[dionidium]

"You can think a race has better average X without thinking it's superior."

Ironically, what this argument tends to reveal is the degree to which the upper crust fetishizes intelligence and believes in the primacy of IQ as the measure of the person. Google practically invented the big, scary interview process that proves you're smart enough to belong.

Is it any surprise that the winners of that genetic lottery believe in the supremacy of that measure?

And once accepted as an organizing principle, you really, really need to believe that there are no statistical differences between groups, because to discover them would, by the original logic, entail grotesque conclusions.

I can only imagine the dissonance this must generate.

[tptacek]

This is more or less the response Curtis Yarvin gives when his racism, which seems (if you can hack your way through his prose) virulent, is challenged. To paraphrase:

"I'm not saying black people are worse than white people. I'm saying that white people are smarter than black people, and that our society is biased against those who aren't as smart as white people. Oh, the unfairness of it all".

I have no idea who you are or of this is what you mean; you're just an abstraction to me, a nick on this site I have no association with whatsoever and will presumably soon forget about. But if you're interested (you responded to me upthread), it might be useful to you to know how this kind of logic comes across to me.

[Dylan16807]

"Society is biased against black people" is a perfectly accurate statement, so I'm not sure what that is supposed to show.

Can't you make an objectively-true equivalent statement about height? People with certain ethnicities are taller. Taller people are treated better. It's unfair.

It doesn't seem like the way that logic is constructed reveals any racism. Just the premise of "X are smarter than Y" is the problem. Kind of begging the question.

[tanderson92]

I didn't read dionidium's post as an endorsement of the chain of logic, or of the fetishization of intelligence by the upper crust, at all. In fact, quite the opposite.

I don't know who you are either, but this comment comes across as rather harsh and over the top,

[dionidium]

I have no idea who that guy is or why I'm being asked to defend him, so I'll speak only for myself when saying that the statement, "white people are smarter than black people" as a summary of population differences is statistically and biologically illiterate.

This is just simply not how serious people talk about populations.

Further, to conclude that such differences, should they even exist, imply anything else about the world (or how to treat the people in it) is morally incomprehensible.