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I know this wasn't the point of your post, but the way you sorta phrased this as a binary made something click in my mind. I'm gonna be honest, I can't buy either of these explanations. And both, oddly enough, for the same reason, the Greenwood District in Tulsa (site of the famous race riot). Ok, so not just Greenwood, but there's plenty of examples of functioning black communities from that era.
Modern society is just straight up not as racist as 1920s Oklahoma. And black people were able to build functioning communities within 60 years of gaining their freedom. And by all accounts, communities that worked quite well. I'm aware of the highway system disrupting black communities, but it's been 60 years since that happened, and that can't be as big of a disruption as being enslaved. There has to be, at the very least, a confounding factor.
At the same HBD makes no sense. The argument is generally that black people have too low of an average IQ to succeed, but we have examples of functioning communities. Even if it were true, the most extreme claims of the HBD groups tend to put the average IQ at around 70, and that's roughly where the US as a whole was circa 1900, and there's plenty of examples from that time of people with this average IQ forming perfectly functional communities. That can't be the entire explanation either.
I have my own hypothesis which is that the way that we’re trying to solve the race problems tends to make the racial disparities worse.
Taking Affirmative Action as an example. Well, there are two problems here that actually hurt the black community. First, it essentially creates a siphon of any marginally talented black person. If he’s smart enough to get through school and hard working enough to hold down a decent job, he leaves the inner city ghetto. Furthermore, almost none of the money he makes goes back into that community unless he makes a special effort. On top of that, the profits of his labor go, again, outside of this community. This creates an effective brain drain for the community. The people with the smarts and work ethic get sucked out to greener pastures. I5 also removes their positive example in that community. No one living in a community like that knows anyone who made a good life for himself by study and work — those people are in the suburbs. What’s left behind are the thieves or drug runners who make good money, or the wage slaves that struggle to feed and clothe their families.
The other part is that there aren’t a lot of black owned businesses. Part of this is simply the modern economy in which large companies can so easily leverage economies of scale that it’s hard to get a new business started. Part of it is the difficulty especially for the relatively poor to get loans to start businesses. Part of it is that people living there don’t have the skills. But the reason that black owned local businesses are important is that locally owned businesses are one of the few ways for any community to get money into the community and to stay in the community once it gets there. Immigrants use this to great effect. They open an ethnic restaurant hire local immigrants to do the work, feed a bunch of yuppies, then the immigrants use their wages in the local ethnic shops, as do immigrants who don’t work in the community. In other words, money comes in and stays in. This creates a wealth base, and as they pay taxes they’re more respectable to local government. They’re setting an example of hard work and study that kids can see paying off.
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You're leaving out the "it's the culture" explanation a typical red triber would point out to anyone he wasn't worried about offending.
Sure but that only gets us as far as the question 'whence culture'? There are obviously right-valence answers to this question which are the most prominent, but there are also progressive answers a la Ogbu, that African-American culture, if it has 'problems', is the product of their 'caste-like minority' status.
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It seems to me that today’s lack of racism could have some explanatory power. One hundred years ago, the smartest, hardest working, and most well-adjusted blacks were not allowed to join the dominant white society, instead becoming businessmen and leaders within their own parallel communities. They preached and modeled the sort of virtuous living that leads to better life outcomes—get an education, get and stay married, hold down a steady job, etc. Then once racial barriers were dismantled in the 1950s–60s, the most educated and high-performing blacks integrated into white society a la Cliff Huxtable, inadvertently leading their former communities to become dysfunctional, crime-ridden ghettos. It’s similar to the brain drain that’s happening in rural America and to the emigration conundrum facing many third world counties. The most capable leave, and the ones left behind aren’t the sort who make functional communities.
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