[skissane]

> Isn't it funny that people interested in the Black IQ question just consider that the only physical appearance worth studying is the color of the skin?

"Black" isn't a proper descent group, it is a term applied to everyone from American Descendants of Slavery to Indigenous Australians to Melanesians to umpteen different distantly related groups in Africa (a continent with massive internal genetic diversity). There is no meaningful question to ask about "Black IQ"

> In reality, the reason is simpler: color-of-skin is a clear and popular ingroup / outgroup separator. Some people see black skin people, and they say "they are not like us", and it is a catalyser for the idea that color-of-skin is a good proxy: they like to think that they are different from them, especially if this difference rationalizes their opinions of them or justifies some of their biased conclusions (such as ultimate attribution error between ingroup and outgroup).

Is that actually what happened though? Imagine a parallel universe which is uncannily like this one, except for the fact that Europeans and Africans happened to have largely similar skin colours (it doesn't matter whether we suppose they be equally dark or equally pale or equally blue-green). Would that have resulted in European-Americans treating African-American descendants of slaves equally? Or would they have still been oppressed about as much, and if some other physically visible marker could have been found to distinguish them, discrimination would have been based on that instead?

> But again, strangely, people interested in the Black IQ question are not really interested in the Askhenazi IQ question

I think human genetic diversity and the heritability of intelligence is an interesting topic–albeit one about which our knowledge is (at least at present) greatly outweighed by our ignorance. But my impression is a lot of people want to approach that topic primarily through the lens of contemporary and historical inter-group dynamics within one specific country: a lens which adds more heat than light, and as someone who has lived their whole life on the other side of the planet, looks like just excessively focusing on just one question and ignoring a hundred others like it

[cauch]

> There is no meaningful question to ask about "Black IQ"

Yep, exactly my point.

> Is that actually what happened though?

I'm not saying that you can only consider a group as a outgroup if they have different skin color. What I'm saying is that foreigners (whatever skin color they have) are considered as a outgroup, and then, people associate easy characteristics of these outgroup as "being foreigner". This is for example why black-skin people who live in white-skin-dominated countries for generations are still strongly associated as being "foreigner" even if they are less foreigner than the white-skin person who was born 500 kilometers away and grew up in a totally different culture.

And this is why people are so interested in Black IQ, not because they are interested in science, but because they are interested in easy ways to confirm or rationalize their prejudice on people they associate with their outgroup.

> I think human genetic diversity and the heritability of intelligence is an interesting topic

It is. But it is very very strange that people who, according to them, are just "interested in the subject" are focalising in the most useless and stupid approach of it. I cannot find the quote, I think it was from Gould, saying that genetic of intelligence is an interesting topic but people who are approaching it with this particular aspect are not contributing anything to science.

> But my impression is a lot of people want to approach that topic primarily through the lens of contemporary and historical inter-group dynamics within one specific country

Yes, I agree with that: what you call "the lens of contemporary and historical inter-group dynamics within one specific country" is what I call "confirming or rationalizing their prejudice on people they associate with their outgroup".

[skissane]

> What I'm saying is that foreigners (whatever skin color they have) are considered as a outgroup, and then, people associate easy characteristics of these outgroup as "being foreigner". This is for example why black-skin people who live in white-skin-dominated countries for generations are still strongly associated as being "foreigner" even if they are less foreigner than the white-skin person who was born 500 kilometers away and grew up in a totally different culture.

I'm not sure it actually works that way though. My impression as an outsider observer: many people from southern India have skin as dark as many African-Americans do, but if they immigrate to the US, while it wouldn't be true to say that none of them ever experience any discrimination and prejudice, on the whole it is at a significantly lower level than what African-Americans experience. A lot of the problems the African-American community experiences are arguably due to history (slavery, Jim Crow, etc) rather than skin colour in itself, which is why many immigrants with equally dark skin don't experience the same degree of difficulties, and find a much smoother path to integration with the American mainstream.

[cauch]

We are saying the same thing. I'm saying that someone is a foreigner _not because of the color of the skin_, but because they are identified, in a way or another, as a foreigner, and put in one or more of the outgroup.

The whole Black IQ question is focusing on the skin color not because the skin color in itself is relevant, but because the Black IQ question wants to focus on foreigner and that the skin color is an easy way to do that without admitting it. And it is 100% consistent with what you say: in the Black IQ question, what the people who give credit to this theory refer to when they say "black" is NOT including southern Indians with equally dark skin. It is the proof that it is not about skin color, but about racist prejudice against African-Americans.

Then, yes, of course, there are several outgroups, and racism applies differently depending on the circumstances. There is obviously an entanglement between past history and recent history, but I don't understand what you are trying to come to? That the Black IQ question is because some people hate some people while these people are being totally neutral on the skin color? So why is the Black IQ question regrouping people based on the skin color as a proxy for a specific outgroup?

For the element where I say that some black-skin people integrated for generation are still way too often classified as foreigner, this is not contradictory to anything you are saying, and I doubt you can just say it's incorrect based only on few examples, as I have few examples where it is the case (the same way you cannot say "it is not correct that some cats are white because I can give you examples of non-white cats": as soon as I've observed white cats, my sentence is validated, and the fact you haven't seen any does not change that. If it exists some black-skin individual integrated for generation that are seen as foreigners, then it means that what I'm saying is correct)

TL;DR:

People are not racist against some other people fundamentally because they have a different skin color (this would be a very ridiculous assertion). They are racist towards them because they are identified as an outgroup. Then, the skin color is used as one of the proxy to classify other people in this outgroup (and other characteristics can invalidate this classification even if the skin is dark, this is why black-skinned Indians or very tanned white people are not often classified as black).