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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Is this a fairly recent thing with Harvard?

No, Harvard has been shutting out ADOS students for at least 20 years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more-blacks-but-which-ones.html

While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.

were West Indian

This really boggles the mind. They are as much DOS as ADOS are, the vast majority of them were worked to death so the survivors weren't chosen for their working ethic or intelligence, why aren't they as dysfunctional as ADOS?

  • It can't be their genes, unless you subscribe to the idea that it's the white trash admixture that is responsible for low ADOS performance
  • It can't be their socioeconomic circumstances, Jamaican GDP PPP per capita is $13543, according to IMF, while Mississippi's is $49911

Selective immigration, probably. We're not getting random Jamaicans.

The English-speaking Caribbean is roughly as messed-up as black America. Jamaica is by far the largest country, and has the highest murder rate in the world at 53/100k (vs about 21 for black Americans). Trinidad (40), the Bahamas (31) and Belize (28) are all worse as well and Barbados (15) is not much better. I think this is the best indicator because most other indicators of ADOS dysfunction are improved by fiscal transfers from white Americans. The islands which remain colonies seem to be better off.

Windrush-era immigration from the British Caribbean to the UK was not selective, and British Jamaicans are the most dysfunctional subgroup in the UK that is large enough to have good statistics. (Gypsies are probably worse). But the DOS crime problem is eminently fixable with competent policing - the black British murder rate is about the same as the white American murder rate at 4.

Jamaica is by far the largest country, and has the highest murder rate in the world at 53/100k

Holy shit. That really is higher than even Haiti and that place is as failed state as they come.

You have to wonder how accurate a record they have of murders in Haiti though. One part of the murder rate is just the ability of the state to gather accurate statistics and discern murders from accidents etc.

But if America is getting the right tail of the West Indies DOS, shouldn't there also be a corresponding right tail for native ADOS? ADOS are about 42m as of 2020, while Wikipedia says that the entire West Indies is 44m, and a quarter of that is Cuba, and that's the entire population including whites and all other races.

I mean, unless AADOS culture is so uniquely shitty(plausible; I don't think it's quite as bad as gypsies, but it's pretty bad) that it prevents the right tail from making anything of itself.

I think we have evidence of AADOS culture being pretty bad and maladaptive in any circumstance, far more constraining than HBD. I don't know if it's 'literally no right tail, it's that bad' tier.

As @2D3D points out, the right tail bails on the culture. They're all (well, OK, not all) in my neighborhood, complaining about property taxes and traffic like their white and Asian neighbors.

The corresponding right tail for ADOS presents identically to the black families of progressive dreams. Suburban 2 parented households with no crime. These blacks just refuse to identify with their failed brethren, like how suburban whites do not identify with kensington fent zombies.

I agree, although I think "refuse to identify" is too strong - there seems to be a "there but for the grace of God go I" attitude, from what I've heard. But yes, from what I can tell, a lot of racial disparities seem to be mediated by class rather than coming directly from race.

Anyway, looking back at the original quote, those with four American DOS grandparents make up 33%, so there's 66% who have at least one grandparent who is from Africa or the West Indies, or who is non-black. Put that way, the numbers make a lot more sense. It could easily be the long-hoped-for cultural assimilation at work, where once people make it into the upper-middle-class (this being Harvard), they identify more and more with their class peers, regardless of geographical background and sometimes regardless of skin color. And so their children and grandchildren still count as "black" in America's racial classification, but they aren't the sort of "black" that intelligent progressives want to focus on.

The problem is that the 'blacks' progs want to lift up don't end up in prog circles to kiss the ring in thanks of prog generosity. The most black millionaires come from sports and rap industries, hardly fields progs find affinity or interest in. Progs want to raise a black girl out of the hood to be president and crowd down the normie whites that otherwise occupy that position, replacing white competitors with grateful black toadies.