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You're essentially arguing that black and Latino students should just accept the reality that they aren't as smart as white people, and be grateful that there are white people around to serve as role models.
Even if this were true, our society is not constructed such that we can assert a modern-day Great Chain of Being and expect the people born into the bottom rungs to accept it.
Are you suggesting that we join them in their denial of reality, or that we lie to them?
As I said to @The_Nybbler, I don't have suggestions. I am just pointing out that accepting the worst racial stereotypes about your people are, in fact, true, would be such an incredibly bitter pill to swallow that I don't think most people could do it.
I'm pessimistic, and I don't think there actually is an easy way forward, unless we conveniently discover either that HBD is wrong, or that the problem is easier to correct than we think.
People have ways to cope. It's always a sad day when a young man understands he doesn't have the makings of a varsity athlete, but he moves on. People typically value the things they are good at and denigrate the rest ('acting white') .
In the less politically correct accounts of white life in africa, they note that the indigenous accept the intelligence difference as a matter of course. Similarly to how an 'old-fashioned' white person might prefer a jewish lawyer.
I don't think trying to find a spooky force that keeps them down does anything but feed their resentment.
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Isn't this, without the slant, the relationship between a walmart greeter / janitor and a well paid lawyer or software dev? The former are much poorer and less-well-regarded than the latter - much moreso than the difference between a 'median black' and 'median white' - but they 'accept' that, whether by skill or maybe social class, their place is lower. At least in the same sense a black student's is.
Of course it's justified by merit - and if a poor smart person can ace leetcode problems (most can't, even if they try and learn), they have a shot at being richer. But that doesn't make them any less unequal. What makes "I'm (white) not as smart as someone who makes $150k/year (white)" THAT much better (fundamentally, not as a matter of political feasibility) than "I'm (14% black / 60% white) not as smart as someone who makes $150k/year (7% black / 60% white)"?
How does it harm a poor black person much moreso than it does a poor white person?
I don’t know anyone that thinks highly of lawyers or software developers, for one.
Second, this status-seeking fetish of the petit bourgeois is in direct opposition to the American mythology of the rugged individual. A Wal-Mart greeter isn’t acknowledging your superiority by saying hello to you. They’re doing a job that they may or may not enjoy (you forget that many Wal-Mart greeters are bored retirees, who have the luxury of not needing to work, which places them well above the lawyers and software developers who do).
Third, “merit” is not the reason your software developer or lawyer has a bloated salary. These are two jobs that currently pay very well because they have corporate backing. And judging by the recent high amount of FAANG layoffs, that backing isn’t unconditional.
Then why doesn't the software guy just get a Walmart job then and cut his expenses accordingly? Hmmm . Maybe making 7 figures by 30-40 is more fun than living hand to mouth your whole life.
You could’ve read the text you quoted and gotten your answer. Also, no software engineer makes 7 figures unless they’re in management or counting “total compensation” in a bid to make themselves sound higher status than they actually are.
7 figures in accumulated savings and by investing your income in the stock market and or real estate, which is doable.
And not at all what you claimed.
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It's a comparison. The way in which a black person, whether by racism or merit, scores poorly on a test, gets into a less prestigious school, or a lower-income occupation, is exactly the same way in which a less-well-off white person does. The claim is this happens disproportionately to black people, not that anything specific happens to black people that isn't ålso common among poor whites.
There's never been an america, or anywhere, where people didn't seek status, wealth, power, social approval, etc
... you type into your laptop/phone's meticulously designed user interface, which is transmitted over dozens of layers of well-optimized abstraction to a dozen others on random parts of the globe, as a billion people do the same thing. Software engineering is hard, and as its products are integrated into every area of human activity, it remains valuable. It has "corporate backing" because corporations using it make billions. FAANG layoffs are returns to the status quo of 1.5 years ago - in part, they overestimated how much of COVID internet demand would be permanent, in part general overhiring. But genuinely talented developers are still hard to find, and expensive.
Yes, petit bourgeois status chasers have always existed. All the same, they are tumors whose existence is harshly ignored in the American mythology of the self made man. You can feel however you want about said tumors.
And software engineering isn’t harder than chemical, petroleum, electrical, or nuclear engineering, all fields that pay peanuts compared to software. As professed by my many acquaintances who jumped engineering ship to the laptop class. Your money comes from corporate marketing.
Oh, and this piece of shit in my hand that you’re fetishizing as the peak of human technology can barely copy and paste properly, hence the lack of quotations in my reply.
Is this actually true? I'd always heard that petroleum engineering is one of the top careers one can go into right out of school in terms of income, whereas software engineering has become saturated to the point that making 6 figures without extensive experience or working for a FAANG company is unusual. The industry in which I work employs a lot of electrical engineers, and I know that they're compensated very well as well, at least within my field.
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All mythologies aren't particularly accurate! But social climbing or hwatever has been integral to the american experience since the revolution, just like every other human society everywhere
... yeah, because those fields aren't in the process of transforming all niches of economic activity. software pays a lot because it's difficult AND in demand.
"that car you're fetishizing as the peak of human technology? its sound system flickers sometimes. cars are irrelevant"
I genuinely don't think we disagree on anything material, you just seem mad at the elite laptop class or something
This is all a very fluffy way to say “yes, most revenue in software development comes from marketing.”
So I’m glad we agree. Though calling the laptop class “elite” is always funny wish fulfillment from rationalists whose greatest achievement in life is becoming middle managers for a tech company. The “elite” don’t work.
Okay, I disagree on that, but it has nothing to do with whatever the original topic was.
Like, if your employer makes billions in revenue from hundreds of millions of people browsing the web, buying subscriptions, or clicking ads, and you can save them recurring millions per year in compute costs in a few months of work - you might be worth a few hundred k per year. Or if you can be 1/100th of the team that develops new products that have a shot at making $XXXM/year, or if you can optimize ad targeting to increase ad revenue by $XM/year, or ... etc.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'coming from marketing'. If you mean ad revenue, then ... yeah, a lot of software revenue comes from that. (But the value that makes users willing to look at the ads is mostly tangential - if i'm on /r/cars, I see an ad for shoes, and the money the shoe company pays reddit pays for a software dev who improves the reliability of /r/cars, "marketing" kinda paid for that dev, but they're still doing, and being usefully compensated for, non-marketing work).
This doesn't need to be a moral defense of the laptop elite. They can still be doing bad things. But sometimes bad things rest on solid economic foundations. Even if you want to destroy or murder the laptop class or w/e, it's useful to understand how it actually works.
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Black children in families making 200K have the same SAT scores as those born in families making 20K. A child born in the top 1% who is Black (a very rare thing), has the same criminality rate as a 40 percentile who is white. The bottom 50% of Blacks have the same criminality rate as the bottom 1% of Whites by income (again using global not intra-race percentiles). With this in mind let's address your following question.
In an entirely fair society, it is concievable that a poor white janitor or his children might one day have the potential to become something more. The same cannot be said for a black Janitor, and in fact his job might actually merit taking by a black secretary or nurse.
Even unsourced graphs from racist blogs show that, at any IQ level, the number of blacks at it is either less than or decently close to the number of whites. This doesn't demonstrate 'categorical' differences. Sure, regression to the mean means a 90IQ black's probably a bit 'genetically' worse than a 90IQ white, but not that much. A white and black that've sorted into similar skill brackets don't have that much difference in potential. And compared to someone who makes 300k/year, the difference is difficult to notice. I don't see what your stats add to that picture.
To the original points, being a 'low-IQ black' isn't worse than being a low-IQ white, of which there are many.
And, if you (speaking generally) are a 130IQ white talking to a bunch of 125IQ whites, isn't there something odd about drawing a line between a 90IQ black and a 100IQ white?
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White people pretty well accept it, though. They accept Asian representation without a wince and have a pathological belief that PoC make better musicians, comics and dancers. If some group, hypothetically, had a civilizationally-challenged level of narcissism that prevents fair and just grading, the issue is squarely on them.
They accept it because, as I said, it doesn't harm them. Even if you want to be a musician, comic, or dancer (accepting your premise for the moment, and "white men can't dance" jokes aside, I don't think anyone seriously believes white people have a genetic disadvantage in the performative arts), white people are obviously able to succeed there as well.
I see no evidence for any race having a "civilizationally-challenged level of narcissim."
So what is the specific mechanism that harms a particular mediocre black American student when American blacks are underrepresented as honor students (because they are straight up worse at academics than most others), but that doesn't harm a particular mediocre Gentile American white student even though Gentile American whites are underrepresented as honor students (because they, too, are worse at academics than Jews, Asians and many other sorts of non-American and sometimes non-white immigrants)? For any student who doesn't make the cut, the harm is obvious because it decreases this student's upward social mobility, potential access to capital, networking, happy life and levers of power. But what does race have to do with it?
If you accept the treatment of races as lobbying groups and cohesive political units (relatedly, a very apt formulation I've seen recently is: «treat individuals in the present as genetically-determined avatars for demographic dynasties») – then it must apply equally in all cases where a race is less successful relative to another. If you do not, then it must be shown and clearly argued that outcomes on the level of aggregate racial statistics have some causal adverse impact on an individual, before it starts to make sense to recognize a problem here. You cannot have it both ways, affirming racial politics of non-whites but bluntly stating whites do not have a case for symmetrical complaints. This would be just incoherent.
Impassionata does, I do too. More accurately, whites have advantages in competitive domains where requirements fit their traits well, and the same is true for any other group (duh). It so happens that what is called «dance» today is better suited to traits of black people, I guess. This is obviously true for NBA, why cannot it be true to more artistic forms of physical performance? Do you think blacks are not genetically advantaged in the context of NBA? This should be textbook stuff.
There is no mechanism that disproportionately harms an individual, assuming a race-blind meritocratic society (which is a big assumption).
Being a good NBA player requires height, strength, and speed, all traits where blacks pretty clearly have a genetic advantage.
There may be genetic traits that make one a better singer, dancer, or comedian, but I am skeptical that blacks are unusually gifted, or whites unusually disadvantaged, in these areas.
So whites should accept the reality that they are statistically shorter, weaker, and slower than black people? (except that US whites aren't shorter, at least.... maybe the NBA needs some diversity investigations?), but blacks cannot be expected to accept the reality that they have statistically lower IQ? This is blatant special pleading.
The reality that blacks have statistically lower IQs is an obvious fact - I don't think anyone actually disputes it. We can see the numbers.
The disputes are over whether IQ actually represents intelligence, and whether the difference is genetic.
Let's skip all the wrangling over both those questions and suppose you and I agree that the answer is yes, IQ is meaningful and genetic, and, to put it crudely, whites are smarter than blacks.
I'm not arguing that blacks "shouldn't be expected to accept reality." I am pointing out that when you have a trait that strongly determines/predicts one's outcomes and success in life (which IQ, given the premises above, does, while height and athletic ability, in today's society, does not), it is not realistic for you to blithely say "Sorry, black people, you're just not as smart, that's why you aren't ever going to achieve economic or political parity. Suck it up."
Are you factually correct in saying that? Maybe. And I don't see much utility (or nobility) in the "noble lie." So maybe saying that until everyone believes it is the only real option.
However, I don't think that will work. I don't think you will ever get everyone to believe it. And I understand why black people would not want to believe it. ("But they should just accept--" Yes, yes, if all this is true, I suppose they should. They won't. Are you absolutely sure, if you were black, you'd be able to bite that bullet?)
I do not have a solution. I am making observations, not prescriptions.
Sure it is. It would be damaging, but less damaging than tying the country up in knots trying to demonstrate otherwise. As Despair, Inc. would tell you, not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up. Or a high-powered lawyer, or a successful investment banker, or a doctor, or a well-paid cog at a FAANG.
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Methinks it's mainly speed, or rather fast-twitch muscle fibers. Politically correct science tells me that black American men are perceived as being taller, heavier, stronger and more muscular even when they are not – and in fact they are like one inch shorter, but it's basically equal. Blacks have more skeletal muscle on average, so I guess that's why they're decent bodybuilders, but they are noticeably less impressive as pure strongmen than Germanics, Scandinavians, obviously including Icelanders, and Eastern Slavs (Poles, Ukrainians).
Btw you have already posited that there is no feeling of inferiority in masculine quality on part of white men, so that's a bit perplexing – do you think men who are perceived as «pretty clearly have a genetic advantage in height, strength and speed» are not seen as more masculine and sexually desirable on a primal level? Asians suffer a lot, and struggle to lose virginity, for their lack of those advantages – not because they're good at math.
Some ethnicities among Southern Slavs are taller and probably stronger than American whites, albeit slower than blacks. Accordingly, there are 83 international players from Yugoslavia, including 30 from Serbia (pop. 6.8 million) and 10 from Montenegro (619 thousand people). This chart tells me French Guiana contributes even more per capita, not sure what's going on there.
Anyway, this stuff is best left to Steve Sailer. My only point is that the same vector of fast-paced athleticism that makes one a good runner, jumper, dunker and boxer* can easily make one a great agile dancer, assuming you're not dancing 19th century waltz. Singers and comedians are more a matter of taste; but self-esteem, impulsivity and outgoing personality are also partly genetic, and one can see how blacks have an advantage there and how it can contribute to success at performing.
* though there, too, Slavs make a good showing by virtue of bulk, power and technique; now that Fedor's star has fallen, I'm looking forward to Sergey Pavlovich vs Curtis Blaydes. Sergei did lose to Overeem but has... changed a lot since then. I don't care for box per se, but the picture there is similar to MMA.
I didn't say no feelings of inferiority. I'm sure some white men do feel that way. I do not think it's an anxiety deeply embedded in white society, as you seem to, or one that affects most mentally healthy white men. Like, how many white men do you know who actually spend time worrying about how their dick compares to a black man's?
Some people may have genetic advantages in whatever traits make one a better dancer, and even a singer, and maybe even a comedian (seems to me IQ would be the most important one there, but maybe extroversion is also a factor, as @ApplesauceIrishCream suggested). Maybe black people have the edge there too. But if so, it's certainly less obvious, given that white people worldwide have no shortage of dancing, singing, and comedy/storytelling traditions. Any "gap" doesn't seem as impactful as an IQ gap, or even a speed/height gap.
I don't think one has to look far in the "white supremacist" sphere to find inferiority complex ridden white men who spend their time seething about things Black people "get." Normally framed in terms of AA, or liberal honors, or other pissant problems that have nothing to do with most people.
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Those seem like cases where thriving on attention, or extroversion, would provide an advantage. A dancer that was extremely physically gifted but also shy would be less successful, on average. Black people are stereotypically seen as having more than average swagger; this plausibly has a genetic component; and they may benefit on the margin as a result.
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Being a good musician or comedian requires intelligence. There's the bit about scott's brother being a good pianist, jewish overrepresentation among musicians, and generally understanding the relations that make up 'good music', 'good dance', has to depend on intelligence in the same way all other complex tasks do. So, any hypothesized racial difference in intelligence should show up there too.
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Affirmative action certainly harms whites, as does having a low regard for whites in total.
What do you mean “white people are obviously able to succeed”? Everyone talented is obviously able to succeed.
i think what @Amadan is arguing is that affirmative action and related things is not the end all be all and has had not really that much of a disadvantaging effect on white people
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I mean there's no evidence that white people are either genetically or socially disadvantaged in those endeavors.
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We accepted that blacks are best at basketball, Koreans at starcraft and seem to be doing just fine. And averages mean nothing to individual. Nobody is saying that this kid is not suited for honors. But meritocracy is important.
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That's basically how white people relate to Asian students and it seems basically fine to me. I don't actually find it all that degrading to know that my ethnic group doesn't have the highest average IQ and I don't actually think it says much of anything about me individually.
I could agree with this in the abstract. Intelligence does not equate to moral worth, right?
Except our society very much does equate intelligence to moral worth, and more importantly, equates intelligence to success in life. As a practical matter, very few white people aspire to be professional basketball players or think that their lives are made worse because they are genetically disadvantaged in their basketball potential. But intelligence affects basically everything. And the hard HBD proponents don't just say "Well, black people have lower IQs, but that's okay."
I often see the "Well, Asians score better than whites on IQ tests and that doesn't bother me" argument, but very clearly, whites are doing fine despite perhaps not being the highest IQ race on the planet. If there is a real, genetically-determined IQ gap between whites and Asians, it's small enough as to make little or no difference, whereas the gaps between whites and blacks are stark and significant.
Note that none of this is me claiming that these gaps can't be real. I'm just saying that if you were a black person seeing how poorly your fellow black people are doing in the world and told "Sorry, it's just your bad luck to be born the race whose dump stat is Intelligence," you would probably have a problem accepting this with equanimity.
Which society? TheMotte?
Adolescent Self-Esteem: Differences by Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Age
How likely do you suppose it is that in a society where intelligence is equated to moral worth, the stereotypically most intelligent and most socially conformist, and objectively the highest-scoring major group has the lowest self-esteem, and vice versa?
Insofar as we define whites on the planet in a convenient enough manner. Ukrainians aren't white, I guess – and Appalachians should be proud that Episcopalans and Judeo-Hapas in private schools of New York and New England who hate them and politically oppose them have a skin tone close to theirs and get honors on their behalf.
Not to be crass, but it's not just basketball.
Social media, porn sites, ads and all sorts of American, and now not only American entertainment are bursting with black-male-white-female content, with «muh BBC» mockery of «white boys», «once you go black» memes, with even Effective Altruists wringing their hands that they treat black men as irresistible «sex toys» in their polyamorous rings (what racism!) in the wake of Bostromgate. You really don't need to look hard for it. American society is very conscious about interracial stuff and in denial about fetishizing it (e.g. here's a 8chan board). It's an elephant in the room, don't even try to snarkily spin this into a me issue, as is the custom. I guess I've first realized this when reading Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! book one, the uncomfortable chapter dedicated to, I assume, nursing insecurities of intelligent elderly Jews:
Granted, the trilogy including this chapter is replete with all other sorts of sex – sign of the times. And I know that accurate tinder/dating/marriage statistics do not support the implied pattern. The question is of social impressions and beliefs.
Sex is right at the foundation of human sociality. Do you suppose there are very few white people who think their lives are made worse because they are not seen as impressively masculine?
I think you’re not quite getting at how white versus black masculinity is seen. Yes, blacks are viewed as bigger, stronger, tougher, and sexually bolder, but Americans do still have a concept of men needing to do the right thing, which black men are very definitely not stereotyped as doing.
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Yes, I do suppose that.
+1 for citing one of my favorite books, though.
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This isn't the message, though. Being born to a particular race certainly can be bad luck depending on the race and society based on the discrimination that goes on in that society. But the average IQ - and more broadly the average of any trait - of your race has no real bearing on your lot in life. It's your own personal intelligence that has the bearing on your life. And that personal intelligence isn't influenced by the average intelligence of your race - it's the other way around, where the average intelligence of your race is influenced by the personal intelligence of you and everyone else in your race, because that's literally how one would calculate that.
In theory, yes. But people aren't just individuals, they are also members of communities - familial, ethnic, racial, national, etc.
"Even if your people are naturally less intelligent, you might not be" doesn't seem like it would be much consolation. Especially if it turns out you aren't one of the lucky ones at the favorable end of the bell curve.
So, given a choice between "The lives of you and yours are unfortunate because you are intellectually inferior and there isn't much that can be done about that," and "The lives of you and yours are unfortunate because of historical discrimination and institutional racism, and we can fix that," which one do you think most people are going to choose? How easy would it be for you to accept option a?
See, I agree with everything you’re saying here, and have argued the same things multiple times in this space. That’s what’s so odd to me about how hostile you get towards me and other users here who have advocated a formalized geographic and/or cultural separation of blacks from other higher-performing racial groups in this country. I believe it would be a genuine act of care and would drastically improve the lived experience of most black people, for precisely the reasons you’ve outlined. Yet you continue to (usually by implication but occasionally explicitly) accuse me of having other, more malicious motives.
I understand why you might have other concerns which would stop you from carrying through the argument you’re making to (what I believe is) its most appropriate conclusion, but I ask that you take this opportunity to at least reflect on why someone would conclude from the argument you’re making that maybe the best solution is to engineer a future in which black people will not have to live every single day of their lives being forced to unfavorably compare themselves to whites and Asians.
Honestly, I don't think I've ever been particularly hostile to you. Obviously I disagree with your ideology, but I don't recall ever being uncivil to you.
I accept that you are sincere in wanting a peaceful separation where we all just get along on our respective sides of the fence.
I just don't believe most white nationalists are so benevolent. Sure, they might not all want a race war if there is a less violent alternative, but they don't actually care about the well-being of black people; they just hate and resent black people because they perceive blacks to be making their own lives worse.
Let's say that's true. I think even you must know that your project of the US setting aside a chunk of the country for African-America and subsidizing them for a few generations is about as likely as AIs turning into benevolent overlords who give us Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. So I don't see white nationalism leading to anything but a race war, whatever your personal intentions might be.
I really don’t. I’ve pointed numerous times to the waves of middle-class blacks who have moved to Atlanta and other largely-black cities in the South over the past decade, reversing the Great Migration which brought their ancestors to the North and the coasts four or five generations ago. Meanwhile, whites are voting with their feet, streaming out of California and the Northeast and fleeing to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and other implicitly-white enclaves. (I lament that at the moment these places are only implicitly white - certainly nobody can look at the demographics of Florida and Texas and conclude that these are Whitopias - but given the churning internal migrations this country is undergoing right now, who knows how things will shake out?)
People are translating their revealed preferences into concrete action and physically separating themselves. This is happening right now. Of course we’re talking about baby steps relative to what I’m ultimately aiming for, but I think it’s disingenuous to pretend like it’s not happening or that it couldn’t possibly lead to more bold steps in the future.
"White flight" has been a thing for generations, and general population migrations for much, much longer.
Creating Whitelandia and Blacklandia is more than just a bold step, it would be essentially a forcible deconstruction of the United States as it exists now, and the explicit acknowledgment of hard racial boundaries. This is the stuff of speculative SF novels (written by white nationalists), not of contemporary society. Could your project happen in, say, two hundred years? I wouldn't rule out anything happening in two hundred years, including Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. But as far as trying to move in that direction now, good luck, but yes, I am going to judge your project by the ideology of your fellows.
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Again, I don't think this is the message. There are plenty of things that can be done about lower intellect to give people better lives - just as many as can be done to effectively improve people's lives by countering historical discrimination or institutional racism, by my lights - and plenty of people specifically push for policies designed to do just that. I do think the message gets negativity attached to them because of the lionization of "intelligence" as the indicator of worth or value in a person, but then the solution is clearly to get rid of that lionization. I'm pretty sure concepts like physical strength or martial prowess used to be a far greater indicator of someone's worth as a human being (at least among males) in the past, but that association is mostly gone now in modern society. I think we can do the same for intelligence. And, frankly, I think we must if we are to create at all a functional society going forward.
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IQ gap is a very abstract concept. I doubt regular people are going around correlating how they interact with people, with what that person's race's average IQ is compared to theirs.
What isn't abstract is how often you are harrassed, abused, or otherwise victimized, and what tribe that person comes from. When you are openly discriminated against during job interviews, and what the open racial preferences of the company were. When you are in groups, and which people are openly racially hostile towards you.
Never, have I ever, had a naturalized Asian-American do any of those things to me, or anyone I know. To whatever degree there are abstract, market dominant minority effects at play between European-Americans and Asian-Americans, they have manifested zero immediate negative consequences in my life. Only the most terminally online person would resort to nonchalantly claiming that some IQ different between whites and asians doesn't bother them. Whatever the differences between whites and asians, asian people have likely never bothered him. And not in the "Ugh, that bothers me" sense but the "I think that might be a felony, or at least a misdemeanor" sense.
The same cannot be said about how many equity policies have forced me into contact with groups that hate me and seem eager to victimize my family. Or worse, have the state do it for them.
Never, have I ever, had a naturalized Asian-American do any of those things to me, or anyone I know. To whatever degree there are abstract, market dominant minority effects at play between European-Americans and Asian-Americans, they have manifested zero immediate negative consequences in my life.
It's not commonly noted, but these things do happen in small ways. The self-segregation of asian students from white ones does happen in some schools - particularly at ones with large asian populations like Cal. Also, I've seen cases of anti-white discrimination crop up in professional contexts; cases of Indian caste-bias, or of the marginalization of whites in some east-asian companies operating branches in CA.
People keeping to themselves doesn't bother me. But RE: Indians hiring discriminately, I really wasn't talking about Indians. I know they are technically Asian, but the Indian Subcontinent is it's own thing for a reason. My wife was actually told point blank during an interview she wasn't going to get the job because she wasn't Indian once. She has an ethnic sounding last name (nobody knows why), so maybe they didn't realize she was white when they offered to interview her.
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Okay. But you're grinding an entirely different axe. We're talking (based on my original response) about whether it's reasonable to expect that blacks (and Latinos) should just accept that white people are smarter and be happy.
Well, Jews and some Asian ethnicities are smarter on average than white people. I, a white person, hold no ill will towards them.
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I donno man. I just don't know.
I mean, going back to my previously mentioned, white suburban, not a minority in sight, upbringing, dumb white kids were just dumb. And they often grumbled that life wasn't fair. The speeding tickets they got for going 100 in a 45 weren't fair. The F's they got on tests weren't fair. Getting fired from the jobs they struggled to show up for wasn't fair. And no amount of pointing out them that these things were the consequences of their actions made a dent in their conviction. Even that they were the easily foreseeable consequence! Well, maybe for normal people. Not for them.
I'm not sure how many of them ever articulated that they even perceived it to be an IQ problem. I mean, naturally everyone around them knew they were dumb as a box of rocks. But they always thought they were as smart as everyone else, and that life wasn't fair.
Luckily nobody gave a fuck, because they were all white. There was no "Dumb ass white person" political action group. There was no equity program for those utterly incapable of not making a bad decision.
If IQ test data between Blacks and Whites is accurate, you've got a truly staggering proportion of the African American population that are just dumb. And if they are like the dumb white people I've known, they don't think they are. They will never believe they are. And, like the dumb white people around me growing up, society serves itself best when it doesn't take their complaints about "fairness" seriously.
As for how they cope with it, ideally, that would be on them. Alas...
Agreed - dumb people are dumb, and one characteristic of dumb people is an inability to accept cause and effect, that actions have consequences, to take responsibility, etc. As well as suffering from Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. (I've known a few dumb people who knew they were less than bright and more or less accepted it, but most... don't.) Obviously this is equally true of dumb white people and dumb black people.
Yeah, that is the crux of it. My argument is not that IQ tests imply unfortunate things so we should not believe them, or that we should pretend things that aren't true because it makes dumb people feel bad. My argument is a purely practical one: given that dumb people demonstrably can't accept this, then if it's true that blacks and Latinos are dumb at much higher rates, why would you think they should just "cope" and be happy? That's not a reasonable expectation of human behavior.
What is the solution? I don't know.
Some things don't need to be solved, the solution, if we must have one, is what the French did. Stop. Pointing. It. Out. Do not collect racial data. Do not write opinion pieces about racial differences. Attempt as much as possible to pretend that race is like hair color. We did this for a while and things were getting better. I believe, perhaps in futility, that we can return to that place. But can we at least acknowledge that it was a clear miss step? That the racial grievance departments have done real and incredible damage to society?
Well, I agree. I don't think we're going back to "color-blindness", though. Even if we all collectively agreed to stop collecting data and pretend we live in a colorblind meritocracy, it will be impossible not to notice persistent disparities, and the real and lasting damage has been done - a disparity is prima facie evidence of racism.
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These are two separate issues. Obviously, they should accept it because accepting reality leads to better outcomes for the entire nation – and I posit that even dumb people are able to understand patriotism; and if they aren't willing to put the nation above their race, then @Hoffmeister25's plan for separation promises higher odds of success than the status quo.
It is also generally personally adaptive. You can extract concessions via unfair complaints, but can you use them well if you don't even realize the unfairness? This doesn't seem to work for blacks. Meanwhile a low-IQ black person who acts in full knowledge of what his IQ implies will (if properly educated) abstain from hare-brained get-rich-quick schemes and crime, work honestly in sustainable ways, and not support destructive (first of all to the black community itself) movements. In short, behave like a member of a lower-IQ Asian minority such as the Hmong, who are not thriving economically, but also are not nearly as troubled as the black community – my earlier argument about self-esteem aside, and speaking only of objective outcomes like credit scores, family structure, crime&incarceration, disease; misfortunes which are, in the case of blacks, attributed by various tribes to «systemic racism», black culture, or HBD.
As for whether they would – well, obviously they haven't yet, and they never will if everybody of consequence only affirms their suspicion that whitey has tricked them and appropriated what's theirs by right.
But it is not clear to me that dumb people cannot comprehend meritocracy.
Or is there some lower bound for this idea? Everyone here seems on board with the theory that more intelligent people naturally tend to become more competent, thus contribute more and are entitled to earn more benefits. It's not because everyone here is sure of being near-maximally intelligent or feels entitled. It's because we believe merit-based economy is better than spoils system, for the whole society. I realize this would be harder to accept if most users here were dirt poor, but probably not very much harder. The principle holds.
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