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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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At what point do you expect African Americans to assimilate (that is to say, start getting outcomes around the US average in terms of crime, educational attainment and earnings)? Why do you think that Haitians will be more successful than they have been?

Sub-saharan African-immigrant populations are largely assimilating in terms of average outcomes of crime, educational attainment, and earning (see here) and appear to be mostly being dragged down on group averages by Somali immigrants specifically. Kenyan immigrants, for example, out-earn US-born citizens on average ($70,000/household vs. $66,000/household). Cameroonians and Liberians similarly have lower poverty rates than either the migrant population as a whole or native-born Americans (9% each vs. 14% of the immigrant population and 12% of the native-born population).

The repeated discussion of whether or not the native-born African American population is genetically distinct and disadvantaged from the general African population, that is the losers of a historical fitness competition, seems to gain another data point in its favor.

Though of course it's something of a folly to group together Somalis with Yoruba with Hausa with Ngala, it's at least a data point.

It seems pretty obvious that this is a selection effect and nothing more. If those Kenyan immigrants were representative of their home country, then Kenya would be a very wealthy country. You see a similar thing in the UK, with Nigerians (very selected) outperforming Jamaicans (unselected). The latter have outcomes that are pretty similar to African Americans.

Of course, if African migration to the US continues to be hyper-selective, then those migrants probably will end up with similar or better outcomes to the current Americans. But the group of Haitians in Springfield do not seem to have been selected for their high IQs (most of the Haitian elite left during the Duvalier dictatorship, as I understand it).

I'd be real interested in an answer here too. Modern American culture is completely built around overlooking and/or excusing the miserable abject failure of generations worth of attempted uplift of the black population. So much so that progressives like @Outlaw83 seem completely unaware that this failure is anything they could even possibly be asked to account for.