. For Hispanics? No. For Jews (himself not being religious — but somehow still being Jewish)? No. But for “White” people (i.e. those “eurocentric” folk).
How many Jews are like this? None of the orthodox; few of the conservative; enough of the “liberal,” post-religious (German) Jews to keep the generalization valid (if weak). It’s mostly that (German) Jews, in general, are vastly over-represented in academia (ultimate cause unknown); this allows the antiChristian European bias of many to be broadcast far and wide.
[1] See for example: Saletan, 2007. Jewish intelligence, Jewish genes, and Jewish values.
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Cynic,
“Do HDBers deny the fact that their is a general anti-black prejudice in America? Do they deny discrimination in hiring, housing, media, and the criminal justice?”
I see massive ethnoracial discrimination FOR Blacks and Browns. To understand my experience of things, look up the following articles:
a. McDaniel, 2009. Gerrymandering in personnel selection: A review of practice.
(Methods commonly used to discriminate for Black and Brown people)
b. Sacket, et al, 2001. High-stakes testing in employment, credentialing, and higher education: Prospects in a post-affirmative-action world
(Start with: “Strategies for Achieving Diversity Without Minority Preference”)
This is where the g-factor comes in. When you control for IQ, the disparities go away, reverse, or mostly go away. Case study:
Kanazawa, 2005. The Myth of Racial Discrimination in Pay in the United State
(I’m just linking to articles that you can google scholar — on the assumption that you don’t have access to all the journal articles.)
Again, from my perspective, Black and Brown people are just performing at the lower 18th and 34th percentile of White population. They are just like white people, except that their color makes their performance relative to the white and yellow mean ubiquitous. This gives the illusion of discrimination. The reality is average g differences.
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To Chuck:
I find that the most fervent anti-(white)-racists tend to be hyper ethnocentric Jews, masquerading as real European people…
Masquerading as real European people…? It’s rare these days for a Jew to hide their ethnicity in the US..what are you talking about.
Oddly, when talking about race and African-Americans, they tend to not mention the over-representation of Jews among slave traders — unless they’re in the “race realist” camp, in which case they brag about it.
I don’t believe I have ever seen a Jew brag about ancestors who were slave traders….I certainly doubt that such behavior is common. The large majority of Jews in the United States are from Eastern and Central Europe whose ancestors had no hand in the slave trade. Yes there were some Jews… predominantly from Portugal and the Netherlands who participated in slave trading but ultimately the decision to allow (and profit from) the slave trade was made by the governments which were ruled up by Christians and slave trading was predominantly not a Jewish affair. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_African_Company
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@Chuck
I didn’t ask about discrimination for Blacks. I am talking about discrimination against Blacks. I want to know if HDBers deny that.
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Omg I can’t believe I live in a society with ppl like Hippo Chuck. I was so naive during my entire adolescence. I never knew ppl like him still existed until I started going to sites that allowed comments. At first, I just tried to tell myself that they were all trolls, but now I am beginning to believe their are copious amnts of ppl in the white community who think like this.
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Wow… From anti-Black to anti-Semitic in about two comments FLAT. That must be a record for a blogger showing their true colors.
Apparently Chuck is now engaging in the “I know Jewish people so I can’t be anti-Semitic” defense. Next thing he’ll be saying is that he doesn’t hate Black people because he listens to Fifty Cent!
Seriously, I’ve met enough anti-Semites in my time who’d laugh in my face or get extremely defensive for calling them out on their prejudice. Chuck, you are no exception. And your sad, sad display of stereotyping and generalizing is just another nail in the coffin on your credibility among this piece of the blogosphere.
Dare I wonder how Chuck and Randy would react if they had to factor in to their extremely narrow view of Jewish peoples the large percentage of Jews who aren’t White? I’m sure they (Jews of Color) would find the assertion that Judaism is “an alliance between a faith, ethnicity, and breeding population” to be either hilarious or, more likely, extremely offensive.
But that’s neither here nor there. My being Jewish is a red herring to the issue at hand: which is that Black, Hispanic, many Asian peoples, and even Jews face entrenched forms of racism, from structural to individual, from racial profiling in LA, Chicago, and New York, to micro-aggressions in the workplace. And the parable in this post illustrates this fact all too poetically.
Whether the racists want to deal with it or not is up to them.
But hey, call me inflammatory, I say they’re cowards. No better than the Stormfront loonies they attempt to distance themselves from. Randy, Chuck, and even Schwartz are liars, cowards, and unapologetic haters.
So it goes.
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“Omg I can’t believe I live in a society with ppl like Hippo Chuck. I was so naive during my entire adolescence. I never knew ppl like him still existed…”
Evidently there are still some left in the lunatic HBD fringe. Like the last of the Dodo… I assure you, a dying breed.
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@ Danila & Chuckwiththehippo:
Thank you for the reading recommendations.
@ Unamused:
If you (or anyone) can send me a copy of this paper, I will do a post on it:
Myerson, Rank, Raines, and Schnitzler. “Race and general cognitive ability: The myth of diminishing returns to education.” Psychological Science, 9, 139–142 (1997).
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Abagond:
Myerson, Rank, Raines, and Schnitzler. “Race and general cognitive ability: The myth of diminishing returns to education.” Psychological Science, 9, 139–142 (1997).
I wonder if the authors would allow you to have a copy..? The email for one of authors is here:
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/9/2/139.abstract
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@ The Cynic:
You can call into question the truth of a commenter’s statements, but not their state of mind.
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Omg I can’t believe I live in a society with ppl like Hippo Chuck. I was so naive during my entire adolescence. I never knew ppl like him still existed
I felt the same way growing up. The world proved me wrong. And fast. But I’m still hopeful that not everyone is a horrible racist or anti-Semite. Mostly because if I didn’t I’d start cursing like Anthony Anderson in Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, shouting, “Imma burn this motha down! Imma burn this motha down!”
Guess that makes me naive, haha.
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@Abagond
Sigh…. I tried 🙂
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I try all the time… which is why Abagond is forced to delete 1 out of every 2 of my posts.
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@cynic and king: well, my comment was also deleted which was propably good thing since it was a bit off subject and on the personal level. But this is abagonds blog and I think he does pretty good job keeping this level of debate up, concerning the subjects and commentators like me. 😀
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Cynic: “At first, I just tried to tell myself that they were all trolls, but now I am beginning to believe their are copious amnts of ppl in the white community who think like this.
You stated up-thread you didn’t “trust” white people. I would say you are not off base. I too was very naive in my suburban youth. I have been Rodney, but my parents taught me how to swim before I got in the boat.
I have learned and every day this society keeps reinforcing my belief that even “nice” white people will push unsuspecting black people in the water. They cut their racist baby teeth in the shallow, and refine THEIR AMERICAN NATURE (got that from Newt Gingrich last night) as they benefit from the system we live under.
As long as white people continue to support and benefit from a system of racism/white supremacy…they are all SUSPECT. Black people need to teach every Black child this. No need to be hostile, but we need to treat every one of them as SUSPECT.
King:”Evidently there are still some left in the lunatic HBD fringe. Like the last of the Dodo… I assure you, a dying breed.”
…a dying breed. If only that were true. In your parable, Rodney drowns…not the boys who constructed the plot before the boat left the shore.
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@ minnieB, cynic
I guess I can follow your logic in terms of not trusting WP, but it makes me wonder how this manifests in practice. Do you think whites still believe general ethics don’t apply to POC on a person to person basis? Could you describe a circumstance where a WP could “push you in the water” so to speak.
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@Jas0nb:”Do you think whites still believe general ethics don’t apply to POC on a person to person basis?”
I cannot tell you what whites believe. Their behaviors reflect their beliefs.
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@ abagond: I’ve emailed Myerson et al.’s paper to you. I previously wrote my own post on it — actually, on your guest post about it.
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“I cannot tell you what whites believe. Their behaviors reflect their beliefs.”
that’s fine, behavior is more what I meant anyway. So you’re saying that whites treat you in an unethical way on a person to person basis. As in they don’t seem to apply the same ethics toward you as they would towards another WP. Is that correct? Could you provide an example of this from your experience?
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@minnie, cynic
the reason i’m asking BTW is that im curious about what exactly WP are doing besides making racist/ignorant remarks and avoiding contact with POC. I can’t think of many examples of WP maliciously “screwing over” POC either in my experience or in anything I’ve witnessed. ( Again on a person to person basis.) I don’t say that to discredit any of your experiences just to show that I don’t have anything personally to draw from. I suppose job discrimination would count and so would police profiling but I guess I was more interested in hearing about how whites that you have known personally and had some sort of friendship or acquaintanceship with have betrayed you in such a way as to make you wary of letting your guard down around a WP
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@ Unamused:
Super, beautiful, wonderful, thank you!!!
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@ jas0n: “…but it makes me wonder how this manifests in practice.”
I am unclear what it is you want to know. What do you mean by manifest in practice?
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The Cynic
@Chuck
“I didn’t ask about discrimination for Blacks. I am talking about discrimination against Blacks. I want to know if HDBers deny that.”
…..
Hmmm…we’ll, why don’t you give me an example of discrimination and I will give you my perspective. Off the bat:
1. Wage = zero, controlling for GMA
2. SES = reverse, controlling for GMA
3. Job = reverse, controlling for GMA
Let’s just go through your list and see what’s left. This is why GMA is discussed. It’s not discussed for the sake of say “X people have lower average GMA ha ha!” It’s to say 1) that the proximate cause of (much of) the difference is GMA not (contemporaneous, at least) discrimination and 2) that the contemporaneous discrimination runs the other way.
………….
“Omg I can’t believe I live in a society with ppl like Hippo Chuck. I was so naive during my entire adolescence. I never knew ppl like him still
Google search the site: “Stuff Black People Don’t Like.” Paul, over there, does a good job at presenting the other side. This is how non-SWPLs think. I’m trying to find the intermediate.
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@Hippo Chuck
-In the Los Angeles area, 1115 landlords received identically worded e-mails from a would-be tenant in vacant apartments advertised online. Encouraging replies came back to 56% of notes signed “Tyrell Jackson,” to 66% signed “Said Al-Rahman,” and to 89% of those signed “Patrick McDougall”(Carpusor & Loges, 2006).
-Seeing Black: Several studies show that the more a person’s features are perceived as typical of their racial category, the more likely they are to elicit race-based responding (Maddox, 2004). In one study of 182 police officers, Jeninifer Eberhardt and her collaborators (2004, ’06) found that “Black faces looked more criminal to police officers; the more Black, the more criminal.” In a follow-up study, they found ppl more willing to give the death sentence to Black defendants having the most stereotypically Black features.(Myers 705)
Myers, David G. Psychology 9th Edition In Modules. New York: Worth Publishers, 2010. Print.
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zek said, “Randy, Chuck, and even Schwartz are liars, cowards, and unapologetic haters.”
Once again, zek lacks a counterargument so he regrettably resorts to name calling.
Supposedly I’m a hater because I pointed out the incontestable truth that Jews in the US have a bachelor degree attainment 180% of non-Jewish whites, and 340% of blacks.
Why is that important?
Because it supports the claim that culture, not racism, accounts for the largest influence on success in 2011. It’s not a “stereotype” that Jews and Asians prioritize education, it’s an inescapable fact.
Why is that important?
Because social scientists like Jared Diamond and our very own zek attempt to assign a lack of success to racism and/or environmental conditions. This could hardly be more disingenuous and harmful.
They know exactly why the Jews and Asians exceed the education and income of non-Jewish whites, blacks, and hispanics, but they don’t have the guts to say it.
Before anyone knee-jerks “model minority!”, look at the numbers. It’s all in black and white and beyond dispute.
If you prefer a bit more anecdote to these arguments, I would suggest that you look up the last month’s WSJ article from Amy Chua called “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”.
In the comments section, you’ll find page after page of other asian folks talking about how their parents were similarly laser-focused on education. From there you can link to dozens if not hundreds of asian-american blogs which discuss the same thing ad-nauseum.
In other words, the education-focused culture of asian and jewish americans is no myth. If people like zek and Jared Diamond really and truly cared about poor people (of any ethnicity), they would have one and only message:
“MAKE YOUR CHILDREN STUDY MORE!”
Full stop.
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@Hippo Chuck I’ve posted this a thousand times, but I might as well do it again.(something tells me this wont be the last)
-ABC – 20/20 What Would You Do / Racism In America – Part 1
Part 2
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Cynic,
“Omg I can’t believe I live in a society with ppl like Hippo Chuck. I was so naive during my entire adolescence. I never knew ppl like him still”
It would be nice if you could actually point out Hippo Chuck’s factual inaccuracies. Hippo Chuck has made the following assertions (among others) on this blog:
1. There are (average) ethnoracial GMA (General mental ability) differences.
2. In the US, GMA is highly predictive of social outcomes.
3. These differences (and not contemporaneous discrimination) are the proximate cause of much of the disparity that you are talking about.
4. Contemporaneously, the ethnoracial employment and education discrimination is for “People of Color.”
5. The ultimate causes of the GMA differences are not clear.
6. Multiple lines of reasoning forcefully argue for a partial genetic basis to the B-W difference. James Flynn of the Flynn effect agree. [1]
Ergo, the disparities are not reducible to discrimination (contemporaneously or otherwise) — or to: “Slavery, Forbidding an education, Then under-education, Refusing to hire us, Portraying us as buffoons or criminals in the media.” (Presumably, the latter wouldn’t help, though).
Please help Hippo Chuck correct his fallacies. Please point of that faulty statements.
[1] Refer to: Flynn and Dickens, 2001. Heritability estimates versus large environmental effects: The IQ paradox resolved.
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@Hippo Chuck
-Racism? What Would You Do? Man Stealing Bike In Park! (Different Reactions When They Changed Race From White TO Black)
http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/e/16711680/wshhA5yGj42eclUn99k6
-A short LA Times article on racial profiling. Lots of useful information in there.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/23/opinion/oe-ayres23
For every 10,000 residents, about 3,400 more black people are stopped than whites, and 360 more Latinos are stopped than whites. Stopped blacks are 127% more likely to be frisked — and stopped Latinos are 43% more likely to be frisked — than stopped whites.
Stopped blacks are 76% more likely to be searched, and stopped Latinos are 16% more likely to be searched than stopped whites.
Stopped blacks are 29% more likely to be arrested, and stopped Latinos are 32% more likely to be arrested than stopped whites.
Now consider this: Although stopped blacks were 127% more likely to be frisked than stopped whites, they were 42.3% less likely to be found with a weapon after they were frisked, 25% less likely to be found with drugs and 33% less likely to be found with other contraband. We found similar patterns for Latinos.
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@Hippo Chuck
-Two studies have found a racial bias in North Carolina’s criminal justice system. They have found that someone who kills a white person is THREE times more likely to be sentenced to death than someone who is a minority.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/press-release-landmark-north-carolina-death-penalty-study-finds-dramatic-racial-bias
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/8017956/
http://www.beaufortobserver.net/publicationreturnframe.lasso?-token.address=http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/02/07/973261/racial-justice-act-faces-test.html
Now tell me, where are the NC laws that mandates a white person’s life is more valuable than a minority’s? How is it that after Jim Crow we have these racial bias phenomenons occur? Lol I can’t believe you are taking the, “whites are the real oppressed majority” route. I don’t see how you can be so obsessed with psychology and not understand the basics of the prejudice human mind. Pathetic
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@Hippo Chuck
5. The ultimate causes of the GMA differences are not clear.
Whoa! Aren’t you the one saying genetics is the clear reason for GMA differences? Did you copy and paste that? From what I have read from you, you’re making the assumption that genes, and not the environment, is the cause of GMA differences or that the former plays are larger role than the latter. Before we get into that I want you to respond to these clear cases of anti-black biases w/in American society.
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@jas0n: Thanks for the clarification.
jas0n said: “I was more interested in hearing about how whites that you have known personally and had some sort of friendship or acquaintanceship with have betrayed you in such a way as to make you wary of letting your guard down around a WP”
If one pays attention to the ways many ways the System of Racism/White Domination bombards white people(and non White people) with misleading and blatant anti-black,(as well as other non White) propaganda on a daily basis, and then WP plead ignorance and or color blindness to the existence of this system and their part in it, or benefit from it, then that makes me wary of letting my guard down, and they are actively suspected of practicing Racism/White Domination.
But you want a personal story:
2009,
Innocent Black children want to learn how swim and play in the pool. White people practicing racism/white supremacy kick them out of the pool because they are black and because they can under their system.
They’re black. I am black. Blackness is political.
Children are personal.
If those black children and their teachers would have been taught about the System of Racism/White Supremacy from birth, they would have known to suspect every white person capable of practicing racism/white supremacy.
If they had been taught White people have been endowed with POWERS by a system to ruin their black innocence, black livelihood, black image, black health, even their black spirit, at white whim, then the teachers and children would have been aware and empowered, instead of blindsided and disarmed for the battled.
Those black children(like many others) had to take their lost racial innocence and get on the bus and cry. Who knows how many of them will ever trust the water again. I hope they will trust the water, but suspect White people.
Meanwhile, the White children get to just jump back in the pool, and go color blind. Like nothing ever happened…to them. Because they weren’t there. They are innocent. Their parents did it, not them. They are children. Who grow up to become…Suspects.
See how it manifest?
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Randy,
I already made my arguments up-thread, and in other posts. You seemed content to ignore the overwhelming evidence contrary to your position. So, I’m going to be content to make fun of you for your racism.
Look at Cynic, and King, and Abagond making well-constructed, empirically supported arguments documenting the evidence of racism. Yet all you do is ignore, deny, and change the subject. I mean, you did the same thing to my arguments. Frankly, it’s gotten to the point where you’re just being stubborn about being wrong. (Chuck too, actually.)
Just seems like a waste of time trying to drag an ostrich’s head from the sand its buried itself in. Instead, I’ll have a laugh at your expense (like Herneith has been doing).
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@ Chuck-Hippo
General Mental Ability
I never do get whether you guys think that this means:
a) The level at which a person/population is testing
b) The highest level that it is genetically possible for a person/population to test at
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The Cynic,
Good, We’re getting down to specifics. You list the following:
1. In the Los Angeles area, 1115 landlords received identically worded e-mails from a would-be tenant in vacant apartments advertised online. Encouraging replies came back to 56% of notes signed “Tyrell Jackson,” to 66% signed “Said Al-Rahman,” and to 89% of those signed “Patrick McDougall”(Carpusor & Loges, 2006).
This is called Rational discrimination. It’s an empirical fact that Blacks have disproportionately higher rates of delinquency and criminality (interestingly, the latter is an international phenomena). Based on statistical rates — i.e. knowing nothing else and all things being equal –any good Bayesian statistician would discriminate against them.
While I don’t agree that this is how it should be, this is illegal. [To give a personal example, when my wife (Yellow) an I (White) were looking for an area of residence, we choose a whiter area (Cary, NC), because statistics show that demographics (Black and Brown) correlates with crime.]
2. -Seeing Black: Several studies show that the more a person’s features are perceived as typical of their racial category, the more likely they are to elicit race-based responding (Maddox, 2004).
This just means that many people think that a more Black etc.-looking person will act more stereotypically Black. Well, one interpretation is that more Black looking people do tend to better fit the generalizations about how Blacks act. [To give a personal example, my brother in law is a hafrican (about 60% ancestrally West Eurasian, 40% West SS African). In my estimate, he acts somewhere between a small town white hick and small town black hick. Theoretically, some of this could be due to difference in behavior genetics; my guess, however, is that is reflects mixed cultural heritage.
3. “In one study of 182 police officers, Jeninifer Eberhardt and her collaborators (2004, ’06) found that “Black faces looked more criminal to police officers; the more Black, the more criminal.” In a follow-up study, they found ppl more willing to give the death sentence to Black defendants having the most stereotypically Black features.(Myers 705)
The interesting thing is that criminal faces, controlling for race, look more criminal to police officers and to everyone else [1]. (i.e people who look like criminals, tend to actually be criminals — proving that stereotype correct). Since more Black people tend to be criminals (nationally and internationally), it’s not surprising that more Black people tend to look like criminals. Right? (Otherwise the correlation would not hold). Now, the findings about criminality and appearance just came out, which was likely why Eberhardt didn’t control for that effect.
[1] Valla, et al., 2011. THE ACCURACY OF INFERENCES ABOUT CRIMINALITY BASED ON FACIAL APPEARANCE
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BTW… this is turning into another HBD related thread… but at least we held it off for a couple of days.
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Cynic
@Hippo Chuck
5. The ultimate causes of the GMA differences are not clear.
“Whoa! Aren’t you the one saying genetics is the clear reason for GMA differences?”
…..
You might be confusing me with some other Chuck. I wrote:
“The average African IQ is 70″
On Wed 16 Mar 2011 at 03:24:56
“Olufemi
@ Chuck
“And your conclusion is?”
My conclusions are:
1. As I said: Within populations, there are socially significant, highly predictive, neurologically grounded, heritable differences in general cognitive ability.
2a. Between US ethnoracial populations (self identifying Europeans, Hispanics, and African Americans) there are average socially significant, highly predictive, neurologically grounded, differences in general cognitive ability. (Notice I dropped heritable).
2b. A rather complex argument — which I could explain if you want — leads me to conclude that there is some genotypic basis to the US Black-White gap.
3. Between international ethnoracial populations there are psychometric differences (some of which are socially significant, highly predictive, and neurologically grounded — depending on the populations being discussed).
4. It’s highly improbably the there are no socially significant (relative to post-industrial needs) genotypic IQ (g)* differences between any ethnoracial populations. (If, as of the 1900s, West SS Africans were genotypically on par with Europeans, then given the dysgenic breeding patters of the latter*, it statistically follows that they would now be genotypically superior with respect to general intelligence……
……………………
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“Within populations, there are socially significant, highly predictive, neurologically grounded, heritable differences in general cognitive ability.”
Is this your own deduction? An as yet, unproven theory, or can you point us the the DNA sequences that limit or promote cognitive ability in humans?
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King
BTW… this is turning into another HBD related thread… but at least we held it off for a couple of days.
…
I think you’re right — and I apologize if I steered it that way. Abagond was interested in the proximate cause of the contemporaneous difference. I hold that differences in GMA is one such cause. I would add that they were a contributory cause to historic discrimination. To quote Jefferson:
“This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty [of reason], is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question `What further is to be done with them?”
African Americans were perceived to be intellectually inferior. It so happens that, statistically speaking, there was — and hence is — some truth to this. Solve this problem and you will go a long way to solving your disparity problems.
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King
“Within populations, there are socially significant, highly predictive, neurologically grounded, heritable differences in general cognitive ability.”
Is this your own deduction? An as yet, unproven theory, or can you point us the the DNA sequences that limit or promote cognitive ability in humans?
…..
I’m trying to focus on the proximates; that said, I already explained this….
“The average African IQ is 70″
0n Wed 16 Mar 2011 at 20:11:36
“And once again I rephrase my previous question, which precisely are the genes that determine “IQ” with a high predictability?”
Chuckwiththehippo: “Genetic variance estimates don’t require specific knowledge of genes — in a parallel manner, environmental variance estimates don’t require specific knowledge of environmental factors. Can you name the specific environmental factors that determine IQ? No. You could name some factors that reliably “determine” some IQ differences. In the same manner, I could name some genetic factors that reliably “determine” some IQ differences (e.g. the rs1018381 and rs2619522 alleles of DTNBP1.). As I said, you can think of heritable differences as differences that would emerge if environments were equalized (i.e a difference that results from endogenous genetic factors), conversely, you can think of environmental differences as differences that would diminish if environments were equalized. The whole debate between nature and nurture is predicated on some concept of genetic and environmental causation; the very fact that we are having this debate, presupposes that we implicitly agree with this conception. Given this conception, genetic (and environmental) variance estimates can be made in absence of knowledge of specific factors.”
See also: (Tue 15 Mar 2011 at 00:28:59)
Chuck: 1. Within populations, there are socially significant, neurologically grounded, heritable differences in general cognitive ability (i.e. g or general intelligence).
b. When it comes to the within population heritability of g, I’d point you to:
Deary et al. 2010. The neuroscience of human intelligence differences
Hayworth, et al., 2009. Generalist Genes and High Cognitive Abilities.
For a general summary, it has been found (in the US, throughout Europe, Japan, China, and Australia) that a) the heritability of IQ (g) increases with age and b) by adulthood additive genetics explains the majority of the IQ (g) variance within populations (who live in the normal environmental range).
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“African Americans were perceived to be intellectually inferior. It so happens that, statistically speaking, there was — and hence is — some truth to this.
But it seems that proof that the disparity is, in fact, a manifestation of genetic variance, is based on conjecture and theory, at the moment. There is no science that pinpoints the genetics.
Therefore you cannot say whether the perception was confirmed, or whether the perception shaped the circumstances.
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The fact that an IQ test may be predictive of performance does not prove that the difference is genetic.
I didn’t test well in my auto shop class, and I’m still not much of a mechanic today. That does not mean that if necessity demanded that I COULD NOT be a good mechanic if I dedicated the time and effort to do so.
There is no proof that I have an anti-mechanic gene.
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Chuckwiththehippo said:
If King does not mind, I will let it proceed this time since the thread is now several days old and it seems to be a main argument against his post (that is, blacks suffer not from racism or anything wrong whites have done, as in the parable, but from their own lack of brains.)
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zek said: “I already made my arguments up-thread, and in other posts. You seemed content to ignore the overwhelming evidence contrary to your position. So, I’m going to be content to make fun of you for your racism.”
I apologize if I missed those. Please be so kind as to copy/paste. Specifically, I’m stating that if racism were more influential than culture, one would expect Jews and Asians to come close to (but never exceed) the achievements of non-Jewish whites.
This is indisputably not the case.
I offered a similarly themed refutation of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” here:
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“If King does not mind, I will let it proceed this time since the thread is now several days old and it seems to be a main argument against his post”
Let the HBDing begin!!!
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@Hippo Chuck
This is called Rational discrimination. It’s an empirical fact that Blacks have disproportionately higher rates of delinquency and criminality (interestingly, the latter is an international phenomena).
Rational discrimination??? Okay, I’m just going to copy & paste a previous comment I made on the “Black shame” thread.
-Even if 50% of all crimes were committed by blacks, does that mean 50% of blacks are criminals?
-Which race do you think disproportionately commits white-collar crime? Do you think it would be right to judge all of them based on that?
-Are you aware that most of the black men behind bars are there for non-violent drug offenses?
-Do you acknowledge the fact that multiple surveys have shown that drug dealing & usage is pretty much the same across races(nvm the fact arrests & sentencing isn’t).
-Do admit that blacks are more likely to be searched and given harsher sentences for similar crimes than whites?
http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/drugfact/minorities/minorities_ff.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/van-jones/are-blacks-a-criminal-rac_b_8398.html
-And no I am not confusing you for anybody else. I directly quoted you.
“5. The ultimate causes of the GMA differences are not clear.”
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@Hippo Chuck
Did you copy & paste that statement?
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@Hippo Chuck
-Did you purposefully ignore this or did you miss this comment?
How do you explain the discrepancies between death sentences?
-Did you also miss this?
“In a follow-up study, they found ppl more willing to give the death sentence to Black defendants having the most stereotypically Black features.(Myers 705)”
Myers, David G. Psychology 9th Edition In Modules. New York: Worth Publishers, 2010. Print.
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King
“The fact that an IQ test may be predictive of performance does not prove that the difference is genetic.”
Let’s distinguish between proximate and ultimate causes and between causes and malleability.
With regards to Blacks and Whites in the US, the average difference in GMA is the proximate cause of much of the average disparity that you are talking about.
You are correct that this does not imply an ultimate genetic cause. You are also correct that this says nothing about the malleability of the difference. Moreover, a genetic cause, per se, wouldn’t not imply that the differences were immalleable.
Everything I have said on this Blog is consistent with that.
Let me reply to your last post:
……………………………………………………………….
King
@ Chuck-Hippo
(genotypic) General Mental Ability
I never do get whether you guys think that this means:
……….
Refer to my “Wed 16 Mar 2011 at 08:32:03” reply to you in “The average African IQ is 70.? I thought I explained this pretty well.
First. An individual’s phenotypic IQ — say if you took an IQ test and found out that your full scale IQ was 120 — is only probabilistically related to that individual’s genotypic IQ [1], and that individual’s genotypic IQ is only probabilistically related to their family’s and population’s genotypic average. So we are dealing in probabilities here.
Second. If you (as an individual) do happen to have a lower than average genotypic GMA, this means, at very least, that all things being equal, you will perform less than average. Right? Does it mean that you can’t perform more than average? There’s a good deal of debate on this. At very least, having a lower than average genotypic IQ puts constraints on your possibilities.
Look: Let’s assume that John Updike had something going for him genetically speaking — it wasn’t just “hard work.” Well, if you don’t have that something — or something equivalent to that — does it mean that you can’t be a John Updike? It probable does — because John Updike had “genes” +”hard work” and you just have, at best, “hard work.” Now, imagine that John had a brother, Frank, who was also a writer. Imagine that Frank shared John’s genes but not his work ethic. Repeat our question. You = “hard work”; Frank = “genes.” The answer would depend on whether or not your hard work could beat out his genes (ie. his natural advantage).
[1]. Of the top of my head, I don’t know the formula. Your can look it up here: Tal, 2009. From heritability to probability.
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Randy,
I mean, I could go on. You could probably take the entirety of my comments from Black Shame besides the ones I’ve pasted. And here is a list of person’s of stature, academics, and organizations that disagree point-blank with you (and Chuck). By no means is this list definitive; it is merely what I found in about 30 minutes or less.
Stephen Jay Gould
Ashley Montagu
Theodosius Dobzhansky
James H Mielke
Luigi Cavalli-Sforza
Paula S. Rothenberg
Leonard Lieberman
Jarred Diamond
Mark C Griffin
Noam Chomsky
Lyle Konigsberg
John Relethford
Franz Boas
Richard Lewontin
Cornel West
Howard Gardner
James Baldwin
Frantz Fanon
Stephen Molnar
Jefferson Fish
Martin Luther King Jr.
Claude Levi-Strauss
Ernest Beaglehole
James Quesada
Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto
Edward Franklin Frazier
Morris Ginsberg
Humayun Kabir
Khalil Gibran
Edward Said
Joseph Needham
Curt Stern
Tim Wise
Ruth Benedict
Margaret Mead
James Loewen
Robert Brooker
Anthony J.F. Griffiths
Susan R. Wessler
Sean B. Carroll
John Doebley
Daniel Hartl
William H Tucker
Marry Mehler
Charles Darwin
John Maynard Smith
UNESCO
The Human Genome Project
American Anthropological Association
The SPLC
The ADL
Institute for the Study of Academic Racism
Center for Genetics and Society
Brown University Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture
Searchlight
But besides this appeal to authority, I also make plenty of arguments on my own blog, and in other threads of Abagond’s dealing with race, genetics, and IQ. Finally, I co-sign with Cynic’s comments detailing racial prejudice at the structural level.
Also, frankly speaking, there are so many resources out there that making my own arguments is often superfluous.
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Randy,
I mean, I could go on, if the moderation would let me. You could probably take the entirety of my comments from Black Shame besides the ones I’ve pasted. And here is a list of person’s of stature, academics, and organizations that disagree point-blank with you (and Chuck). By no means is this list definitive; it is merely what I found in about 30 minutes or less.
Stephen Jay Gould
Ashley Montagu
Theodosius Dobzhansky
James H Mielke
Luigi Cavalli-Sforza
Paula S. Rothenberg
Leonard Lieberman
Jarred Diamond
Mark C Griffin
Noam Chomsky
Lyle Konigsberg
John Relethford
Franz Boas
Richard Lewontin
Cornel West
Howard Gardner
James Baldwin
Frantz Fanon
Stephen Molnar
Jefferson Fish
Martin Luther King Jr.
Claude Levi-Strauss
Ernest Beaglehole
James Quesada
Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto
Edward Franklin Frazier
Morris Ginsberg
Humayun Kabir
Khalil Gibran
Edward Said
Joseph Needham
Curt Stern
Tim Wise
Ruth Benedict
Margaret Mead
James Loewen
Robert Brooker
Anthony J.F. Griffiths
Susan R. Wessler
Sean B. Carroll
John Doebley
Daniel Hartl
William H Tucker
Marry Mehler
Charles Darwin
John Maynard Smith
UNESCO
The Human Genome Project
American Anthropological Association
The SPLC
The ADL
Institute for the Study of Academic Racism
Center for Genetics and Society
Brown University Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture
Searchlight
But besides this appeal to authority, I also make plenty of arguments on my own blog, and in other threads of Abagond’s dealing with race, genetics, and IQ. Finally, I co-sign with Cynic’s comments detailing racial prejudice at the structural level.
Also, frankly speaking, there are so many resources out there that making my own arguments is often superfluous.
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The Cynic
@Hippo Chuck
“-Did you purposefully ignore this or did you miss this comment?”
I try to reply to as many of your inquires as I can. Note that I said: “The GMA difference is clearly the PROXIMATE cause of (much of) the disparities you discuss.” Much implies a significant amount. How much? Much. Get it.
“In a follow-up study, they found ppl more willing to give the death sentence to Black defendants having the most stereotypically Black features.”
I would have to read through the studies to give you an informed reply. A priori, I would not rule out racism. I would note, however, in the South here, African Americans are usually underrepresented in death sentence convictions (when offense and criminal history is controlled for).
As for blacks with more stereotypically Black features getting more death sentences, having more “involvement” with the criminal justice system, having lower levels of education, receiving lower wages, having lower SES, having lower IQs, having diminished prestige [1,2], etc., I agree that these intra-black disparities make complete “cultural” arguments like Randy’s suspect.
My interpretation of the etiology of this disparity should be obvious. In fact, I ague that this is evidence for the genetic hypothesis (i.e what is though by some to be an effect of colorism is really an effect of hybridism). Whatever the case, I agree that “culture” explanations don’t seem to fit the data here.
[1] Hochschild and Weaver, 2008. The Skin Color Paradox and the American Racial Order
[2] Hill, 2000. Color Differences in the Socioeconomic Status of African American Men: Results of a Longitudinal Study
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zek,
I appreciate the lengthy list, but as you guessed, I’m not so inclined to be persuaded by name-checking.
You also included Jared Diamond, whose entire premise of Guns, Germs, and Steel I effortlessly spanked using his own words (https://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/guns-germs-and-steel/#comment-84013).
Why not offer a simple 2-3 sentence or so refutation of my claims that Jews and Asians are successful because of education, but that social scientists sell minorities down the river by not universally advocating the same? (https://abagond.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/the-parable-of-rodney/#comment-84171)
Surely you can distill all that great wisdom from the authors you mention into a brief, but epic smackdown.
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Randy,
“And here is a list of person’s of stature, academics, and organizations that disagree point-blank with you (and Chuck)”
It would interesting to calculate the ratio of self-identifying (Ashkenazi) Jews to Gentiles on that list and see how disproportionately over represented Jews are. Just glancing at the list, I see at very least 1/3 are self-identifying (Ashkenazi) Jews, which means at very least a 10 fold over- representation. This confirms my point above.
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@ Chuck-Hippo
Well, first let me ask you, are the terms “phenotypic IQ” and “genotypic IQ” used by geneticists, or are these terms coined by HBD enthusiasts?
I’m asking because I don’t know.
“we are dealing in probabilities here.”
Statistical probabilities, notions, and hunches when, dealing with genetics, reeks of theory rather than confirmed fact.
I therefore ask you, are you aware of any genetic science (based on actual gene studies, not corollary data) that indicate racial DNA-based genetic differences in cognitive abilities?
In regard to malleability: Is it your position that although you believe that divergent scholastic outcomes are, to some degree, genetically based, that the genetics, or the effects of the genetics, are changeable, to some degree?
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@abagond: since you gave the permission, may I join the rumble as well?? 😀 I try to behave this time!
@chuck, randy et all:
What you guys seem to be missing, or simply do not understand, that so-called western (american that is) IQ tests test cognitive skills in the culture in which conceptual problem solving is more important than, say, staying alive in hostile enviroment. It does not tell anything about intelligence at all. That is the major fault in your reasoning.
Biology does not support any of the stuff you claim it does. You read into science, not the other way around. Meaning, you invent your own idea and then try to distort the evidence to fit in it. You cherry pick, directly distort statistics, and put right lie when in need, and claim that this is the fact. Sorry.
When I was in the army, yes I have served my country that way too (I’m not a peacenick, boys :D), the guys who were most of the time in trouble were the guys who scored the highest in IQ tests. Why? They could tell which number follows which, what square fits into what, but they could not find their way out from the woods even with a compass. Reason? Well, nature is not a map. You have to combine the paper with reality. They could not do that.
They could not put up a tent which is essential if you wish to survive in -25 celsius degrees night during winter. They did not know how to build a proper fire nor how to start one, again essential skill in order to stay alive. They did not know how to heat up a tent. They did not know what to eat, how to treat the water, where to go… They were lost. And these were the guys who scored the highest in IQ tests.
In comparison, the guys who flunked, which there were many, were they guys who got things done. Without these guys, the IQ supermen would’ve been in very serious trouble indeed. They could not even fix the radios! Also, the IQ supermen were the ones who fainted, collapsed and had to be carried out from the forest during ecxercises, because they could not take it. They could think about it but not survive it.
Army is a funny place. It is one of those places were theory and practice are put to test. It is the one place were it does not matter how well you can speak, write, read or give intellectual somersaults. You and the dumbest guy are on the same line. And many times, many many times, it is the so-called dumb guy who bails out the IQ monster because he can not shoot straight, does not understand how really dangerous some stuff can be etc.
So, in the real world, there is intelligence which can litterally save your life, while it can not be measured by culturally modified so-called IQ tests. And in the real world, the IQ tests just show how well you can do them. Nothing else. To jump to conclusion that they prove another race dumber is a big big lie.
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@ sam
“What you guys seem to be missing, or simply do not understand, that so-called western (american that is) IQ tests test cognitive skills in the culture in which conceptual problem solving is more important than, say, staying alive in hostile enviroment. It does not tell anything about intelligence at all.”
Bullshit.
Conceptual problem solving is one major part of intelligence. Staying alive in a hostile environment, on the other hand, is not. It is survival skills. You could also call it “wisdom.” In an urban setting, it is called “street smarts.”
You can’t just redefine intelligence any way you like.
“Biology does not support any of the stuff you claim it does. You read into science, not the other way around. Meaning, you invent your own idea and then try to distort the evidence to fit in it. You cherry pick, directly distort statistics, and put right lie when in need, and claim that this is the fact. Sorry.”
Are you sorry that you were unable to come with any actual examples of how biology does not support the theory of race differences in intelligence? Are you sorry that you chose this amateur psychoanalysis instead of addressing the data? Are you sorry that everything here is a baseless accusation? Are you sorry for wasting our time with a long-winded version of “you’re a raaaaaaciiiiiiiiist“?
Finally, high IQ correlates with being a good soldier. That’s why the army gives IQ tests (by another name: AFQT). They have been doing this for a very long time. Your little egghead-bashing stories are just that: stories, anecdotes, with a little confirmation bias thrown in.
Thank you for your service.
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“Well, first let me ask you, are the terms “phenotypic IQ” and “genotypic IQ” used by geneticists, or are these terms coined by HBD enthusiasts?”
I just did a quick google scholar search and I only got 60 hits for “genotypic IQ” and 98 hits for “”phenotypic IQ.” In the paper, “Socioeconomic status modifies heritability of IQ in young children,” Turkheimer et al discuss “phenotypic IQ” variance (as opposed to genotypic variance). So, yes the terms “phenotypic IQ” and “genotypic IQ” are used by geneticists — though not regularly.
(for reference, “heritability of IQ,” gives 1670 hits.)
“Statistical probabilities, notions, and hunches when, dealing with genetics, reeks of theory rather than confirmed fact”
You misunderstood. Probability falls under the domain of statistics and statistics is a firm science. There’s nothing “unconfirmed about it.” The relation is just statistical. In physics, wave functions are defined by probability. That doesn’t imply that physics is riddled with “hunches and notions.”
I think the confusion was my fault. I said:
“Phenotypic IQ” is probabilistically related to “genotypic IQ.” This is statistical fact.
And
“The B-W gap probably has a genetic component.” This is just Chuck’s hunch — or, I would say, estimate. It clearly isn’t a fact.
I’ll try to be clearer next time.
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“Let’s assume that John Updike had something going for him genetically speaking — it wasn’t just “hard work.” Well, if you don’t have that something — or something equivalent to that — does it mean that you can’t be a John Updike? It probable does — because John Updike had “genes” +”hard work” and you just have, at best, “hard work.” Now, imagine that John had a brother, Frank, who was also a writer. Imagine that Frank shared John’s genes but not his work ethic. Repeat our question. You = “hard work”; Frank = “genes.” The answer would depend on whether or not your hard work could beat out his genes (ie. his natural advantage).”
Thank you, the example helps.
But you are making some assumptions in your example. You are assuming that the ability to write good literature is genetic—that Updike’s children could inherit his “writing gene” and therefore become classic (or at least good) writers themselves by virtue of their genes.
It is at least, equally possible, that good writing has no specific genetic component, but is based instead on an experiential love reading, how much you are encouraged to use your imagination as a child, and other environmental factors. The same thing may be true of all cognitive abilities.
You are also assuming that whereas an ability like writing is genetic that traits like tenacity, drive, and patience (in other words, hard work) are not genetically driven. Therefore you allow for” hard work” to be a matter of choice, but good writing to be strongly effected (if not controlled) by inherited traits.
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“This is called Rational discrimination. It’s an empirical fact that Blacks have disproportionately higher rates of delinquency and criminality (interestingly, the latter is an international phenomena). Based on statistical rates — i.e. knowing nothing else and all things being equal –any good Bayesian statistician would discriminate against them.”
Well this is actually irrational discrimination. All blacks (and anyone else for that matter) are individuals, and therefore must be judged on their own accord, case by case.
I can’t say for example all or most whites are mass murderers due to the statistical fact that the majority of serial killers are disproportionately white (or the historical fact that most mass killings were conducted by whites).
Racists love (and always resort to) aggregates and averages because they are simple minded and can’t see past statistics.
Its also very interesting that scientific racism/HBD likes to say blacks have a genetically lower average IQ but even if that were true (which it is not), what would say about individuals (probably in the millions) with above average IQ’s? I suppose they prefer to just pretend as if those folks don’t exist.
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King,
“In regard to malleability: Is it your position that although you believe that divergent scholastic outcomes are, to some degree, genetically based, that the genetics, or the effects of the genetics, are changeable, to some degree?”
They’re obviously changeable to some degree. James Flynn takes a radical view on this and argues that they’re super malleable. In you’re interested, read through the back and forth in The Cato Institutes’s “NOVEMBER 2007: THE IQ CONUNDRUM.” (Google it).
To give a personal anecdote, I have been battling a pretty brutal mitochondrial condition (likely from a Jew in the family tree, hence some animosity) and within the last couple of years my measured IQ (as an index of my cognitive agility), dropped quite a bit and is now back up — somewhat. (For the record, I wouldn’t trust an IQ that wasn’t measured by a licensed neuropsychologist). The point here is that individual biological differences are somewhat malleable — of course, if environment were equalized, differences would show. On the population level things are more complex.
“therefore ask you, are you aware of any genetic science (based on actual gene studies, not corollary data) that indicate racial DNA-based genetic differences in cognitive abilities?”
I gave you an example:
“In the same manner, I could name some genetic factors that reliably “determine” some IQ differences (e.g. the rs1018381 and rs2619522 alleles of DTNBP1.)”
Look:
1. Google “Hapmap”
2. Under “project data” Click: “HapMap Genome Browser release #28 ( Phases 1, 2 & 3 – merged genotypes & frequencies )”
3. In the “Landmark or Region” box enter the alleles.
4. Note the frequencies.
…………..
There clearly are “racial DNA-based genetic differences in cognitive abilities.” They don’t tell us much, however, because what matters is how the various differences add up and interact.
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“You misunderstood. Probability falls under the domain of statistics and statistics is a firm science. There’s nothing “unconfirmed about it.”
Yes, I took an inferential statistics class back in college.
Statistics is a science, but NOT like Physics or Biology. Statistics is completely dependent upon:
1) the quality of the data you are using (is it correct?)
2) the random nature of the samples selected (is it biased?)
Neither of these factors is guaranteed. You just do the best that you can, and TRY to correct for errors. However, even when we control, as best we can, for errors, we still make some mistakes, because we are never aware of ALL of the errors or biases. There is no such thing as a purely random sample.
Statistics is, of course, still a useful tool in science. Often the information is accurate enough, and random enough to predict *some* outcomes accurately… but then again, sometimes the stats are wrong because they are based on incomplete information. The more complex the question, the more unreliable the statistical prognostications tend to be. And human intelligence is almost* infinitely* complex and fraught with unknowns.
Trying to use inferential statistics to predict the degree of genetic influence to human intelligence, instead of using actual genetic chemical analysis seems more than ill advised as a scientific proof.
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King said:
“But you are making some assumptions in your example. You are assuming that the ability to write good literature is genetic—”
Chuck: I did make an assumption; I thought that I was pretty upfront about that. I said: “Let’s assume that John Updike had something going for him genetically speaking.” As I’m sure you recognized, the point was to illustrate the meaning of genetic differences.
“You are also assuming that whereas an ability like writing is genetic that traits like tenacity, drive, and patience (in other words, hard work) are not genetically driven. Therefore you allow for” hard work” to be a matter of choice, but good writing to be strongly effected (if not controlled) by inherited traits.”
Chuck: Fair enough. This was an unmentioned assumption. You’re correct. According to “the first law of behavior genetics,” “all human behavior traits are heritable” (Turkheimer, 2000).
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King,
“Statistics is, of course, still a useful tool in science. Often the information is accurate enough, and random enough to predict *some* outcomes accurately… but then again, sometimes the stats are wrong because they are based on incomplete information….
The more complex the question, the more unreliable the statistical prognostications tend to be. And human intelligence is almost* infinitely* complex and fraught with unknowns”
……………
I would say that human behavior, in general, is more “complex and fraught with unknowns. Yet this stops no one here from deducing causes to certain differences. No one here seems to have a problem with “the unreliable [of] the statistical prognostications” when it comes to certain inductive inferences. I called zek j evets on this a number of times.
I don’t play this “you have to be extra extra careful when it comes to” Black people, intelligence, genetics, Jews, etc. game. I don’t give a damn. As it is, I am too conservative in my statements. Given the standards of inference and attribution that people here seem to go by, I should be cavalier in my assertions.
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“I don’t play this “you have to be extra extra careful when it comes to” Black people, intelligence, genetics, Jews, etc. game. I don’t give a damn. As it is, I am too conservative in my statements.”
You sound angry. Are you angry?
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“I would say that human behavior, in general, is more “complex and fraught with unknowns. Yet this stops no one here from deducing causes to certain differences. No one here seems to have a problem with “the unreliable [of] the statistical prognostications” when it comes to certain inductive inferences.”
I’m not sure which inferences you have in mind, but here are a few discriminating factors as to why prognostication is not proper in this particular case.
1) You are using Statistics to try and leapfrog the current information timeline in another scientific field. Instead of allowing the geneticists to own their own genetic facts, you are trying to use I.Q. tests and psychological studies, from outside of the field of genetics, to predict that which the geneticists themselves have not yet concluded.
2) You are using Statistics to try and solve a problem that has a direct physical means of experimentation available. It’s like trying to discover the composition of a boulder by giving a survey of the neighborhood instead of simply taking samples back to the laboratory and testing them. If the actual, physical, genetic research is not there yet, then any conclusion based outside of the field of genetics is simply premature.
3) The subject that you are addressing could potentially effect millions of lives, public policy, educational policy, and economics. All inferences are simply not created equal, and if you want to take on the “Black people have a stupidity gene” theory then yes, OBVIOUSLY the threshold for proof is going to be much higher.
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Randy,
I responded to your argument against Diamond in the thread. Not really a spanking at all. More like you mouth-breathed in his general direction. But alas, that is your style.
As for your assertion that prioritizing education would allow Blacks and Hispanics to overcome structural oppression seems to indicate your belief that Blacks and Hispanics DO experience structural oppression, or else they wouldn’t need the focus on education to overcome it. They’d just exist — like White people get to.
That said, how do you reconcile the fact that a Black male without a record STILL loses out to jobs against White males who DO have a criminal record? How do you reconcile that among all the financial-aid in the US, only 0.25% is devoted solely to people of color, despite the fact that financial barriers are exceedingly immense in preventing people from attending college, which is something disproportionately affecting Black and Hispanic men? How do you reconcile that Black men are used as virtual work-horses in the NFL and NBA, yet the large margin of profits, ownership, and power is vested in White owners? Why are there few Blacks or Hispanics in power in professional sports, despite the fact that both groups are extremely numerous in American sports?
How do you reconcile the problem of urban decay whereby city governments, such as San Francisco, allocate very little public housing while simultaneously lowering property taxes for Pac Heights homeowners? Why encourage only rich people to live in the city? And why does this encouragement mean de facto gentrification among SF’s other neighborhoods? The problem of rising housing costs in the city is nothing new, and has seen the destruction of the Fillmore neighborhood from a vibrant Black community into a tiny strip of touristy holdouts?
I mean seriously Randy. How do you reconcile the de facto segregation recorded by the recent census?? Using a map of colored dots, rich neighborhoods are all White, and poor neighborhoods are all Black and Hispanic, especially in cities. How do you reconcile the 2000 HUD study which documented direct discrimination between White, and Blacks/Hispanics.
Literally I could go on, and on, and on sir. You ask me for evidence because you say I make no arguments and just name-call, but frankly you ignore the evidence and all a person has left is to laugh at your willful ignorance.
Go out there and READ something about this country. Shoot, drop the ideological container you’ve shelved your rapidly dwindling intelligence in, and try LOOKING at how the world IS for people of color (and other minorities) instead of focusing on your personal little bubble and naive prescriptions for a successful society.
How does a Black man getting an education prevent active discrimination? How has this alone ever been enough? Even decorated war-heroes were treated like second-class citizens while N*** war-criminals were brought in like old-friends to help fight the Russians. And even now, Tea Baggers hold up signs comparing the president to a witch-doctor or a monkey, asking to see his already provided birth certificate! I mean, do you honestly believe that there isn’t a significant amount of racism in America that is being stirred by reactionary and conservative politicians to the continued disenfranchisement of ordinary citizens, especially citizens of color?
Wake up Randy. This is not your Leave It To Beaver America anymore.
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@unamused:
“Bullshit. Conceptual problem solving is one major part of intelligence. Staying alive in a hostile environment, on the other hand, is not. It is survival skills. You could also call it “wisdom.” In an urban setting, it is called “street smarts.”
You can’t just redefine intelligence any way you like.”
I don’t, you do. You claim that IQ tests prove that blacks are dumber, that africans are dumber. Prove it. You can not. All you have is couple of pathetic examples from tests designed for americans and westeners given to handful of africans and you draw the conclusions which you like. You believe they support your race theories, which they do not.
“Are you sorry that you were unable to come with any actual examples of how biology does not support the theory of race differences in intelligence? Are you sorry that you chose this amateur psychoanalysis instead of addressing the data? Are you sorry that everything here is a baseless accusation? Are you sorry for wasting our time with a long-winded version of “you’re a raaaaaaciiiiiiiiist“?”
No I am not. You are a racist. Why I should feel sorry for you or anybody else?
You data is what it is. You can show it from here to eternity but it is just that. The test you so much rely on proving your racial superiority proves who can do it well. That is all it shows. Nothing more than that. It tests cognitive skills. That is the reason it is called now a days more often cognitive test. Not intelligence questionaire.
Originally it was just that. When the american eugenists took it from Europe to home, they twisted its meaning. Test designed originally to measure the cognitive skills of school children became, in their heads, a test to measure intelligence. For the very same reason you think: to prove how much superior the whites are compared to the blacks. Since blacks and immigrants could not score well in the test, it showed how much intelligent the whites were. Just like you think it does. That is the history of your beloved IQ tests and what it was originally. Sorry for that. 😀
Also, you make the claim. So prove it. Give me hard science that proves that blacks are dumber than whites biologically. Yep. You can not. There is no evidence in SCIENCE, in biology. Are you sorry for that? 😀
“Finally, high IQ correlates with being a good soldier. That’s why the army gives IQ tests (by another name: AFQT). They have been doing this for a very long time. Your little egghead-bashing stories are just that: stories, anecdotes, with a little confirmation bias thrown in.”
Have you been in the army? I have. I have done it. Have you? I have done the army tests, all of them. Actually, like I have told here before, bunch of us threw the whole IQ test down the tubes by making it a big joke. The results were terrible, our officers got mad, we were punished, but that was it. We did not get any dumber even if our test results told so. Some of us even became reserve officers. Dumb, huh?
Yeah, in order to be a good soldier you have to be intelligent. That was my point. How on earth these high scoring IQ giants were the worst of the worst on the field then? How can it be, that the guys who, according to you, were supposed to be rambos (based on their IQ tests), had to be rescued time and a time again by the guys who did not score well in the IQ tests?
How it is possible, that the guys who were so superior, according to you, were so clumsy and could not understand when their lives were actually in real danger? How these giants of IQ tests f***ed up time and time again with expolsives and weapons??
See, that is the real life army thing, not playstation thing. That was what happened to these IQ superwarriors on the field. I saw it. I was standing next to one of them when he accidentally almost blew us all up with a live grenade. Thanfully one sarge was quicker and saved us all. I am talking about that kind of stuff. You are talking about statistics and papers.
“Conceptual problem solving is one major part of intelligence. Staying alive in a hostile environment, on the other hand, is not. It is survival skills. You could also call it “wisdom.” In an urban setting, it is called “street smarts.””
Are you serious? What is the difference of wisdom and intelligence? How staying alive in hostile enviroment does not involve intelligence? How many times you have tried it?
I think you should really test yourself in real world. Take a plane to what ever country in third world, grab few dollars with you, and make it back home alive on foot. Stay alive. Then come back here and tell me that survival has nothing to do with intelligence. I mean, isn’t it what the story of the Man is all about? That we survived as spieces namely because of our intelligence?
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Conceptual problem solving is one major part of intelligence. Staying alive in a hostile environment, on the other hand, is not. It is survival skills. You could also call it “wisdom.” In an urban setting, it is called “street smarts.”
– – –
…and the “Snow Makes You Smarter” idiocy bites the dust.
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@ zek j evets: I have rebutted the entirety of your first moronic blog post on race realism over at my site. I will enjoy rebutting your more recent, equally moronic post on the same subject tomorrow.
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[…] 1992″), who describes himself as an anthropologist and “saboteur academic,” and often wonders WHY people NEED other races to be smarter, dumber, less attractive, less masculine, better at […]
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Unamused,
Yeah, I kind of got the memo the first time when you left a comment at my blog… See there for reply.
Also, can I mention I’m flattered you dedicated an entire post to me? Haha. Since you seem so interested in my work. Life After Hate is going to be doing a multi-part reposting of both my posts either later this month or in May. Feel free to comment again. The founder, Arno Michaels would have FIELD DAY with you ; )
In the meantime, keep on hating!
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I can’t believe I am arguing over the internet with people who use terms like ‘rational discrimination’ and think it’s perfectly justified for a person to get a harsher sentence for a crime based on phenotype. It makes me ask what is the purpose of dealing with these ppl.
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You can never truly know your enemy until you fight him.
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@MinneB
“The relevance is being correct about facts, and basing one’s opinion on them. In my opinion, based on the facts; Rodney’s and Black American’s situations are a match.”
The swimming pool story doesn’t prove that opinion to be true. It only proves that a certain group of black Americans was mistreated once, in a rare, specific situation. It doesn’t even prove that these kids are generally mistreated on a regular basis.
Other examples aren’t going to help, because it’s the regularity and scale of oppression that needs to be proven, not the fact that it sometimes exists. Examples, where oppression is undeniable, can always be dismissed and called rare and unusual cases.
That is why I think it’s impossible to prove that black Americans in general are being mistreated.
“Innocent children. Innocent black children in particular is why I am against the System of Racism/White Domination.
I understand, but this oppression works so subtly it’s hard to prove that racists aren’t just “a few bad apples”.
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I co-sign all of Minnie B.’s comments
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For anyone interested (and I’m not sure if the study has already been linked) but here’s the study detailing how Black & Hispanic job-applicants get denied in favor of White job-applicants, even those recently released from prison.
Click to access dp4469.pdf
Also, if ya’ll peruse Unamused’s blog, I notice he makes random White Nationalist sounding statements like that White people are better looking than other races of people (by what standard I do not know), that liberals and deviants are ruining the country (how, he does not say) that anti-racists are anti-White (would he also say that war = peace, and other contradictions), and finally that anti-racists are anti-White (not sure how being against racism makes anti-racists extremely racist, but it smacks of circular logic).
I mean, it’d be funny if it weren’t so pathological.
However, I did enjoy the debate between him and Obsidian. It was like watching Darth Vader fight Sauron, only hilarious instead of epic.
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Zek;
Thanks for the link to the Pager hiring study.
Do you have a link for the Unamused/Obsidian debate?
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@ Unamued:
I never got that email. Resend if you can: abagond at gmail. Thanks.
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Chuckwiththehippo said:
Why not just look up the crime rate instead? Am I missing something?
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@king: absolutely right. But sometimes this feels like fighting with three year old in tandrum 😀
@eco: “Other examples aren’t going to help, because it’s the regularity and scale of oppression that needs to be proven, not the fact that it sometimes exists. Examples, where oppression is undeniable, can always be dismissed and called rare and unusual cases.
That is why I think it’s impossible to prove that black Americans in general are being mistreated.”
Wrong. Check zeks link. Blacks do get discriminated and harassed on regular bases in US. It is a fact. Question is: why you do want to belive that they don’t?
And just to let you know that I am not talking about studies here, I’ve witnessed this couple times when I was living in USA. Hanging around with black friends was, let us say, very educational experience, particularly at night time. Racial stereotyping seems to build up after dark somehow.
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I just cheked out the unamuseds own blog. Do go see it! It has to be one of the craziest comedy acts available! 😀
If you toughed musical Springtime for Hitler was crazy in Producers, this blog is way out there! And this guy is for real! 😀
abagond, I can not be without huge respect for you, man. I could not deal with these guys so calmly as you do ( as you’ve propably seen in my deleted postings :D). It takes a real nerves of steel to deal with that kind of doo doo on regular bases. Respect, abagond!
And zek, this guy has some very serious issues with your blog and words 😀 He is like a negative fan! All the patience for you too. Do not loose your cool with these morons. I know it is almost possible but try to hang in there :D!
Wow. That is all I can say.
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@Abagond:
“BUT those are not the primary CAUSES of our dilemma here in the United States.”
Who are you referring to exactly? Not all Blacks are in the same circumstances. Some are doing very well. Some are doing okay. Some are law abiding. Some choose to break the laws and to be parasitic to the society at large and to their own communities. Think of those Black males who decided it was okay to gang rape an 11 year old Hispanic girl in Cleveland, TX. They’re not part of “my” community.
Please don’t assume that all Blacks are under some kind of heavy yoke of oppression. Not all of us are suffering and struggling.
This is the land of opportunity – if you want to do well, you’ll find a way. There are too many Black Americans (including Black foreigners) who are examples of that for it not to be true.
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@Patricia Kayden:
Aww…geez Patricia, read the post and thread.
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Zek says:
Are you Tim Wise’s protégé? You are doing a fine job of mimicking his style of writing and you’ve got the talking points down perfectly. I’m sure your chest swells with pride at the comparison. 😆
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King,
“You are using Statistics to try and leapfrog the current information timeline in another scientific field. Instead of allowing the geneticists to own their own genetic facts, you are trying to use I.Q. tests and psychological studies, from outside of the field of genetics, to predict that which the geneticists themselves have not yet concluded.”
I’m pretty explicit about what I’m trying to do. Go read the intro to my “race, genes, and disparity” site”
“My interest is not in convincing anyone that this or that subpopulation phenotypic difference has a partial genetic etiology, but rather in forcing an empirical test of the genetic hypothesis and resolving this issue once and for all. To do that, it is necessary to demonstrate (to the public and misinformed members of academia) that this is a yet unresolved issue of pressing social importance. Levin (1997), Jensen (2000), Gottfredson (2005), Sesardic (2005), and Hunt and Carlson (2007) have laid out the case for bringing closure to the issue; those interested are left to bring the matter to public consciousness and to challenge those believers in the reigning paradigm to subject their prejudices to investigation. This issue, for the most part, can be resolved in a matter of months. With regards to the questions of evolved ancestral differences, Rowe (2005), Rushton and Jensen (2005), Murray (2005), Hunt and Carlson (2007), and Lee (2009) have already discussed the proper tests that would provide dispositive results: hybrid comparisons using modern genotypic analysis. This, of course, would not [absolutely] rule out the possibility of ethnoracial differences…such tests would, nonetheless, go a long way towards ending debate.”
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Patricia said
Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows that people of color (hue-mans) are always oppressed by Whitey. You must be one of those Black folks that think you’re too good to be a perpetual victim. You need to get with the program. I used to be like you. Confident and assured in my abilities. I felt like I was in control of my own life. Then a few nights ago, I heard a strange noise in my closet and there, hiding behind a row of jackets was a ghoulish looking White man. He said nothing. Just pointed his finger at his eye and then at me. That’s when I realized, like the other awakened people on this blog, that there’s no escaping Whitey. He’s watching you right now, oppressing you!
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“My interest is not in convincing anyone that this or that subpopulation phenotypic difference has a partial genetic etiology, but rather in forcing an empirical test of the genetic hypothesis and resolving this issue once and for all. To do that, it is necessary to demonstrate (to the public and misinformed members of academia) that this is a yet unresolved issue of pressing social importance.”
Perhaps I misunderstand. You are then blogging in hopes of… what—spurring on the “misinformed” masses of genetic scientists worldwide, who have decided, en masse, not to perform the necessary tests to decide the issue of genetic racial intelligence?
Do you believe that the great majority of the genetic scientists are “politically correct” or are otherwise under the thumb of a worldwide left-wing conspiracy, to either impede or fabricate proper research results?
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“Then a few nights ago, I heard a strange noise in my closet and there, hiding behind a row of jackets was a ghoulish looking White man. He said nothing. Just pointed his finger at his eye and then at me. That’s when I realized, like the other awakened people on this blog, that there’s no escaping Whitey.”
Interesting… was it Dick Cheney?
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abagond
Chuckwiththehippo said:
“Why not just look up the crime rate instead? Am I missing something?”
The crime rates told the same story. % African American predicts % crime on the national, state, city, and county levels. See, for example, this recent paper:
Bartelsa, Ryana, Urbana, and Glass, 2010. Correlations between estimates of state IQ and FBI crime statistics
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King
“Perhaps I misunderstand. You are then blogging in hopes of… what—spurring on the “misinformed” masses of genetic scientists worldwide, who have decided, en masse, not to perform the necessary tests to decide the issue of genetic racial intelligence?
……………….
You seem to misunderstand the dynamics. Anti-hereditarians are trying to prevent testing and hereditarians are pushing for it. The genetic community is apprehensive. Read through this discussion; it’s a who’s who of the debate.
“Nature Opinion forum: topic
Should scientists study race and IQ?”
http://network.nature.com/groups/naturenewsandopinion/forum/topics/3871?page=1
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King asked
I’m pretty sure it was one of his many clones that the government grew using one of his toenail clippings.
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wait… there are too many Chucks again!
Sure, I’ll give it a read though.
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Abagond,
http://unamusementpark.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/i-have-black-friends/#comment-9
The comments start right off, and it devolves pretty quickly from there. Even RR gets in on the action later! Of course, the joke is that they’re all still wrong, but that can’t be helped. It’s just great to see a bunch of crazies duking it out.
Sam,
Haha, I know seriously! He’s like the Mauritania t-shirt guy, only in blog form! And the negative-publicity has been doing wonders for my site traffic. I should start making a habit of deconstructing bigotry ; )
Thanks for the support too!
Sagat,
Well, I do like Tim wise, but I prefer what Benjamin Disraeli said, “It is easier to be critical than correct”. Apply this directly to forehead, and try not to suffer brain-freeze when it siphons out your nonsense =P
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Thank you for linking that debate. I think it shows very clearly who’s on the right side of the race issue.
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[…] Comments have been re-enabled on my recent debunking of fanatical faith-based race denialist Zek J Evets’ crazy ideas about race. Note that Zek is unable to respond, either at his blog or at abagond’s. […]
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If we broke off a few states and gave you your own homeland, an all black country complete with infrastructure, do you think your level of prosperity would be equal to what it is today? You know it wouldn’t, it would probably drop to a fraction of what it is today within a few years. We don’t have to guess about this, we’ve done massive field experiments: Detroit, Camden, Newark, etc., except those experiments were limited since we couldn’t actually allow those cities to fend for themselves and they always got a substantial amount of outside (read: white) aid during the experiments. Your little bullet list might soothe your feelings, but it’s a lie, and you know it.
“Portraying us as buffoons or criminals in the media”
You’re joking, right? The only place where blacks are routinely portrayed as criminals is on the nightly news. In a country where at least 70 per cent of murders are committed by non-whites, and in the cities where 90-98% of murders are committed by non-whites, whites are virtually the only ones portrayed as murderers. The DAs are multiracial, the cops are multiracial, the technicians are multi-racial, the Judges are REALLY multi-racial, the crooks are all white. Blacks are portrayed as not only better than they are, but better than anyone could be. The white-hating Liberals who have control of our mass-media would rather die than portray blacks simply as they are, much less negatively.
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Geez Louise!
Take it easy on the site promotion, Unamused.
We can see that you have a blog, no need for a “go to my site” plug in every post that you make.
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Unamused,
Oh you’re welcome. I think it shows very clearly too.
Very clearly that you’re a bunch of bigots, but so it goes.
I’m not sure your kids-glove counts as a gauntlet that I’m expected to rebut. I mean, I don’t fight cripples, and I don’t argue with racists about race. That is called a waste of time.
That said, I’m not sure what else I would add besides the undeniable information already presented. I mean, the facts stand, and all your kicking and screaming isn’t going to knock them down.
So why make a specific rebuttal? Do you need someone to feed your ego? Are you spoiling for a blog-war? Or are you just really bored and want to type a lot?
Actually, if you want to have a real conversation, answer me this:
If you don’t need Black people to be dumber than White people (as you attest to on your blog) then why do you argue so vociferously to convince people that it’s true?
Think about it, and then get back to me. Or don’t. I might not be listening.
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Jim, I wish you had come a few days earlier before we got knee deep into HBD.
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For the benefit of all the readers of abagond’s blog:
I am a race realist. A race realist is someone who thinks critically and scientifically about race, doesn’t make assumptions, and doesn’t care if his findings hurt your feelings.
We don’t “need” black people to be “dumber” than white people, whatever that means. Nor do we argue that they are. Zek’s claims are a straw man argument, a red herring, a trick. He would like you to believe that race realists think all black people are less intelligent than all white people, or some other nonsense.
The truth is that the average IQ of a black American, according to IQ tests, is about 85. The average IQ of a white American is about 100. This is called the IQ gap. It has been studied for decades by psychologists and other scientists. Some of them are black. None of them is a neo-Nazi or a Klansman.
No one has ever managed to shrink the IQ gap. It is not caused by the environment (e.g., poverty).
The IQ gap explains why blacks are less successful on average than whites in America. The racism that’s supposedly everywhere in America (but curiously hard to find… especially during the last Presidential election…) does not account for their lesser success.
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Well, what is really funny is this: all these racist, ööh, race realists think they are somekind of trailblazers, courageous guys who are showing the light into darkness of racial confusion. They really believe that they are the ones who will show the world how it really is. 😀
Well, sonny boys, you are crawling behind some real shakers and movers of bigotry and racism. Unamused, chuckie, randy and these guys are midgets in their field, left overs of times long gone.
Way back then was a time when american racists were really influencing the world instead of yapping in their little blogs and internet. Here is a stone cold racist who was admired by Adolf Hitler himself. Old Addy wrote to him a letter where he said that the book written by this racist was his (Adolfs) bible. Yeap, this guy made the nazis really move on with their program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Grant
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“Please don’t assume that all Blacks are under some kind of heavy yoke of oppression. Not all of us are suffering and struggling.
This is the land of opportunity – if you want to do well, you’ll find a way. There are too many Black Americans (including Black foreigners) who are examples of that for it not to be true.”
Patricia,
Maybe so, but that does not rule out that oppression still exist in some way, shape, or form. Just because there are blacks who have done well, doesn’t mean that oppression or racism is a thing of the past. It’s the same as looking at Oprah and President Obama and think that racism is a thing of the past.
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I did a post on Madison Grant:
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Wait… are there two Chucks again?
“The crime rates told the same story. % African American predicts % crime.”
Most African-Americans have inherited several generations of poverty, first because of slavery, and then because the White majority wanted to maintain a Black servant underclass. So, most of the schools that were created to serve Blacks were intentionally kept poor, which meant understaffed, short of learning materials, and overcrowded.
That reality maintained a Black population that was largely poor. Black were basically groomed to be the American underclass, and to perform the menial or unpleasant jobs that White people would rather not do. But even when Blacks were able to get a good education, White people often wouldn’t hire them and “give them a White man’s job.” In fact, Black were purposely kept segregated at every levels of society, including housing.
So, we ended up in homogenous, poor, Black neighborhoods where a separate Black American culture was developed based on our common but separated experiences in America. — I might add as an aside, that because education was lacking in those communities, for the reasons stated above, and because education did not pay off for Blacks in the same way as it did for Whites, education became less important.
Many of those neighborhoods didn’t start off as bad places overall, aside from being relatively poor. But because they had little opportunity, and because there was little hope of things getting better, and because the people there were looked down on by the rest of society, those neighborhoods were vulnerable, in the long term.
So, in the decades that followed, as crime increased nationwide, it increased even more in places that had been poor, separated, disenfranchised, hopeless, and undereducated. In time, the problems of drugs, alcohol, gangs, and crime, became virulent in these areas. And that’s how you got those high crime rates. Obviously NOT ALL Black communities had this problem. There were clearly many Black communities that were clean and safe, but there were, and still are, more than enough examples of bad ones around.
Add to that the fact that, as time went on, segregation and exclusion lessened somewhat, and whereas in earlier times Blacks who had managed to beat the odds and gain some success were forced to stay in the community as time went on they could move elsewhere. This is what many people miss. Black people who have made it are usually not looking to for a “Rich Black neighborhood” anymore. Blacks who have means simply melt into the rest of society and find neighborhoods based on their income, not on their ethnicity. This results in two things happening:
1) Traditionally Black neighborhoods lost the economic and social benefit of having successful and more highly educated Blacks living among the poor and influencing the community.
2) So, the “Black neighborhoods” were worse for it, since only those who cannot afford to leave are left behind. And the successful Blacks become invisible as an identifiable group because they are spread out in non distinct neighborhoods, often next to people of other races. This leaves the only easily identifiably Black neighborhoods to be the poor, crime ridden, ghettos.
Therefore, someone like Chuck reads a survey and finds that places with higher concentrations of Blacks are prone have higher crime rates, and he assumes that the crime is a result of the Blackness without knowing the whole story.
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and race realists:
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and the white privilege mindset (Unamused scored a 95% on my test, making him a specimen worthy of study and observation):
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“It’s the same as looking at Oprah and President Obama and think that racism is a thing of the past.”
Well, the thing with Oprah and Obama is that they are just two people. I think Patricia was saying that racism isn’t really something that would stop a determined person from being successful, and I would agree with that. It certainly creates more roadblocks and lowers your chances though. It’s amazing and embarrassing how many whites refuse to acknowledge this fact.
As far as immigrants are concerned, I think racism has a creeper effect on people and the racism that is woven into the fabric of our culture has an overall detrimental effect on POC that occurs over time. Immigrants who come here as adults wouldn’t have grown up within our racist culture so you can’t really make a good comparison between them and American POC in terms of the effect of racism on success.
10 minutes of exposure to radiation will have a much different effect than 10 years of exposure to the exact same levels. I imagine it’s probably the same with racism.
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jas0nburns,
In an oblique way, you appear to be arguing that non-immigrant minorities would benefit from “get over it” therapy.
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Unamused,
Are you serious? Are you really serious? The essence behind your arguments are that you don’t take blacks or their plight seriously, and want some kind of “proof” as to why people shouldn’t take them seriously. Plus, according to your blog, when someone, anyone, presents a different view, you call them and their views names as if you’re presenting yourself and your views as superior to everyone else’s.
Blacks and other POC tell people like you what’s REALLY going on, but you are unwilling to listen because your ego prevents you to open your mind and heart like the other racists roaming around here.
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Unamused,
Answer me this, even if I.Q. determines differences in intelligence among races, and even if genetics determine inferiority between races, are they good reasons to think less or little of them? Are they sound reasons why they should be treated with little or no respect?
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I am a member of the New York black flight. Things did not get bad because we left – we left because things had already become bad. And they became bad because:
1. City services, like police protection and education, are not provided equally. Blacks, both working-class and middle-class, get the short end of the stick.
2. Black neighbourhoods, partly because of their political weakness, wind up having the city’s drug trade pushed onto their streets, with the police doing little about it. Unsurprisingly, the crime rate goes through the roof.
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@ Blaque Ink:
You’re misrepresenting me. The only time I don’t take blacks’ plight seriously is when that plight does not actually exist. The only time I don’t take blacks (or whites, or anyone else) seriously is when they don’t support their claims with evidence.
Are you being serious? Look at this comments thread. Read my first comment, and the replies. Read my second comment, and the replies. Read the post by Zek J Evets I refuted. Ask yourself: who’s calling names?
I present my views. My views correspond to objective reality. That’s what makes them superior to other people’s views.
Black people and white people and all kinds of people tell me all sorts of things. Unfortunately, they don’t back it up with evidence. Anecdotes about discrimination or smart black people or dumb white people don’t mean a thing to me.
IQ measures intelligence, so of course it determines differences in intelligence. So do genes. Now, I have never called any race “inferior,” so you’re misrepresenting me again. “Inferior” is a value judgment; it’s very different from, say, “inferior in intelligence,” which just means “of lower average intelligence.”
Your questions reflect your prejudice against my point of view. You’re starting from the premise that I’m going to end this conversation with “and you see, that’s why slavery is so awesome” or “therefore Hitler was right and n*****s are all dumb.” If you set aside your preconceived notions and read what I am actually writing, you’ll find you don’t need to ask those questions. I’ll answer them anyway.
The Constitution of the United States of America rightly guarantees the same treatment for all American citizens, regardless of their race or sex or age or intelligence or the length of their big toe. Anyone who thinks that someone having a low IQ is a reason to treat them badly, is a jerk. Anyone who thinks that an entire race having a lower average IQ is a reason to treat them badly, is approximately one million times worse.
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Randy:
It is not that easy. In my experience, blacks who do the best in America are those who come after age 18. From what I can tell it seems to be because:
1. The self-selection factor of being an immigrant.
2. They avoid the terrible American public schools.
3. They have far less internalized racism, having avoided America’s racist culture when they were too young to understand it.
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@ Jas0n: “10 minutes of exposure to radiation will have a much different effect than 10 years of exposure to the exact same levels. I imagine it’s probably the same with racism.”
nice call.
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The Constitution of the United States of America rightly guarantees the same treatment for all American citizens, regardless of their race or sex or age or intelligence or the length of their big toe. Anyone who thinks that someone having a low IQ is a reason to treat them badly, is a jerk. Anyone who thinks that an entire race having a lower average IQ is a reason to treat them badly, is approximately one million times worse.
And yet, isn’t that what Steve Sailer, David Duke, American Renaissance, Philippe Rushton, and others have advocated?? Isn’t that what HBD bloggers like Half-sigma and yourself have advocated?? Isn’t that why programs like welfare, public healthcare, food stamps, and affirmative action are criticized as unnecessary, hurting people of color, or even reverse racism?
Based on pseudo-science, those above (including yourself?) indicate a desire for treating Blacks, Hispanics, and other races differently due to supposedly genetic differences despite the fact that our laws specifically prohibit such action, and despite the presence of continued structural racism in America which continually oppresses these groups in spite of anti-racist activism to end it.
Such thinking you have is indicative of more than merely a White privileged mindset, but of someone who fundamentally denies the very reality of race in America. You’re saying racism is over when in point of fact it isn’t — hardly realistic.
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“Randy:
jas0nburns,
In an oblique way, you appear to be arguing that non-immigrant minorities would benefit from “get over it” therapy.
It is not that easy. In my experience, blacks who do the best in America are those who come after age 18. From what I can tell it seems to be because:
1. The self-selection factor of being an immigrant.
2. They avoid the terrible American public schools.
3. They have far less internalized racism, having avoided America’s racist culture when they were too young to understand it.”
co-sign. “get over it” is a really easy thing to say to someone when you haven’t been through the kinds of things they have. I mean randy do you honestly believe your sitting on some kind of psychological goldmine here? “get over it” therapy?
raped? get over it.
abused as a child? get over it.
burn victim? get over it.
Yes it’s that simple folks, just follow Randy Garver’s 1 step program and you too will be able to live a carefree life with just 3 simple words! Operators are standing by!
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abagond,
Exposure to the coarser and crasser parts of American culture no doubt plays a significant role in lowering esteem. I believe this to be true for all ethnicities.
At the risk of sounding utterly quaint, I would like to offer that immigrants tend to benefit from an un-jaded and non-cynical belief in the “American Dream”, and in doing so, are more likely to achieve it.
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Well, the thing with Oprah and Obama is that they are just two people. I think Patricia was saying that racism isn’t really something that would stop a determined person from being successful, and I would agree with that. It certainly creates more roadblocks and lowers your chances though. It’s amazing and embarrassing how many whites refuse to acknowledge this fact.
JasOn,
I know, but having successful blacks and a black middle class doesn’t negate the fact that racism is alive with presents barriers that make it harder to live and succeed in a society compared to whites. I agree that racism doesn’t stop determination, but it does get in the way a heck of a lot.
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Unamused,
U: You’re misrepresenting me. The only time I don’t take blacks’ plight seriously is when that plight does not actually exist. The only time I don’t take blacks (or whites, or anyone else) seriously is when they don’t support their claims with evidence.
B: People presented evidence that contradict your views and theories, but you yet, you would still refute them. What more proof do you need?
U: Are you being serious? Look at this comments thread. Read my first comment, and the replies. Read my second comment, and the replies. Read the post by Zek J Evets I refuted. Ask yourself: who’s calling names?
I present my views. My views correspond to objective reality. That’s what makes them superior to other people’s views.
B: I took one look at your blog’s main page alone, and I saw how you referred to Zek, Obsidian, and even Abagond. Also, what makes you think their views aren’t objective?
U: Black people and white people and all kinds of people tell me all sorts of things. Unfortunately, they don’t back it up with evidence. Anecdotes about discrimination or smart black people or dumb white people don’t mean a thing to me.
B: Again, what kind of proof do you need to understand instead of reject outright? I think your next statement says it all.
Original Question by B: “Answer me this, even if I.Q. determines differences in intelligence among races, and even if genetics determine inferiority between races, are they good reasons to think less or little of them? Are they sound reasons why they should be treated with little or no respect?”
U: IQ measures intelligence, so of course it determines differences in intelligence. So do genes. Now, I have never called any race “inferior,” so you’re misrepresenting me again. “Inferior” is a value judgment; it’s very different from, say, “inferior in intelligence,” which just means “of lower average intelligence.”
Your questions reflect your prejudice against my point of view. You’re starting from the premise that I’m going to end this conversation with “and you see, that’s why slavery is so awesome” or “therefore Hitler was right and n*****s are all dumb.” If you set aside your preconceived notions and read what I am actually writing, you’ll find you don’t need to ask those questions. I’ll answer them anyway.
The Constitution of the United States of America rightly guarantees the same treatment for all American citizens, regardless of their race or sex or age or intelligence or the length of their big toe. Anyone who thinks that someone having a low IQ is a reason to treat them badly, is a jerk. Anyone who thinks that an entire race having a lower average IQ is a reason to treat them badly, is approximately one million times worse.
B: But isn’t discounting that racism and discrimination effecting the lives of blacks or any other POC the same as treating them badly, or as I said with little/no respect or think less of them?
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Zek’s quote
“…Isn’t that what Steve Sailer, David Duke, American Renaissance, Philippe Rushton, and others have advocated?? Isn’t that what HBD bloggers like Half-sigma and yourself have advocated?? Isn’t that why programs like welfare, public healthcare, food stamps, and affirmative action are criticized as unnecessary, hurting people of color, or even reverse racism?”
Exactly.
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No, Blaque Ink, no one has presented any evidence that contradicts my views and theories. They just screech about racism and call it a day. That’s why refuting Zek’s vicious attacks against race realists was so easy. He just doesn’t have any real information to support his claims.
“B: But isn’t discounting that racism and discrimination effecting the lives of blacks or any other POC the same as treating them badly, or as I said with little/no respect or think less of them?”
No, because nearly all the racism and discrimination they complain about isn’t real. It’s in their heads.
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So I’m not a geneticist, and unlike some here I’m not going to act like one. But I do know that no matter what genetic differences you can find between races they are nowhere near even close to as important as anyone who calls himself a “race realist” believes. I mean even if you guys were 100% correct on the science it’s still totally irrelevant. It in no way warrants the importance and focus that you guys place on it. By anyones measure our similarities outweigh our differences and your approach is 100% useless for anything except making yourself feel superior. I can’t even imagine what the people this stuff appeals to are like IRL. (shudder)
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abagond
Randy:
”
It is not that easy. In my experience, blacks who do the best in America are those who come after age 18. From what I can tell it seems to be because:
1. The self-selection factor of being an immigrant.
2. They avoid the terrible American public schools.
3. They have far less internalized racism, having avoided America’s racist culture when they were too young to understand it.”
………
You might be interested in Susan Model’s work (1,2). She exhaustively demonstrated that Black West Indians perform no better than internal immigrant African Americans — so you can drop 2 and 3:
“To review, West Indian immigrants have long fared better economically than African Americans. This generalization holds even when immigrants and natives are assigned the same age, education, location, etc. Experts have proposed four distinct explanations for this state of affairs: West Indians are positively selected immigrants, Caribbean slavery taught West Indians valuable skills, socialization in an all-black society is psychologically beneficial for blacks, and white Americans discriminate less against West Indians than African Americans. When the four explanations are tested empirically, only positive selection receives support. This is not to say that growing up in an all-black society might not provide psychological benefits or that whites might not respond positively to blacks with a Caribbean accent. But even if these relationships hold (which has yet to be demonstrated), there is no empirical evidence that they enhance West Indian economic attainment. Rather, West Indian success can be attributed entirely to the greater talent and ambition of those who choose to move. Similarly, the subset of African Americans who are voluntary internal migrants are better off than their less venturesome counterparts. Once this point is clear, it is easy to see why West Indian success offers no lessons for African American improvement.”
Incidentally, her work has recently led her to reevaluate her position on IQ/genes. She’s now skeptical of the environmental position (2).
(1) Model, 2008. The Secret of West Indian Success
(2) Model, 2008. West Indian immigrants: a black success story.
(3) Model, 2010. The IQ Wars Reconsidered. Contemporary sociology.
…………………
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I just cheked out the unamuseds own blog. Do go see it! It has to be one of the craziest comedy acts available! 😀
Here’s his theme song:
The truth is that the average IQ of a black American, according to IQ tests, is about 85.
I thought it was 70, make up your mind!
The average IQ of a white American is about 100.
How do you account for those trailer park denizens or the hillbillies? Discuss!
This is called the IQ gap.
Oh I see! Black folk aren’t really stupid, they just have lower IQs on average, which in reality has nothing to do with intelligence per se!
The IQ gap explains why blacks are less successful on average than whites in America.
How very convenient. What do you propose to do with this knowledge besides coming onto blogs and castigating the kneegrows for failing to realize this?
The only time I don’t take blacks (or whites, or anyone else) seriously is when they don’t support their claims with evidence.
Who are you? Perry Mason?
My views correspond to objective reality.
Whose objective reality? Such a thing doesn’t exist!
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Chuckwiththehippo:
Thanks for the Susan Model references. If you or anyone else knows of any other studies, I would be interested. I have long wanted to do a post on how and why West Indians seem to succeed better in America than the blacks who are born there.
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@ jas0nburns: I think the fact that all these commenters are freaking out, and screaming about racism and hatred and bigotry, suggests that issues of race, genetics, and intelligence might be worth discussing.
@ Herneith:
“I thought it was 70, make up your mind!” I never said that.
“How do you account for those trailer park denizens or the hillbillies? Discuss!” You do not know what the word average means. Until you look it up, discussion will be impossible.
“Oh I see! Black folk aren’t really stupid, they just have lower IQs on average, which in reality has nothing to do with intelligence per se!” You keep calling black people stupid. I can’t figure out why. I suppose they’re stupider on average, but that’s a really nasty way to put it. Also, IQ measures intelligence.
“How very convenient. What do you propose to do with this knowledge besides coming onto blogs and castigating the kneegrows for failing to realize this?” Again with the nasty names for black people. Anyway, again: the fact that you start throwing temper tantrums whenever someone cites intelligence research suggests this is a topic worth discussing in some detail.
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jas0nburns
“So I’m not a geneticist, and unlike some here I’m not going to act like one. But I do know that no matter what genetic differences you can find between races they are nowhere near even close to as important as anyone who calls himself a “race realist” believes…..”
As I have pointed out, the issue is quite relevant. This discussion is about the cause of various disparities (and about the extent to which “white” (and light — i.e colorism) people are to blame for them). It’s an indisputable empirical fact that the difference in General Mental Ability is the proximate cause of much of the B-W disparity. Arguing that the GMA gap does not contribute to the various gaps is no longer intellectually reputable. The issue is 1) how much of the gaps does it explain and 2) what it the ultimate cause of the GMA gap.
To give an example, the predictive validity of GMA for work performance is .5 (when correcting for error). Since African-Americans adults, on average, are 1.1SD behind Whites and N.E Asians, there is a .55 SD worker performance gap (.5 x 1.1). This means that only 30% of Blacks perform above the White mean (50 percentile). Since, (many) companies discriminate for cognitive ability, they inadvertently discriminate against Blacks — which leads to the “racial” discrimination you see.
Now, in absolute terms, GMA is not all that important. If it was, there wouldn’t be much variance in it. For example, having two lungs is fairly important, hence there is little variance in the number of lungs people have. With regards to GMA, there’s extensive variance, hence it’s not that important. Difference in it, however, do result in the types of disparities that you are talking about.
For the sake of clarity, from the “race realist” perspective, “Black people” are just like white people who performs 1 SD below the mean (all 32 million of them).
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Unamused: No, Blaque Ink, no one has presented any evidence that contradicts my views and theories. They just screech about racism and call it a day. That’s why refuting Zek’s vicious attacks against race realists was so easy. He just doesn’t have any real information to support his claims.
“B: But isn’t discounting that racism and discrimination effecting the lives of blacks or any other POC the same as treating them badly, or as I said with little/no respect or think less of them?”
U: No, because nearly all the racism and discrimination they complain about isn’t real. It’s in their heads.”
My response:
I see. So, blacks, anti-racist whites, and other POC know less about racism and discrimination than you and other racist…err…race realists? Okay, I know (for sure) where this is heading. SMH.
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abagond
Chuckwiththehippo:
Thanks for the Susan Model references. If you or anyone else knows of any other studies, I would be interested. .
…….
Model’s work is worth reading. And you can find much of her work online. Here’s a link to the paper I was referring to:
Click to access Society_45.pdf
Undoubtedly, there are contrary opinions out there (she discusses 4 hypotheses). I would start with her paper and see who she references and then look up their replies.
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zek said: “As for your assertion that prioritizing education would allow Blacks and Hispanics to overcome structural oppression seems to indicate your belief that Blacks and Hispanics DO experience structural oppression, or else they wouldn’t need the focus on education to overcome it. They’d just exist — like White people get to.”
Prioritizing education allows people of all ethnicities to escape poverty. Jews and Asians in America have seen their family/community investments in education yield such astounding benefits that they now significantly exceed that of non-Jewish whites. You keep avoiding addressing that indisputable reality.
If you can think of a better recipe, I’m all ears. Before you trot out the “but Jews are white looking” explanation, I would point to figures which demonstrate that Indians and Filipinos lead all ethnic groups in household income.
“That said, how do you reconcile the fact that a Black male without a record STILL loses out to jobs against White males who DO have a criminal record?”
Was that a peer-reviewed study? I’d be interested to read about the methodology.
“I mean seriously Randy. How do you reconcile the de facto segregation recorded by the recent census??”
Here’s a thought: maybe people like to live near those most similar to them. Germans traditionally prefer German neighborhoods, Vietnamese traditionally prefer Vietnamese neighborhoods, Italians traditionally prefer Italian neighborhoods etc etc. Picking a statistic out of the blue and inferring nefarious causation without evidence seems a rather unsound method of constructing an argument.
Shoot, drop the ideological container you’ve shelved your rapidly dwindling intelligence in, and try LOOKING at how the world IS for people of color (and other minorities) instead of focusing on your personal little bubble and naive prescriptions for a successful society.
Considering that I married a so-called “person of color”, count many them as close friends and relatives, and have spent innumerable hours discussing a variety of relevant issues both here and 10,000 miles away, I’d say that my bubble is probably rather large.
Wake up Randy. This is not your Leave It To Beaver America anymore.
Try telling that to my wife or any other similar immigrant who came to this country and became successful by following the traditional formula.
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King
Wait… are there two Chucks again?
“The crime rates told the same story. % African American predicts % crime.”
Most African-Americans have inherited several generations of poverty, first because of slavery, and then because the White majority wanted to maintain a Black servant underclass. So, most of the schools that were created to serve Blacks were intentionally kept poor, which meant understaffed, short of learning materials, and overcrowded.
………..
The problem with your theory is that Blacks (defined here as ancestrally West SS African) tend to have higher crime rates everywhere: W SS Africa, Canada, UK, West Indies, Brazil, etc. This is not a US specific phenomena.
My HBD explanation is quite simple. On average, West SS Africans — population depending –were less domesticated (i.e. “civilized”). (The effect that civilizing has on a population’s behavior is called “genetic pacification” (1).) Interestingly, there is some behavior genetic support for this idea (2,3).
(1) To get an idea of what I’m talking about see, for example, Frost, 2010. The Roman State and Genetic Pacification
(2) Beaver et al., 2010. Genetic risk, parent–child relations, and antisocial phenotypes in a sample of African-American males.
(3) Schilling, 2011. ADHD and Criminality: A Primer on the Genetic, Neurobiological, Evolutionary, and Treatment Literature for Criminologists
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“I think the fact that all these commenters are freaking out, and screaming[….]”
Where?! I don’t see anyone “freaking out, and screaming”. Examples, please.
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I’m really starting to get sick of this “Asians just do better!” crap, that whites like Randy like to use for their own political agenda. They intentionally and constantly use the vague term “Asian”, because the first nationalities that come to mind are Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and to a lesser extent Filipino. What they intentionally leave out are the other Asian groups (that are just as Asian as the aforementioned ones) that DON’T reinforce this brand of disingenuous white stupidity.
Last time I checked Hmong, Cambodian, Laotian, Native American (“yes” they still technically count), Pacific Islanders, and Vietnamese DON’T have a high rate of college degrees, when compared to the aforementioned Asians. Nor do they have a high personal income. The breakdown is as follows.
College Degree Obtainment:
Cambodian – 9.2%
Laotian – 9.2%
Hmong – 9.2%
Latino – 9.9%
Native Americans – 10.8%
Pacific Islanders – 13.6%
African American – 13.6%
Vietnamese – 13.8%
Whites – 25.3%
Japanese – 40.8%
Filipinos – 42.8%
Koreans – 43.6%
Chinese – 46.3%
Indians – 64.4%
Source: http://www.asian-nation.org/model-minority.shtml
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Franklin said: “I’m really starting to get sick of this “Asians just do better!” crap, that whites like Randy like to use for their own political agenda.”
I’m not saying that asians just do better. Rather, I’m saying that education leads to success. Education levels parallel income levels. On average, asians and Jews in the US have higher education and higher income than whites. This is no accident, as family and community prioritization of education tends to be high among asian and Jewish people in the US.
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@Randy Garver
“family and community prioritization of education”
I think everybody here agrees that these values are important. I’m a personal advocate of both.
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@ Randy
On average, asians and Jews in the US have higher education and higher income than whites.
Median Personal Income:
Latino/Hispanic – $14,400
Native American – $14,500
Cambodian – $16,000
Laotian – $16,000
Hmong – $16,000
Vietnamese – $16,000
Black – $16,300
Korean – $16,300
Pacific Islanders – $19,500
Chinese – $20,000
Filipino – $23,000
White – $23,640
Japanese – $26,000
Indian – $26,000
Source: http://www.asian-nation.org/demographics.shtml
I already pointed out and refuted education levels, which you chose to ignore.
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@Eco: ” I understand, but this oppression works so subtly it’s hard to prove that racists aren’t just “a few bad apples”.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’d have me believe racist+people=Apples? NOT. The System of Racism/White Domination is a bit more serious than rotten fruit.
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Cynic,
I’m not trying to beat people over the head with the obvious. Rather, it seems like social scientists and similar “advocates” want to strip agency away from the poor and always cite structural factors as the primary limiting factor.
To use (and abuse) King’s parable, they want to hold workshops, symposia, candlelight vigils, protests, and congressional hearings while Rodney splashes away unassisted.
Meanwhile, these guys have cushy tenured university positions and fat book contracts owing to their own families’ unwavering demand for academic success.
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Franklin,
You didn’t refute anything. Lower achieving Cambodian, Laotian, etc metrics are factored into the median values for asians as a whole, which despite your wishes otherwise, are still well above those of non-Jewish whites, hispanics, and black folks.
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@ Randy
If you were going to dismiss my facts, because you can’t argue against them, do just that please. Going back to your monolithic way of thinking, despite me demonstrating why it fails, isn’t smart.
Why aren’t Cambodians, Laotians, Vietnamese, Hmong, and those other Asian groups (as a whole) just as high as the white selected tokens? I mean, they’re still “Asian” right? If it’s “Asians in general”, then there wouldn’t be such massive gaps with certain groups. So once again, saying “Asians” IS IN FACT a half truth. One that you can’t put a spin on, as the numbers don’t lie. It has to do with culture. Not with IQ or genetics as suggested.
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@franklin: of course randy ingnores facts which do not fit in his ideology. That is what this is all about. These guys cherry pick minute details, twist facts and claim that statistics and science prove something which they do not. That is the way guys like these have always worked.
Just read what herr Göbbels has said about propaganda, or what Trotski, Lenin etc. were saying about it. Guys with totalitarian agendas have always done it: “we tell you just the truth, these are just the facts, the other side is lying and have a political agenda – we don’t, we are not what they say we are, we are just unbiased guys who want the hidden truth out, we do not want to hurt anybody, we are not for any discrimination, we want everybody to be happy, we like everybody” etc.
In 1930’s the official magazine of the SS made a cover story which had a headline “Our zionistic brothers!” based on the fact that accordin to them the zionists just wanted the same as the nazis, meaning get the german jews out and into the Palestine. Well, we all know what happened few years later between these brothers!
@abagond: missed that Grant thing, thanks for pointing that out.
@all: Guys like unamused, randy, chuckie etc. can not be taken seriously just by themselves (actually, they are quite funny and sometimes outrageously hilarious), but the thinking they present should be. They are the living proof of the racism that is still alive and doing very well in USA. They are the proof that there is still a lot to do in anti-racism. Like irritating zits they show that there is still some sore spots in the face of the country.
The ideas born in the late 1800’s still live on in the marginal, even the older ideas of blacks being subservient spieces seem to live on, and so we all have work to do. We all must be active in our own communities, be aware that these midgets are still here spreading their ideology masked as a science. Lucky for us, it is very much harder for them now a days. There is already a black man in the White House. 😀
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Franklin,
I’m not familiar enough with the genetic arguments to have a solid opinion. My focus is to promote a culture of academic achievement as a way out of poverty. We don’t seem to be in disagreement.
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@Randy Garver
I understand what you are saying. I believe their should be a balance also. We shouldn’t ignore societal factors or personal responsibility. I feel their is room to take both into account
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@ Randy
The only disagreement we have is that using “Asians” as a group, for obvious political reasons is wrong. Not to mention incorrect. As it is usually for the sole purpose of denigrating blacks and hispanics. Not only that, but it clumps Asians together as a singular entity, which undermines the problems the struggling ones go through.
“Because they’re Asians and they do better than whites, there’s no real problem. Look at the statistics!”
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Rather, I’m saying that education leads to success.
Except per the study I linked earlier education doesn’t seem to change the fact that the peer-reviewed evidence I provided demonstrates that your feel-good rhetoric is patently false for Black & Hispanic Americans.
Here’s a get starter kit for the newbs here (I’m looking at Randy, Chuck, and Unamused). It includes evidence of housing discrimination, definitions of key-terms, a short analysis of the sociocultural construction of race as a biological concept in an HISTORICAL context, and also lots of great questions that everyone (both racists and anti-racists) should be asking:
Click to access Definitions%20of%20Racism.pdf
Also, while like people do tend to want to live together, per Unamused’s blog, the Black flight taking place whereby the Black middle-class is abandoning cities to live in White southern suburbs is evidence that the trend is actually the OPPOSITE of Randy’s assertion that similar people like to live together. At least for Black people. Apparently we need to take into account Class when talking about Race. (The two often overlap, along with other factors to create a kyriarchy.) Because either Randy is wrong, or Unamused is wrong — although I think they’re both wronger — which still does not answer the problem of why upper-class neighborhoods are predominantly White, and poorer neighborhood are predominantly Black & Hispanic if racism is no longer a problem in America.
Quoting IQ stats or cultural flaws seems beside the point since our laws specifically prohibit any kind of discrimination based on intelligence, culture, race, religion, or other identities. Since we have observable evidence of discrimination and disparity that cannot be answered through racist IQ measurements or ethnocentric cultural appellations, it seems logical to examine other racism as one factor which apparently (based on the evidence) is still widely prevalent.
Of course I expect the bigots to disregard the facts and simply pretend that “He [I] just doesn’t have any real information to support his claims.”
In the face of overwhelming evidence, racists prefer to go the way of all babies and put their fingers in their ears going, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
Again, it’d be funny if it weren’t so pathological.
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To Franklin:
Re: Asian personal income.. the stats about Asians are a bit dated… here is more recent info:
Last time I checked Hmong, Cambodian, Laotian, Native American (“yes” they still technically count), Pacific Islanders, and Vietnamese DON’T have a high rate of college degrees, when compared to the aforementioned Asians.
Second generation Vietnamese Americans now graduate from college at rate more 50% higher than Whites:
“The second generation of all four groups, however, has attained more education than their parents. Nearly 45 percent of the Vietnamese graduate from college.”
Can’t find the latest data for Hmong and Cambodians but I have read things are improving for them also. Things were pretty bad for them in the 90s. (these two groups were basically the last of the Southeast Asian refugee groups..) Culturally Pacific Islanders and Native Americans are very different than East Asians. The former is arbitrarily lumped in with East Asians by the US government and as for the latter… that’s your categorization… yes they came from somewhere in Asian between 10,0000 to 20,000 years ago… go back far enough and you could say we are all Africans (I probably have a 30,000 year separation with an Ethiopian guy..) so where is the cutoff..?
Also Asians now have both the highest personal and household income:
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To Zek:
OPPOSITE of Randy’s assertion that similar people like to live together.
Well that’s sort of true.. (note Randy is married to an Asian woman..) but it doesn’t have to break down by race.. I doubt many Upper Middle class Whites would have problems living next to Dr. Achube from Nigeria.. or Raj the computer programmer… because they would be of the same class. I have a feeling that these guys would not be so welcome:
Personally I am looking for the neighborhood of Indian, Persian, Czech, Chinese and Ukrainian models.
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To Franklin:
The only disagreement we have is that using “Asians” as a group, for obvious political reasons is wrong….. As it is usually for the sole purpose of denigrating blacks and hispanics.
Well spin it another way … East and South Asians graduate from college at a rate more than 50% than Whites… and have a violent crime rate 1/4 that of Whites.
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@ Uncle Milton
First of all, you just did the same exact thing I slammed Randy for doing. Incorrectly grouping all Asians together to repeat the slogan of “Asians doing fine.” And these weren’t my classifications, btw. Those were the classifications of other Asians from that (Asian) site. That was a very sly attempt, to undermine and dismiss what I said though. Dirty pool, mister. Dirty pool…
The author of the article in 2008 states that all the figures were updated since the original report was written in 2002. Figures that were more recent than your 2006 sources. Figures from an Asian researcher that I’ll take over a white person’s anyday. (No offense, since they have a known history of statistical distortion for political reasons.) About Hmong, Cambodians, and Laotians (who you left out for some reason). I’ll wait for the statistics. But ever as the author of the site said, that it most likely won’t be anything drastic.
Your wikipedia link was irrelevant, because it once again grouped all Asians together.
:edit: For someone who doesn’t have the facts on all Asian groups, you sure are eager to restate the same grouping slogans. Slogans which only reinforced what I said the purpose of stating such facts were. Your “wit” just worked against you.
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To Franklin:
Figures from an Asian researcher that I’ll take over a white person’s anyday.
That site used the US census data from 2000.. which is where I got my data…albeit from 2005
About Hmong, Cambodians, and Laotians (who you left out for some reason).
Because I couldn’t find the latest data…
Your wikipedia link was irrelevant, because it once again grouped all Asians together.
It also groups Whites together, Blacks together, and Hispanics together all of which are rather diverse groups.. what would you have me do then..? The 2010 census data will be out eventually I guess.
Those were the classifications of other Asians from that (Asian) site.
Those were classifications taken directly from the US census…
“Asians doing fine.”
Well that’s not what I said.. so…
Anyway Randy’s bent is culture not race as Unamused and Chuck are pursuing…
Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cultures are influenced by Confucianism which strongly endorses education. Abagond has argued, that Asian Americans are self selected highly educated immigrant group. Arguably true for many Filipinos, Chinese, Indians, and Koreans… Not so for Vietnamese and Japanese… whose 3rd generation children for the Vietnamese and 3rd generation for the Japanese outperform Whites at the academic level.
The author of the article in 2008 states that all the figures were updated since the original report was written in 2002. Figures that were more recent than your 2006 sources.
If you mean this article:
http://www.asian-nation.org/demographics.shtml
It says:
“With that in mind, below are statistics and demographics from the 2000 Census on how the eight largest Asian American ethnic groups compare with each other and with the other major racial/ethnic groups in the U.S.”
If you mean this article:
http://www.asian-nation.org/model-minority.shtml
This is their source:
“Once in a great while, statistics don’t lie. It is true that in many ways, Asian Americans have done very well socially and economically. The data in the following tables was calculated using the 2000 Census Public Use Microdata Samples, and they compare the major racial/ethnic groups among different measures of what sociologists call “socioeconomic achievement.”
Or perhaps you were referring to another article?
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To Franklin:
US census data shows Asians (with Pacific Islanders thrown..) basically matching the income of Whites in 2000 (a few hundred less..) and surpassing it for the years 2004 – 2008 where the data ends:
Click to access 11s0704.pdf
I would be happy to look at the data of the Asian fellow you mentioned… (aside from the data from the 2000 US census which we have already covered..)
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US census data shows Asians (with Pacific Islanders thrown..)
should read US census data shows Asians (with Pacific Islanders thrown in..)
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Franklin:
This topic was sort of already flogged here:
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“abagond
Chuckwiththehippo:
Thanks for the Susan Model references. If you or anyone else knows of any other studies, I would be interested. I have long wanted to do a post on how and why West Indians seem to succeed better in America than the blacks who are born there.”
Linda says,
So stop chatting and get to it, man 🙂
You’ve been saying that for a year now…
I read the Susan Model review, very interesting…I agree that the two groups should not be compared because West Indians are immigrants first and think/behave as most immigrants do, regardless of colour…we don’t have the luxury to think about or worry about racism in the beginning…
The only people black Americans should be compared to is their own “native” countrymen…
I personally think black Americans have done quite well for themselves in the US despite the early disparities and blatant roadblocks purposely set up by white governmental institutions back in the day…this is their country and they have fought, bled, and died for this country…black American influence is seen in almost every facet of American culture…it should be recognized more often instead of marginalized.
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@ Chuck-Hippo
Well, first, let me point out that you don’t seem to be arguing that most of what I said has occurred, is true.
1) Slavery did happen for hundreds of years
2) Dramatic and prolonged educational inequity did happen
3) Forced Segregation from the rest of society did happen
4) Economic deprivation, based on color, did happen
and then as thing got better
5) Successful Blacks did eventually leave segregated communities
6) This did leave behind a core of less educated, poorer, and therefore more disenfranchised Blacks.
BUT, none of this is really the CAUSE of some of the high crime rates we see today. The CAUSE is that Rodney couldn’t swim.
“The problem with your theory is that Blacks (defined here as ancestrally West SS African) tend to have higher crime rates everywhere: W SS Africa, Canada, UK, West Indies, Brazil, etc. This is not a US specific phenomena.”
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, SS Africa is not extraordinary in it’s rankings on the Global Peace Index which takes into account not only crime but wars and other factors.
Several Nobel laureates, including Joseph Stiglitz, backed the study. However it still depends on what basis one use to calculate the numbers, and it also depends on how accurately violence is reported.
But also, look at the maps with an eye towards your genetic theory. If these people all had a “crime/violence gene, I would expect a more even distribution of crime/violence across all of the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. As it is, African countries show the full range of rankings, from high to low.
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@ Abagond
“1. The self-selection factor of being an immigrant.
2. They avoid the terrible American public schools.
3. They have far less internalized racism, having avoided America’s racist culture when they were too young to understand it.””
I just watched this great documentary entitled “god grew tired of us”
If you haven’t seen it it’s about Sudanese Refugees who are selected to live in the United States (what criteria was used for selection I don’t know) They are supported for 3 months than they’re on their own. These guys came from less than nothing and have never seen indoor plumbing or electricity or a doughnut but they still manage to do reasonably well. They get bachelors degrees while working full time and all that.
Anyway that kind of takes the self-selection out of it. These guys really had no resources to begin with. It also of course takes the ridiculous genetic argument out of it as well. Really all you’re left with is racism and culture if you want to explain the achievement gap. imo.
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“I am a race realist. A race realist is someone who thinks critically and scientifically about race, doesn’t make assumptions, and doesn’t care if his findings hurt your feelings.”
So basically you’re a racist. Race isn’t biologial. I know that you want it to be so badly, but it’s not.
“Well, I think she is struggling with what alot of blacks struggle with. Fear, insecurities and misconceptions about other blacks. Like I said earlier, many blacks are like this and probably don’t want to be.”
No, I just don’t care for “black” american culture. As in I don’t like the music, dance, art,and beauty standards.Most of it doesn’t make sense. I never liked it. More of my issuses were feeling guilty about to liking and trying to a certain to fit in. My dad took me to an afroventric school and I hated every minute. I can’t relate to it at all.I’m glad because I would be like this most of the black americans I ran into. Alot of have issuses with their skin color and hair. I know alot more the textbook crap. I’m lived around blacks all my life. I grew along with the culture, not really in my house. I felt nothing. I’m not ignorance of racism and have been kicked of blogs telling off racist. I’ve never the need to have lighter skin or straight hair. Nor am I overly senstive. I didn’t understand why blacks were so upset over Don Imus, besides a couple of eyerolls. I was called nappy headed the other day. People tried to make me feel about wearing curly hair. I don’t what really acting black or white means. I’m not sure if really exists. I just get annoyed when people assume
1. I hate black people
2. I hate myself
3. I was raised around whites all my life
4. Thinks I dislikes it sorely because it’s black. The reason I don’t want The Game is the same reason why I don’t watch Gossip Girl. I can’t stand music like Jill Scott, Fantaisa, Whitney Houston so why would like Robin Thicke, Justin Timberlake or Teana Maire.
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Edit:I’ve had never the need to have lighter skin or straight hair.
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@ Chuck w/Hippo
I’ve given some more thought to your Updike example.
“Look: Let’s assume that John Updike had something going for him genetically speaking — it wasn’t just “hard work.” Well, if you don’t have that something — or something equivalent to that — does it mean that you can’t be a John Updike? It probable does — because John Updike had “genes” +”hard work” and you just have, at best, “hard work.” Now, imagine that John had a brother, Frank, who was also a writer. Imagine that Frank shared John’s genes but not his work ethic. Repeat our question. You = “hard work”; Frank = “genes.” The answer would depend on whether or not your hard work could beat out his genes (ie. his natural advantage).”
King:
“You are also assuming that whereas an ability like writing is genetic that traits like tenacity, drive, and patience (in other words, hard work) are not genetically driven. Therefore you allow for” hard work” to be a matter of choice, but good writing to be strongly effected (if not controlled) by inherited traits.”
Chuck w/Hippo:
“Fair enough. This was an unmentioned assumption. You’re correct. According to “the first law of behavior genetics,” “all human behavior traits are heritable” (Turkheimer, 2000).
One of the internal logic problems that I see with your theory is that you believe that all human behavior traits to be heritable but not all human traits that effect cognitive development are tested for in an IQ test. You speak quite correctly about “work ethic” effecting the progression of cognitive ability, but IQ tests don’t directly test for work ethic. They also cannot test for long-term patience, or self trust, yet these may all be major slices of the intelligence pie.
In other words, whether these traits are genetic or not, they are not all being tested for, and the “smart brain gene” may be cancelled out by the “lazy brain gene” or the impatience gene.
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King said
I think most people that acknowledge the importance of IQ recognize that there are many factors besides high IQ for life success; the ability to delay gratification probably being one of the more important factors. I think you know about the Stanford marshmallow experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment
Considering that there’s a strong correlation between better test scores and the ability to delay gratification, maybe we should be spending more time trying to understand the causes of this trait and whether or not it’s changeable to any significant amount. Since taking tests does require a high level of patience with no immediate rewards, it seems obvious to me that people with no impulse control would do poorly on tests, including IQ tests. Maybe trying to raise children’s “patience quotient” would be a more effective method of closing the IQ gap, though I wouldn’t be surprised if this has already been tried.
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Sagat, the problem is that cognitive ability itself requires patience, and tenacity, and imagination, and many other things that are very difficult to test for if the test doesn’t last for 12 years. If you are not testing for those things, are you truly testing for intelligence?
A big question is what is intelligence? Is it the ability to test well, or to do well? And then how do you define “doing well?” Is it being rich? Is it being happy? Is it being powerful? There are many people who are rich who are not super smart… like Alec Baldwin. Does Gaddafi strike you as a genius? Yet he is the head of a state. Is that the kind of correlation we’re talking about?
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King
“One of the internal logic problems that I see with your theory is that you believe that all human behavior traits to be heritable but not all human traits that effect cognitive development are tested for in an IQ test. You speak quite correctly about “work ethic” effecting the progression of cognitive ability, but IQ tests don’t directly test for work ethic. They also cannot test for long-term patience, or self trust, yet these may all be major slices of the intelligence pie.”
IQ tests were developed to test intelligence. There are other psychometric tests that test other aspects of human behavior. Heritability, however, is not measured with a psychometric test. It’s measured by a) comparing twin performance, b) comparing sibling-parental performance, c) comparing the performance of twins and siblings reared apart, and now d) comparing the performance of siblings using modern genotyping — the latter method is what could be used to resolve the IQ debate. (5)
(zek j evets doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about — 20 years ago when Gould wrote his critique, heritability estimates were shaky — now with modern genotyping you can test the assumptions)
King
@ Chuck-Hippo
“Well, first, let me point out that you don’t seem to be arguing that most of what I said has occurred, is true.
1) Slavery did happen for hundreds of years
2) Dramatic and prolonged educational inequity did happen
3) Forced Segregation from the rest of society did happen
4) Economic deprivation, based on color, did happen”
………….
Generally speaking, I don’t dispute the above. I would qualify some of the claims. For examples, while the institute of slavery in the US was several hundred years old, on average, African-Americans were impacted by slavery for less than approximately 5 generations (100 years). (If you want me to go through the math I can; basically, the current African American population mostly descends from a stock of .5m West SS Africans (Yoruba (1)); and most of those .5m Africans were bought and brought to the US after 1750).
Additionally, while there was dramatic and prolonged educational inequity, the overall human capital of Africans brought to the Americans was significantly improved relative to the capital of their kin in Africa circa 1750-1900. It’s worth noting that the human capital of African Americans is still higher, on average, than the capital of their kin in Africa (in Nigeria, Ghana, etc.). The issue then is, as you say, not teaching Rodney how to swim — and sometimes preventing him from learning — as opposed to, say, breaking his legs and pushing him in the water. (3)
As such, it’s important to distinguish between economic deprivation and an absence of economic enrichment. Refer to note 3. Since 1965, white America has engaged in program after program to try to raise Black America. The amount of research on this topic has be phenomenal. Just Google scholar search “achievement gap” and you will get 25,000 articles dealing with the nature of the problem and theories of how to fix it.
That said, the above is somewhat nitpicking. As I said, generally speaking, I don’t dispute the above. I do argue that currently, the racial discrimination in the US is primarily for African Americans (controlling for other factors).
“But also, look at the maps with an eye towards your genetic theory.”
The various maps don’t greatly support my theories. An the other hand, they don’t support colonialist theories. See for example: http://abc102.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/the-geography-of-african-iq/
The IQs of Caucasian Africa don’t cohere with a simple genetic model and the IQs of the regions from where African-Americans, etc. descend are uncomfortably high for my model. I’m currently doing my own literature search on West SS African IQs. It will take a couple of months but I will let you know what I come up with when I’m done. (4)
………
(1) Zakharia, et. al. 2009. Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans
(2) For another example of cognitive differences specifically between Europeans and Yoruba refer to:
Pickrell, Coop, Novembre, et al., 2009. Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations (Figure 2). (Google Scholar it)
(3) Note that, from a libertarian perspective, there is nothing wrong with not teaching Rodney how to swim.
(4) As for crime specifically, I would note that one of the main competing theories is also a evolutionary theory — the idea is that all humans are adapted to act that way, when put in stressful positions. That would roughly support your positions and explain the international difference. It would also make sense of the crime x African American pigmentation phenomena.
See: Nettle, 2010. Dying young and living fast: Variation in life history across English neighbourhoods. Behavioral Ecology
(5) Visscher, et al., 2005. Assumption-Free Estimation of Heritability from Genome-Wide Identity-by-Descent Sharing between Full Siblings
………….
Usagi
“So basically you’re a racist. Race isn’t biologial. I know that you want it to be so badly, but it’s not.”
If race isn’t biological, why are many of you claiming to be “African-Americans”? How is the African-ness transmitted? Socially? Some people here keep saying that the cause of African-American problems — what happened to the other people of color? — is the legacy of slavery? Why are you supposing that you’re related to enslaved Africans? Were you some “White dudes” that joined an “African-American club” — Is this how you got your Africanness? If it causes so much toil, why did you accept it?
……………..
jas0nburns
@ Abagond
“Anyway that kind of takes the self-selection out of it. These guys really had no resources to begin with. It also of course takes the ridiculous genetic argument out of it as well. Really all you’re left with is racism and culture if you want to explain the achievement gap. imo.”
I don’t see how it removes self selection. How did the immigrants get selected? Moreover, when it comes to the genetic hypothesis, Africa contains numerous separate ancestral population clusters — Sudanese, for example, are about as related to Ghanans as Ghanans are related to Europeans. By your logic, since tutsi are tall, the smallness of pygmies must be environmental.
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(zek j evets doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about — 20 years ago when Gould wrote his critique, heritability estimates were shaky — now with modern genotyping you can test the assumptions)
And may I ask how your degree in ERGONOMICS qualifies you judge the expertise of anyone? Especially since I actually study the problems you merely write opinions on.
Modern genetics has been unable to isolate specific alleles, genes, or even chromosomes that directly impact individual/group intelligence, except in cases of mental retardation. To say that testing proves IQ is heritable is like saying because there are more storks in areas of England with a high birthrate that storks must be delivering babies. (An interesting example of why correlations do not indicate causation.)
And Gould is not the only source for these facts. James H Mielke (et al) have an excellent textbook on human variation used for undergraduate courses in the subject which not only patently disprove Philippe Rushton’s assertion that IQ is heritable at 0.8 (traits with low repeatability, like IQ test measurements, ALWAYS have low heritability) but also disprove even the belief that IQ is solely a genetic trait.
Again Chuck, you need to actually do RESEARCH, and READ mainstream texts on the subject. Alternatives are interesting, but they aren’t peer-reviewed, and the ones that have been have been discredited afterwards.
Your faith in IQ testing would be commendable if you worked for College Board, but as a glorified chair-builder, it seems disingenuous when you consider the racist and ethnocentric history of IQ testing. Moreover, you seem to completely ignore the fact that psychology today emphasis that there are different kinds of intelligence which cannot be adequately measured by testing — from emotional intelligence, to kinetic, visual, spatial, auditory, musical, artistic, linguistic, mathematical, etc. From the Triarchic theory to Howard Gardner’s models, there has never been a universally agreed upon definition of intelligence — just like there’s never been one for race, even among academics in the same field.
Also, take note that twin-testing and parent-offspring testing is frequently only done with WHITE subjects. This is rarely done/never done with people of color. The data on heritability of IQ through testing among PoC is limited to one-time tests based on ethnocentric testing methodologies, something any anthropologist (both hard science anthro and soft science anthro) could tell you.
Again you demonstrate not only a lack of understanding of the subject matter in this field, but even a basic lack of understanding of how modern genetics and human variation operates. Please give up embarrassing yourself with this charade of racist pseudoscience. Or don’t.
Oh, one last thing. Joseph Graves, a Black American evolutionary biologist would say you’re wasting his time by dredging up things which are patently false. He says, and I quote, “Most Americans still believe that there is some biological legitimacy to our socially constructed racial categories. However, our modern scientific understanding of human genetic diversity flies in the face of all of our social stereotypes.” He’s written quite a number of books on the subject, in addition to his work on aging. I suggest you study up, if you actually care about real science, instead of real racism.
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“And may I ask how your degree in ERGONOMICS qualifies you judge the expertise of anyone”
(cognitive) ergonomics is closer to psychometrics and I-O that anthropology, right? Ask Abagond where I’m located. Look up “research triangle.” My undergrad was in psychology, biology, and philosophy — so that’s why I’m semi literate when it comes to that.
(Please cite me some research in the last 5 years that shows that IQ has a heritability under .6 for adults)
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jas0nburns said: “I just watched this great documentary entitled “god grew tired of us” “
While having only watched the trailer, I have to say I’m not surprised with the outcome. Be careful Jas0n, seems like you’re close to taking the red pill here.
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“Psychologists working in human factors spend much of their time performing research and applying what they know about human behavior, perception and cognition to create more usable products and work environments.”
Quote taken from your link Chuck.
So, you spend your time designing how to build a better office-chair. Again, how does this qualify you in the areas of evolutionary biology, human genetics, or any directly related field? As opposed to say, bio-anthropology, paleoanthropology, forensic anthropology, and all the other subfields I’m studying??
Oh, and for your pleasure. I provide a few studies. Here are the preliminaries, just so you can understand the basics. Get back to me in a week or so when you’ve finished reading them.
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/3/525.full — Steven Rose
Not In Our Genes — Rose, Kamin, Lewontin
Mismeasure of Man — Gould
What Is Intelligence? — Flynn’s work on the Flynn Effect and more.
Intelligence and How to Get it — Richard Nisbett
Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence — Robert Sternberg
Jefferson Fish, David Marks, Johnathan Marks, they all have done work on this subject which contradicts your assertions.
But the big enchilada…
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v388/n6641/full/388468a0.html — Devlin, et al, demonstrates a heritability of below 0.5.
BOOM! Found a study in less than five minutes. Now will you PLEASE go learn something?
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chuchwiththehippo says:
“If race isn’t biological, why are many of you claiming to be “African-Americans”? How is the African-ness transmitted? Socially?
MinneB: In America, how is one’s Irish-ness transmitted?
How one’s Italian-ness transmitted?
How is Polish-ness transmitted? Or any other group?
Why would ‘African-ness’ be transmitted differently?
chuckw/hippo:
“Some people here keep saying that the cause of African-American problems — what happened to the other people of color? — is the legacy of slavery?”
MinneB: The cause of African-American problems is white people and the System of Racism/White Domination they refine and maintain.
chuckw/hippo:
” Why are you supposing that you’re related to enslaved Africans?”
MinneB: Not supposing. It’s a fact. African-Americans are related to enslaved Africans. Despite White people’s attempts to use their System of Racism/White Domination to destroy the evidence.
chuckw/hippo:
“Were you some “White dudes” that joined an “African-American club” — Is this how you got your Africanness?”
African-Americans are NOT White people with Brown skin. That’s fantasy created by white people for white people.
Part of that colorblindness *ish.
chuckw/hippo:
“If it causes so much toil, why did you accept it?”
Being an African-American doesn’t cause “so much toil”
Having to deal with White people under the System of Racism/White Domination causes so much toil.
Don’t accept it. Replace it with a System of Justice.
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Chuck said:
True: Chuck is commenting from the Research Triangle in North Carolina.
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“African-Americans are NOT White people with Brown skin. That’s fantasy created by white people for white people.
Part of that colorblindness *ish. ”
It’s difficult to process this concept without essentializing people.
It seems to suggest that whites are essentially “one way” and blacks are essentially “another way” It leads one to think “BP are not WP dipped in chocolate because BP are X and WP are Y” The problem is that X and Y can’t really be clearly defined. The only difference you can plainly state is their differing relationships to the system of white supremacy. I suppose if you believe that this relationship to WS defines us on a fundamental level than yes BP cannot be WP dipped in chocolate and WP can’t be BP dipped in vanilla.
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This is what I said: “(Please cite me some research in the last 5 years that shows that IQ has a heritability under .6 for adults)”
You cite:
Not In Our Genes — Rose, Kamin, Lewontin
(dated — 1980’s)
Mismeasure of Man — Gould
(dated — 1980’s)
Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence — Robert Sternberg
(dated — 1980’s)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v388/n6641/full/388468a0.html — Devlin, et al, demonstrates a heritability of below 0.5.
(dated — 1990’s — and BOOM I said “a heritability under .6 for adults” h^2 increases with age.
………………………….
What Is Intelligence? — Flynn’s work on the Flynn Effect and more.
(Flynn argues that IQ differences are due to multiplier effects, not that heritability of IQ is not high. The issue is one of malleability not heritability. I’ve cited Flynn numerous times. In fact on, On Mon 4 Apr 2011 at 23:30:49 I replied to King: “They’re obviously changeable to some degree. James Flynn takes a radical view on this and argues that they’re super malleable. In you’re interested, read through the back and forth in The Cato Institutes’s “NOVEMBER 2007: THE IQ CONUNDRUM.” (Google it).
…………………………….
Jefferson Fish, David Marks, Johnathan Marks, they all have done work on this subject which contradicts your assertions.
To quote me: Please cite me some research in the last 5 years that shows that IQ has a heritability under .6 for adults
……………………………….
We are left with:
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/3/525.full — Steven Rose
Intelligence and How to Get it — Richard Nisbett
What in this article and this book contradicts what I said?
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MinneB
chuchwiththehippo says:
“MinneB: In America, how is one’s Irish-ness transmitted?
How one’s Italian-ness transmitted?
How is Polish-ness transmitted? Or any other group?
Why would ‘African-ness’ be transmitted differently?………………….”
Minus the ressentiment, you have a good sense of race. I mean that in the Spenglerian sense.
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@ Chuck w/Hippo
Another difficulty that I have with your theory is that you’re looking at a pretty broad swath of “Black People” around the world and assuming that they have a common genetic deficiency. You are assuming that because certain people “look alike” in your eyes, that they must also share in common their genetics, which causes them to act badly at higher percentages, wherever they settle.
I think that for years, White people have been looking at darker skinned SS African peoples and mistaking that they all look the same based on a generalization that anyone with darker skin and type 3 or 4 hair must belong to the same genetic group.
However, when it comes to people who share features like lighter skin, and type 1 hair, they are still easily able to divide these people into different people groups and races. Like the girls below.
Yet, according to almost every scientific source I’ve found, African genetics is about as varied as it gets.
“A 10-year study published in 2009 analyzed the patterns of variation at 1,327 DNA markers of 121 African populations, 4 African American populations, and 60 non-African populations.[25][26] The research showed that there is more human genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else on Earth. The genetic structure of Africans was traced to 14 ancestral population clusters…” Wikipedia (Human genetic variation)
“People of African descent are more genetically diverse than Middle Easterners, who are more diverse than Asians and Europeans. Native Americans possess the least-diverse genomes.” The Telegraph – Science News (African DNA has more genetic diversity) Feb 21, 2008
How diverse is African genetics?
“Despite the fact that the four Bushmen come from neighbouring parts of the Kalahari, their genetic diversity is astounding. Pick any two and peer into their genomes and you’d see more variety than you would between a European and an Asian.”
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/02/sequencing_the_bishop_-_scientists_present_full_genomes_of_a.php
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/02/18/genomes-of-desmond-tutu-bushmen-show-africas-huge-genetic-diversity/
So, with African genetic diversity being so varied
http://www.breakingnewskenya.com/2009/05/01/most-comprehensive-study-of-african-genetic-diversity-released/
it would seem that treating people of African descent worldwide as if they could ALL be sharing the same intelligence limiting genetics seems unreasonable.
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“Being an African-American doesn’t cause “so much toil”
Having to deal with White people under the System of Racism/White Domination causes so much toil.
Don’t accept it. Replace it with a System of Justice.”
Yes and no, while I do believe that whites really screwed up blacks alot, but I can’t say it’s true for every case. We can keep saying that Americans are brainwashed by this system, but how much of it is really ? Some people are just stupid. What if Rodney was offered the swim classes before he drowned,but refused to learn ?
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King
@ Chuck w/Hippo
“Another difficulty that I have with your theory is that you’re looking at a pretty broad swath of “Black People” around the world and assuming that they have a common genetic deficiency. You are assuming that because certain people “look alike” in your eyes, that they must also share in common their genetics, which causes them to act badly at higher percentages, wherever they settle.”
Wasn’t I just commenting on African genetic diversity (On Thu 7 Apr 2011 at 02:29:38 reply to Usagi). As I define race (cladistically) there are more races within African than without. And I realize that this or that group of Africans is not representative of the whole. Moreover, and more significantly for my theories, the selection pressure was radically different in different parts of the continent.
Your point is a good critique of some HBD theories, but not mine, since I try not to generalize across continents. For example, in the African IQ is 70 section I just argued about continental level phenotypic (IQ) differences and limited by genetic claims to certain subpopulations (i.e African Americans).*
(I do point out that we can average ancestries (when discussing average differences that are thought to be under additive genetic control) — for example, if 60% of the African-American ancestry is from N.West SS. Africa and 15% is from N.East SS Africa and 25% is from West Eurasia, we can say that the population on a whole would tend to have more N.West SS African genes and therefore more N.West SS African phenotypes, given the stipulation about additive genetics).
*This wasn’t just because I was hating on African-Americans. It was because there is independent evidence — and I see no escape from this, assuming we grant the major premises.
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Usagi,
The question is, why do we talk about the what ifs and not the what happeneds? What would Rodney refusing to swim have to do with the people who pushed him in refusing to help him once he drowned? They would still be wrong regardless.
Americans are not brainwashed, but they are certainly told to fit into their role in this system and sadly most people do not think there are any alternatives. They accept it without question and even go out of there way to defend it.
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Chuck,
Oh yes, that’s right. I forgot you wanted it to be a more recent example. (Because you’re mistrustful of established facts?) Anyhoo, here’s one from 2007, which I believe is within the required — and random — time-frame.
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
Careful though. This one is math heavy. Since you’re a newb at this, I STRONGLY recommend you read basic human variation and intro to genetics textbooks before delving into this. You’ll only give yourself a headache otherwise. But that said, the narrow-sense heritability was determined to be 0.34, and the broad-sense heritability was determined to be 0.48. (Please tell me you know the difference between broad-sense and narrow-sense. I’m not going to explain it to you.)
Also, James Flynn takes a radical view on this
You do realize that’s your opinion, right? Flynn’s theories are part of established, tested, peer-reviewed, and accepted genetics. Saying it’s “radical” is merely you’re way of saying you disagree because his evidence disproves your prejudice.
Finally, What in this article and this book contradicts what I said?
If you actually READ the article and the book, you’d understand. As it is, Rose and Nisbett essentially tear apart biological determinism, which is what race-realism is when it argues that behaviors are mostly genetically determined, and that IQ is overwhelmingly genetically pre-determined. Again, I suggest you READ the evidence and sources, because this (and I reiterate) established, tested, peer-reviewed, and accepted science. This isn’t American Renaissance or Richard Lynn’s discredited work. This is actual science, done by actual scientists.
Oh, and one more thing…
BOOMSHAKALAKA =P
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Abagond,
I have a comment in moderation. Uncertain if it is my link. Please let me know if I need to repost. Thanks!
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zek,
Upon jas0n’s recommendation, I watched the documentary “God Grew Tired of Us” about Sudanese “lost boys” who relocated to the US as refugees. Despite incredible hardships in Africa, they’ve thrived here, gaining educations, livelihoods, and in some cases, creating philanthropy projects.
I’d encourage all readers here to see this movie and then come back and let’s have a further discussion about whether or not the American Dream is still alive.
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Hey Randy, you might also enjoy “What is the What?”
an autobiographical fiction that I read on the same subject by Valentino Achak Deng. Check it out.
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Randy,
You do realize exceptions PROVE the rule, right?
That said, nobody said the “American Dream” isn’t still alive. In fact, all anybody ever said was that People of Color don’t get a fair shake in this country. Not that people from extreme poverty don’t rise up to extreme success. However, what class (and race) you are born into has a great influence on your future. Read Class Matters for a detailed example of how social class (and race!) can affect a person’s life in myriad ways — some obvious, some subtle. More importantly, it is part of a chain of evidence that demonstrates that statistically speaking most people remain in the social class they are born in, and never experience “success” as mainstream American culture defines it. This is obvious enough by the fact that not everyone can be a millionaire. Why? Not because they didn’t try hard enough, and not only because they weren’t lucky enough, but simply because money is a finite resource. Not everyone can be a millionaire because most of the millions belong to a concentrated percentage of our country.
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King,
Thanks for the recommendation.
zek,
You’re definitely backtracking some here. On several occasions when I’ve claimed that culture more than anything determines success, you’ve replied with “structural racism.”
These Sudanese guys had no idea even how to use electricity before coming to the US, and learned how to read in a UN refugee camp. By following simple, basic principles were able to thrive and are now in the process of giving back.
What barriers other than culture prevent every single kid in America from doing the same?
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Fascinating.
zek j evets wrote: “You do realize exceptions PROVE the rule, right?”
zek j evets also wrote the following, about HBD and race realism: “I’m sorry, but in SCIENCE, if you have an ‘exception’ to the ‘rule’, then you’ve basically just disproved yourself.”
In any argument, he simply takes up whatever position is contrary the race realists. He will interpret exactly the same thing in two completely different ways, in order to reassure himself that his opinions were right all along.
Can someone define “prejudice” for me? I lost my dictionary.
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Unamused,
Rule of thumb and rule of science are two different concepts. I’m sure even your limited grasp of the material can handle that.
Or maybe not?
Social class is a societal category, not a genetic or biologic category. They are governed by different principles. Heritability in genetics doesn’t operate in the same way that people inherit class.
Again, you need to READ A BOOK. But then again, your comprehension can’t even handle my comments. Oh well.
Randy,
What barriers other than culture prevent every single kid in America from doing the same?
Well apparently according to Unamused and the HBD crowd, biological determinism is why.
But let’s discount the extremely ignorant and focus on something real. Like racism. If you’d actually read any number of the books or articles or sources I, King, Cynic, and others have cited in these discussions you’d have the answers to your questions. But as it is, here I am leading you by the hand again…
There are examples of individuals overcoming extreme odds to achieve greatness. Human history is replete with them. Yet for every rags to riches story, how many do not make it? Even assuming a single approach was the only way to achieve success, the simple necessities of life would prevent it. You do understand the concept that not everyone can be a millionaire, right? Even if they wanted to and did everything in their power to do so. Extreme fatalism, like Unamused espouses is just as faulty as extreme individualism, like you espouse.
Individuals are bound by the collective in which they reside, to that degree they may enact limited change upon their environment. Individuals with more skills, resources, status, etc. have a greater, proportional effect than individuals who don’t possess these things.
The Sudanese children from the documentary (which I’ve seen as well — a great flick) are an example of how people can achieve despite overwhelming odds against them, but that doesn’t address the fact that the odds were against them. Why is that allowable in a free, democratic society? You yourself have admitted the obstacles and challenges racism poses, yet you continuously deny that more than mere education is required to overcome it for many people of color, even in spite of direct evidence to the contrary. (Like the article I linked on hiring practices among Black, Hispanic, and White applicants.)
Racism, classism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and many other forms of prejudice play a large part in determining the outcome of a group AND individual’s possible accomplishments. Even people with substantial resources and status cannot completely overcome these forms of discrimination. Sammy Davis Jr is one such example. A counterexample would be OJ Simpson, probably one of the only Black men to get away with murder despite a near-obvious guilt, especially when you consider that the opposite has always been true in America. (Where Whites who have killed Black people, and are obviously guilty have gotten off.)
But we can play the examples game all night. I’m talking in aggregate, and the studies back me up on this. You just need to go look at them. Or what’s the point in even discussing it?
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“Rule of thumb and rule of science are two different concepts.”
Thank you for proving my point. When the exception hurts your case, it’s a “rule of thumb” — exception proves the rule. When you think the exception helps your case, it’s a “rule of science” — exception disproves the rule.
By the way, “the exception that proves the rule” is an idiom, not a rule of thumb. Words have precise meanings. Please learn them.
Also, if you had ever bothered to read my two point-by-point rebuttals of literally everything you wrote on race realism, you would have seen my extensive references to the literature. As a college student, you should really learn how to cite your sources.
That includes books.
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Unamused,
Are you going to link your blog again? I think everyone’s got the URL permanently lodged in their browsers from your last conniption fit.
Also, apparently don’t know the definition for idiom OR rule of thumb…
The former: “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words”
The latter: “a broadly accurate guide or principle, based on experience or practice rather than theory”
From the Oxford English dictionary. Not Wikipedia. Apparently you never went to college since you still use it.
Nor do you even know the entire statement it seems: “the exception to the rule always proves the rule.” It’s rhetoric (go ahead, look it all up while I wait…) and not a core part of my argument. The data is. Did you bother to read Class Matters? Or any study on the intersection of race and class in America? I’m guessing not since you’re still crying for attention about your latest blog post.
Please dude, this obsession you have with me was flattering at first, but I DO have a girlfriend and while there are some guys I’d go gay for (Robin Williams, David Duchovny, and maybe even Alan Rickman) you’re just not one of them =P
So, yeah… Go find someone ELSE to develop your blogocrush on.
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P.S. I just realized you might not have gotten the point from my listing the definitions together like that.
THEY’RE SYNONYMS.
Laters ; )
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zek said: “The Sudanese children from the documentary (which I’ve seen as well — a great flick) are an example of how people can achieve despite overwhelming odds against them, but that doesn’t address the fact that the odds were against them.”
The “overwhelming odds against them” were present in the Sudan, where they escaped genocide, famine, and disease. You would presume that the “overwhelming odds against them” took place in the US. That’s an unbelievably ridiculous statement.
“You yourself have admitted the obstacles and challenges racism poses, yet you continuously deny that more than mere education is required to overcome it for many people of color, even in spite of direct evidence to the contrary. (Like the article I linked on hiring practices among Black, Hispanic, and White applicants.)”
Can you find a peer-reviewed paper on this study? I’d like to see it.
“Racism, classism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and many other forms of prejudice play a large part in determining the outcome of a group AND individual’s possible accomplishments.”
Apparently none of this stood in the way of the Sudanese boys, who knew absolutely nothing about western culture and practices. Yet they worked hard and succeeded and even sent money from their meager earnings back home.
They’re either enrolled in college or have graduated, and now maintain decent apartments, cars, and have money to travel. John Dau even started his own charitable foundation, which became an officially chartered 501(c)3 just 4 years after he learned how to operate a light switch.
“But we can play the examples game all night. I’m talking in aggregate, and the studies back me up on this.”
Do ANY of your studies factor for culture? I bet they don’t. That is my point here. Culture determines success.
It’s no accident that the Sudanese lost boys succeeded in the west. It’s no accident that my wife and her friends and family have succeeded in the west. Until we have the courage to address the issue of culture, the poor will remain poor.
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“Culture determines success.”
Well I like that a lot better than saying that 80% of success is due to your genes and 20% is due to various other factors.
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“Culture determines success”
and what determines culture?
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@ Chuck non/Hippo
“As I define race (cladistically) there are more races within African than without.”
I think that your definition is genetically more correct.
“Your point is a good critique of some HBD theories…
Thank you for admitting this. But I’d say that it probably applies, not to some, but to MOST HBD theories.
…but not mine, since I try not to generalize across continents.”
Yes, very sapient of you.
“(I do point out that we can average ancestries (when discussing average differences that are thought to be under additive genetic control) — for example, if 60% of the African-American ancestry is from N.West SS. Africa and 15% is from N.East SS Africa and 25% is from West Eurasia, we can say that the population on a whole would tend to have more N.West SS African genes and therefore more N.West SS African phenotypes, given the stipulation about additive genetics).”
I see what you’re trying to do, but I’m afraid that doesn’t quite wash either, because it’s not only a case of large region-based genetic diversity, but diversity of people who may only live miles apart form each other, within the same region.
“Despite the fact that the four Bushmen come from neighbouring parts of the Kalahari, their genetic diversity is astounding. Pick any two and peer into their genomes and you’d see more variety than you would between a European and an Asian.”
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/02/sequencing_the_bishop_-_scientists_present_full_genomes_of_a.php
“Gubi is the first person from an African minority population to be fully sequenced, and comparing him to the other three men from the region shows as much genetic separation as you’d expect to find between European and Asian peoples. Says Schuster: “This is despite the fact that they sometimes live within walking distance of one another” [Nature News] Published online 17 February 2010 | Nature 463, 857 (2010)
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100217/full/463857a.html
This seems like it would be a serious problem to ALL the HBD theories that I’ve heard to date.
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zek: “[idiom]: ‘a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words’
[rule of thumb]: ‘a broadly accurate guide or principle, based on experience or practice rather than theory’”
also zek :”P .S. I just realized you might not have gotten the point from my listing the definitions together like that.
THEY’RE SYNONYMS.”
Ahahahahaha. I just realized you’re a troll. No one could really be that stupid.
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Unamused,
Ooookay… apparently you don’t know the definition of synonym either.
Let me explain: synonyms are two words or phrases which have similar meanings. A rule of thumb IS an idiom.
That said, the fact that you’re arguing semantics incorrectly and laughing hysterically shows you’ve given up any actual argument.
And that you’re as crazy as I say you are.
Oy vey, but so it goes.
Randy,
Again, you’re focusing on individual examples and not aggregates. Check the study linked in this post on hiring practices for an example.
Also, all these studies DO factor in culture. That’s why they’re considered social sciences. And while I disagree that culture determines success, I would say that enculturation can determine success. How well a person works within the system of their society can determine their success. But if the system actively discriminates against you, then we begin to see disparities. Again check incarceration rates of Blacks to Whites who commit the same crime, hiring practices, housing loan approval rates, and other criteria.
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@randy: “It’s no accident that the Sudanese lost boys succeeded in the west.”
No it is not, they were never slaves and wanted to come to west and also, in one documentary which I saw couple of years ago, they were helped by christian charities to find decent housing, language courses, education, clothes etcetcetcetc. So it is no accident indeed.
@zek: I see the loony toones are here again 😀 Try to stay serious even though it is tuff with this guy 😀
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zek said: “Also, all these studies DO factor in culture. That’s why they’re considered social sciences.”
You have studies that only tracked people who maintained intact families and who prioritized education? I’d like to see those. Otherwise, you’re not controlling for culture.
“And while I disagree that culture determines success, I would say that enculturation can determine success.”
Forgive me if I have a laugh when an educated Jewish person says that culture doesn’t determine success. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of Jewish grandmothers would similarly disagree with your statement.
Also, I find it unfortunate that you would throw such common immigrant success stories under the bus because they don’t fit a politically correct narrative which you’ve read in books.
Maybe you should call up John Dau and personally tell him that his success was an accident, and had nothing to do with the traditional values he had been taught by his family and community. I’d love to listen in on that one.
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[…] I making this up to make him look stupid? Unfortunately not. “Let me explain,” he offered, “synonyms are two words or phrases which have similar meanings. A rule of thumb IS an […]
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[…] you [i.e., Unamused] never went to college since you still use [Wikipedia as a source]” (source). (Context: Zek was asserting that idiom is a synonym for rule of thumb. I provided the relevant […]
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You should check out Baldwin’s Nigger on Youtube. It reminded me of this post.
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[…] you [Unamused] never went to college since you still use [Wikipedia as a source]” (source). (Context: Zek was asserting that idiom is a synonym for rule of thumb. I provided the relevant […]
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[…] Comments have been re-enabled on my recent debunking of fanatical faith-based race denialist Zek J Evets’ crazy ideas about race. Zek is unable to respond except with more hateful, bigoted screeching about hate and bigotry, either at his blog or at abagond’s. […]
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[…] 1992″), who describes himself as an anthropologist and “saboteur academic,” and often wonders WHY people NEED other races to be smarter, dumber, less attractive, less masculine, better at […]
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[…] a guest post for abagond, black racist megalomaniac “King” declares that the “primary causes” of the black “dilemma” (i.e., all their problems) […]
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[…] to the ‘rule’, then you’ve basically just disproved yourself.” On April 8, he wrote: “You do realize exceptions PROVE the rule, […]
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Hi
you have violated my copyright on the photo above. You have not asked for permission to upload it onto your server and use it in your blog. Please remove it.
Peter
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@ Peter
The photo has been removed.
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Structural racism is part of a culture so you can’t separate the two when arguing against the effects of racism. And what is the point of arguing that a person’s behavior & IQ are inherited if not to use it to defend race based policies? And if these theories are ever accepted, what would happen if they ended up proving the opposite of what people assume?
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Hmmm… deranged blogger, Unamusement Park, called me a black racist megalomaniac. That’s seems an unfortunate description, and hardly fair.
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