[noselfrighteous]

There is so much wrong with the taking of this view. Instead of looking at the experience of growing up black, the horribly unlevel playing field, the reverberating echos of slavery and broken families. A resonance maintained by the complete disregard of the dominant system.

You point to a metric associated with intelligence only to a standard deviation at best, and say it's the reason? I think your reasoning is a lazy kind of cowardice. You want there to be a simple explanation because you want to believe it's not possible to elevate african americans and therefore you don't have to face the enormous effort that will be required to do so.

Finally, the Jews, Italians, Irish and Chinese were never slaves in america. They lived through terrible poverty as immigrants, but they were never slaves.

[hnpc123]

I think it's perfectly reasonable to place a large emphasis on the IQ distribution when trying to explain population trends. It's not laziness or cowardice in the slightest in the same way placing a large emphasis on BMI distribution is legitimate when trying to explain the prevalence of heart disease and other lifestyle diseases among populations.

[noselfrighteous]

Perhaps, if one asserts IQ is some quantity defined and birth, and not amenable to influence through education, diet, living conditions etc.

Then one might be justified in implying that black people are worse off because they are fundamentally, genetically limited.

But that assertion re: IQ is not at all well founded. And this is setting aside how well IQ even captures "intelligence". Let me just point out that your statement "Intelligence is correlated with long term planning and academic performance and is anti-correlated with lack of intelligence" means absolutely nothing, as in the statement itself is non-sensical. Of course "intelligence" is anti-correlated with "anti-intelligence". You go back and forth between "intelligence" and IQ as if they're interchangeable meanings.

Even if I allow you that assertion re: IQ, and join with you in believing that blacks are fundamentally, genetically limited, then that would put them in the same camp as people with down syndrome.

From there, the implication of your view is that perhaps we should just place all the people with down syndrome in ghettos and leave them there. After all, they can never compete in the modern world. Do you think that's acceptable social policy? That that's an acceptable way to treat your fellow human beings, no matter how disadvantaged they are?

Why are you not looking at these circumstances and weeping for the way in which this genetically disadvantaged branch of humanity has been treated?

[jmorphy88]

> From there, the implication of your view is that perhaps we should just place all the people with down syndrome in ghettos and leave them there. After all, they can never compete in the modern world. Do you think that's acceptable social policy? That that's an acceptable way to treat your fellow human beings, no matter how disadvantaged they are?

He was making much the same point, at least before the post was flagged... the point being that we must take these perhaps unpleasant facts into account when making social policy, rather than maintaining elaborate fictions that force us to disregard reality in favour of expediency.

And as far as I'm aware, we don't place people with Down syndrome into ghettoes, nor do we harbour illusions that with the right environment they will all be future neurosurgeons...

[noselfrighteous]

My point is that offering up IQ as an explanatory variable which alleviates any obligation to help another group is cowardice. Even accepting that IQ difference is an irrevocable consequence of genetics (which I don't), the next step is not "so it's their fault and we should not help them because they don't help themselves".

Which is the point of the DS analogy. It was an appeal to what I consider fundamental humanity. Perhaps it was a waste of time as an argument. Perhaps I should have just stuck to pointing out how fundamentally flawed the idea is; of formulating social policy on a metric as flexible as IQ.

[DanBC]

> And as far as I'm aware, we don't place people with Down syndrome into ghettoes

You may want to spend some time investigating the human rights abuses that people with Down's Syndome (and other learning disabilities) endure.