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So, I've made this post more or less verbatim a few times, every time the idea of discrimination as the driving force for differing outcomes in racial groups gets brought up as a justification for the relative poor performance of black Americans. I figure I may as well make it as a top-level comment, and see if anyone has any serious critique of it.
Historical discrimination is not the primary driver of group outcomes. Slavery and Jim-Crow-era policies are frequently brought up as justification for the relative underperformance of black Americans. However, it is clear that this is not the case generally, when one looks at literally any other group. I personally prefer to use Jews in this example, because of how many points of similarity I can make; Jews were historically relegated to ghettos and denied economic opportunities, chased out of their homes repeatedly, suffered public outbreaks of mob violence, had their successful businesses plundered, and, for a time, had it generally considered that basketball was their sport. Jews, historically, have suffered serious discrimination, for longer than African-Americans have literally existed. And yet, the mean outcomes of Jewish Americans are above the majority. If it were the case that historic discrimination was the sole or even primary driver of group outcomes, as in the frequently-used metaphor of a racer given a handicap which is removed partway through the race, we would expect the group outcome of Jews to be well behind the majority. We do not see this; Jews commit relatively little violent crime, make relatively more money, and achieve relatively more scholastically. We see a similar pattern with (some) Asian immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, who came to the U.S. with very little, suffered significant discrimination and group violence, and yet their descendants are now in a similar situation.
It does not matter if this racial ordering is due to genes, culture, or a giant racial conspiracy detailed in the Protocols of the Elders of Martha's Vinyard; the point is that the existence of these groups shows clearly that discrimination does not necessarily lead to lesser outcomes.
There are a few attempts at counterarguments I've heard. The most common is special pleading; the claim is made that the specific discrimination against black Americans was unique, and that while other groups have had individual pieces discrimination applied, the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. As theories go, it's of course unfalsifiable; if there is some dark alchemy of historic appearances which, when inflicted on any group, would force them into group outcomes comparable to black Americans, then the less likely it becomes that history would track it exactly as time changes. The follow-up, of course, is simply that the dark alchemy has already happened and that it has left a stain on the character of black Americans, such that racism in their favor is needed now due to their persistent inferiority; this is, of course, simply racism with one extra step, and can be ignored just as the claims that black Americans carry the curse of Ham and must repent to YHWH with an appropriate sacrifice could be.
Another claim is to dig into the specifics. Jews (and Slavs, and others) were enslaved, but not as recently as blacks. Of course, other races suffered from redlining, but blacks had it the worst. Sure, the victims of lynching were surprisingly varied when you look into the details, and if you look at the KKK's traditional enemies you will see that they did not simply target blacks, but surely blacks were the worst-off in all of these cases? Well, perhaps, and perhaps not. I don't need to weigh how many Tulsa Race Riots make up a Krystalnacht; I just need to claim that they were both bad, that they happened to different people, and that the group outcomes of one group are above-average while the others are below. If the claim is that the current position of black Americans is primarily due to racism, and not "Well, sure, obviously they'd be below every other race in every metric we care about if there wasn't historical racism, they'd just be less behind.", then that is an argument that might be worth engaging with, but unless you're already attempting to split those hairs, I don't really find it so.
But the reason I'm bringing this up here is that by far the single most common response I've had to this argument is silence (or being silenced, when I bring it up in Wokist-controlled spaces). Repeatedly, I've heard people make some assertion about relative underperformance of black Americans (and only black Americans) being due to historic discrimination, repeatedly I've brought up the presence of other groups who have suffered historic (and current) discrimination and who relatively overperform, and repeatedly, receive no answer, neither a "That's clearly wrong." or even a "Hmm, let me think about that." It is because of that silence that I wanted to bring this up as a top-level post, because I've made it so many times and never had it challenged. My feeling is that the argument is not really an argument; it's an attempt to bring up emotively-charged history to justify current discrimination, and that literally no one who makes the argument started by looking at a bunch of racial groups, looking at their relative performance and historic ill- or well-treatment, and drawing a graph to prove that historic mistreatment generations ago leads to poor outcomes today.
If you want to disprove that 'literally' above, I invite you to post. I don't get how my argument can seriously be novel, when even a Wiki-skim level of history and literal first-week-in-logic analysis (Persons B have property D. Persons J have property D. Persons B have outcome Bad. Persons J do not have outcomes Bad. Does property D imply bad outcomes?) is enough to generate it. So, since I keep seeing it get treated as novel, here I am, posting this.
I have left a list of citations off of this post, because I believe all of the factual claims made (black Americans earn less money, commit more crimes, and do more poorly in school, while Jewish and some Asian groups earn more, crime less, and school harder, and that all groups have suffered notable historic discrimination.) are taboo, but not actually controversial. If it is necessary, I can post a reply to this with a list of sources, but I do not feel that these statements are either partisan or inflammatory.
You are conflating two different theses:
Historical discrimination is the primary driver of group outcomes
discrimination does necessarily lead to lesser outcomes
I believe both are false, but you only disprove the latter claim, despite claiming to disprove the former. The latter is much easier to disprove.
If historical discrimination was the primary driver of group outcomes, then we could look at two groups which had suffered similarly, and confidently predict that they have similar outcomes relative to an undiscriminated-against control group. This is not the case; you can suffer historic discrimination and be either wildly above-mean in outcomes, or distinctly below-mean in outcomes. (And, of course, you can as an individual be in the above-mean group and fail hard, or in the below-mean group and succeed hugely.)
Because discrimination does not necessarily lead to lesser outcomes and can in fact lead to greater outcomes, it cannot be the primary driver. At least, that's how I'm understanding the term; if you have a different understanding, please feel free to elaborate. Or alternately, if you want to claim that Jewish and Asian overperformance in the face of discrimination is a historic fluke specific to a place and time, reminiscent to a legless man winning a marathon due to a series of freak coincidences (while having functioning legs is still generally the primary driver of winning footraces) and that we should expect to see Asians and Jews with comparable outcomes to American blacks in other areas and times, feel free to make that case as well.
Ok, so, first things first, this is simply not mathematically true.
Suppose two variables: X and Y cause outcome Z:
X = Norm(0, 1)
Y = Norm(0, 1)
Z = 1.1 * X + Y
X is the primary driver of Z, but, given two groups (i, j), P(Z_j > Z_i | X_j > X_i) ~ 77%
This gets exacerbated by the fact that the "doing worse" groups are much larger than the "doing better" groups: black and hispanics outnumber asians and Jews 4:1 in the US. So, if you believe discrimination led to blacks and hispanics doing worse and had a small negative effect on asians and Jews that it counteracted (and exceeded) by large positive effects (e.g. "culture"), then it is still entirely true that you think discrimination is the "primary driver" of group outcomes. Indeed, I think this is the accurate summary of the liberal position.
[Edit: to clarify, I believe most liberals believe the first point, but not the second; I believe this is wrong but perfectly consistent; which means, I don't think you've really debunked them ]
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You're preaching to the choir here. I agree completely, I think this assertion often goes unchallenged because the most obvious alternative explanation (genetics) is so taboo.
Isn't a broken culture another obvious alternative explanation?
People residing on the western coast of Africa had an existing, stable culture. With the rise of modernity, polities started raiding each other, slaughtering most people and atomizing the survivors into marketable goods who were sold to buyers on the other side of the world. Even once they formed new family structures, those were broken apart at higher rates (possibly?) than comparable populations. Cultural knowledge was lost, and that reverberates to this day, perhaps exacerbated in recent times by government policies that discouraged family formation. It continues to this day because only (relative) elites are able to maintain stable families
I'm not claiming that this is true, exactly, but it's a prima facie plausible and obvious argument that's been made many times. Black thinkers originated this argument, and since then figures ranging from Du Bois to Sowell to Obama have propounded versions of it.
What's most interesting is that in recent times it's become as taboo as the genetics explanation, and making the claim that black culture is broken is as likely to receive accusations of racism as full-on HBD.
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Can everyone have their cake if we say something like, "African American descendants of slaves are disadvantaged by the epigenetic effects of slavery and brutal selection effects that killed their best and brightest early as they were the ones with the greatest chance of escape/rebellion?" I can't tell if saying it's genetic/epigenetic but also white people's fault is the worst or best of both worlds.
Or maybe being enslaved in Africa to be later sold selected for low intelligence. Maybe Galcticus, the evil alien god of mischief(yes both an alien and a god, why not?) shot every slave crossing the Atlantic with a bad genetics ray. It doesn't really matter the origin story, those culpable are long dead or flew off for other mischief. Social Justice advocates/blank slatists are not going to be happy with an explanation that doesn't come with a viable solution no matter who is to blame and there is no actual solution besides becoming less interested in breaking statistics down by race.
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I doubt that was common. If anything smart slaves could learn a trade or a get a cushy job instead of farm labor. Toussaint Louverture comes to mind as an example.
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No, because the punch line to that explanation is not consistent with the policy preference of it being possible to correct the problem.
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The central problem with your argument is that you are ignoring the vastly different history of all these groups and the flattening the different circumstances of each by saying they were all discriminated against. Of course, you do address the point that each group are/were disadvantaged to a similar extent, but it isn't really that simple. Of course, Asian and Jewish Americans did/do face significant discrimination. However, for instance, in the case of Asian Americans the circumstances of their arrival have had the effect of counteracting disadvantage based on race faced on an institutional or inter-personal level. Asian Americans are almost all here as or as descendants of economic migrants, which selects for the most educated and grafting. Consider this; in the period immediately following 1965, Asian immigrants (excl. Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) had an average 15.2 years of schooling, which makes plenty of sense - it was not your average Indian or Japanese that immigrated to America in the 1960s and 1970s, or even today, especially in the case of poorer countries. This far exceeded the average native level, which as late of 1980 was only 13.07. This represents an enormous advantage in terms of ensuring the kind of beneficial which, as you, Asian-Americans disproportionately enjoy. So of course Asian immigrants should do better than average.
The circumstances of the arrival of African-Americans are plainly vastly different. Hence why recent Nigerian immigrants and their children actually out-earn the American average. Looking at such a vast disparity between recent black immigrants and the descendants of slaves, what else can explain that gap except the circumstances of the arrival of the slaves and their subsequent treatment, first as slaves and then as free but disadvantaged citizens?
A somewhat similar argument was made by John Ogbu
years ago; he made a distinction between voluntary and involuntary
immigrants[edit: he actually referred to minorities, not immigrants], the development of a caste-like status re the latter, and the effects on the culture of each. I don't know, however, how that theory has fared subsequently.Edit: Ogbu's arguments were not just about the US, he tried to explain why, eg, the Buraku do poorly in school in Japan but do well in the United States, or why Koreans do well in school in China and in the United States but do poorly in Japan.
Regardless, the OP errs in glibly equating the experience of African Americans with that of other groups. It was literally illegal to teach slaves to read, which was never the case for other groups, and Jews of course are famously literate on average. Non AfAm groups tended to immigrate to urban areas, whereas AfAms largely were in rural areas until the 20th C, so AfAm culture presumably has rural influences. Asian Americans largely immigrated in the last 60 years, when discrimination was less and opportunites greater. Etc, etc. None of this demonstrates that OP's conclusion is necessarily wrong, only that his argument rests on a dubious premise.
Jew didn't "voluntarily" immigrate from nazi Germany, yet their achievements are greater than many other European ethnic groups that had merely economic reasons to come to the US.
The vast, vast, vast majority of Jews in the United States immigrated long before the Nazis. According to this, the Jewish population of the US was 4.6 to 4.8 million in 1937 (i.e., pre-Kristallnacht), and 4.5 to 5 million in 1950. Moreover, this estimates that total immigration from Germany from 1931 to 1946 was only about 120,000 (50,500 x 16 x 0.15) and from Central and Eastern Europe about half that, while this states that only about 110,000 Jewish refugees were admitted to the US.
I have not read Ogbu in years, so I misspoke. He actually refers to voluntary and involuntary minorities rather than immigrants.
Note also that his work is cross-cultural; he is also interested in why the Buraku do poorly in school in Japan but do well in the United States, or why Koreans do well in school in China and in the United States but do poorly in Japan.
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With respect, I think you're misreading me. I am making no argument as to why there are group differences; I am simply pointing out that a frequently-given explanation (prior trauma) is clearly and obviously a non-answer. Clearly, races are distinct in terms of outcome at the group-aggregate level; equally-clearly, we see that outcomes of races do not correlate directly with discrimination.
I do think that we've got a lot to untangle if we did want to claim it's all group-founder effects. If we posit that the primary determinant in group outcomes is subgroup selection and founder effects, we could also look at the outcomes of indentured servants who were shipped across to the burgeoning Americas as well; if selection effects explains all, then we should find a clear delineation in demographic destiny between the children of free colonists and indentured servants (who we would expect to be very close to the descendants of slaves). We could also dig into the histories of Irish immigrants who came over en masse in response to the Famine, as well as digging into those sentenced to transportation to, e.g., Australia.
Of course, the big issue is that if the secret sauce is selection effects and we're just getting the cream of the crop from various nations, then we could look at the pool of people who didn't immigrate from various nations and see if the world really is divided into Economic Go-Getters and Everyone Else. And now that I mention it, wouldn't the descendants of the original American colonists be the ultimate economic migrants? Shouldn't we see parity between their descendants and the others?
Again, I make no claim as to why group outcome difference exists. I just note that it does, that it's durable, and that historic discrimination doesn't account for it. As far as I'm concerned, the reason for different group outcomes is that people are different, and groups contain different people, and because I believe this, I am very skeptical of any "But for Factor X, these groups of people would have identical outcomes."
This is just a causation/correlation problem. Just because discrimination has a significant negative effect on group outcomes, that does not imply historic discrimination will correlate directly with discrimination. In my view the two central factors determining group outcomes are historic discrimination/disadvantage and selection effects/the circumstances of arrival. These both work against African-Americans significantly, but for Asian-Americans the negative impact of discrimination is counter-acted by selection effects.
I didn't say it explains all, just quite a lot and a very large part of why we see many more recent immigrants groups perform very well.
Vague waffle. How are the people in these groups different and how is that affecting outcomes?
Again, I bring up what those two factors would imply about the pool of non-immigrants; if we assume that groups are blank slates, then we should see the same demographic outcomes in non-immigrants from Nigeria, and from Israel. Do we? And again, does this assumption encode American original-colonist exceptionalism as an expected outcome, where we should assume that the best outcomes should belong to the stock of those that did the hardest initial work on arrival? Do you think there is any reversion-to-the-mean going on, and at what rate?
And yes, I'm being vague. From my perspective, I'm a guy who can watch the night sky and has an OK memory hearing astrologers confidently announce that a plague is happening because Mercury is in retrograde and that is what causes plagues, and lining up that with the other times I know that Mercury was in retrograde and there was no plague. I am not a doctor or a microbiologist or even an astronomer, but I don't need to be; all I need to do is evaluate "Does condition X, which I hear people claim as the reason for this observable event in the world Y, actually correlate with Y, or do we have cases of X not causing Y and in fact being associated with the opposite of Y?"
My own default position is vague because it's complicated. My thoughts are that sets like black Americans and Jews are a huge, confounded mass of distinct lineages and cultural influences, and that what might be true about subsets of those groups could not be true about the whole. My default position is that while knowing someone's race gives you information about their likely group outcomes, every group contains diligent sinners and callow saints and that looking at the individual in front of you and tracing their specific life outcomes to their specific choices and reactions to the events of their own specific life is the only way to get a non-statistical answer.
And so, if anyone is going to say "But for X, these groups which have wildly divergent group outcomes would have near-identical ones.", then they'd better be able to show the general principle first that groups are not distinct in the absence of X, and second that X moves the needle for a high confidence interval of groups that I can think of in the expected direction."
By non-immigrants, do you mean Nigerians in Nigeria and Israelis in Israel? If so, then I'm not sure what the thrust of your point is. The different levels of prosperity of different countries are affected by various historical and geographical factors.
Again, not quite sure what you're getting at here. With regard to reversion to the mean, yes that definitely is happening to some extent but we should also recognise that these things are often very inter-generationally persistent. Indeed, this is the whole argument for programs to help certain groups with poor outcomes, that it is quite difficult to break the cycle of low education, low earnings and poor childhood circumstances for the next generation etc. without some external help.
If we want to look towards solution to the problems regarding the performance of different groups this appears a deeply unsatisfactory and pointless conclusion. Of course it's complicated, everything about society is complicated, but that does not preclude us from making general statements about the position of certain groups. Obviously the outcomes of each individual will depend on their specific circumstances, but the disparities between groups indicate broader forces are at play.
I think the problem here is that you seem to be confusing 'X moves the needle' with 'groups affected by X must be below average in outcomes'. I think discrimination does and did affect the outcomes of Jewish and Asian-Americans, is just that it's moved the needle from over-achieving somewhat more to overachieving somewhat less.
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You know who else under performs? Southern white proles. One might go so far as to invoke cultural contamination from the poorest, mostviolent subculture in the US. It's less black culture that's the problem, and low-class borderer culture, which black Americans had thrust upon them.
You could say, "of course Asians in California do well; they assimilated to the culture of California." And "Of course Jews do well; they assimilated to the cultures of New York and European intelligencia." And "Of course Black Americans do poorly; they assimilated to poor Southerner culture."
You'd think, being that it's acceptable to bash Southern culture, this would be an acceptable path. It sounds like blaming racism, but it's really blaming The South, which is even better to some. Jazz, Blues, Rap, Hiphop, etc are distinctly Black in origin, but drug-addled criminality, low test scores, under-aged polyamory, and parents in and out of prison are not.
We got a problem though - white households in Mississippi earn about $50K per capita. That's below the American average, but not catastrophic, almost double what the Mississippi black population earns, and well above quite a few European countries. I pick Mississippi because it's the poorest American state, but the same basic pattern replicates across the South. White Southerners aren't as rich as white Minnesotans, but they actually do pretty well relative to any other standard.
White southerners are a mishmash of traditionally wealthy-working class groups/small business owner groups(Cajun diaspora, white Mexicans- both occupy a similar cultural niche to Koreans in LA in parts of the rural south), educated northern transplants, the descendants of southern elites, and the actual southern white proles who historically sharecropped alongside the blacks and now live in trailer parks instead of tenements.
There’s not a great way to separate out the latter group, but I doubt they outperform blacks much at all.
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This immediately fails if blacks have even worse outcomes and norms than southern Whites, or non-black southern minorities. If the culture sucked for everyone, but blacks are worse again, once more the dread wolf Racism rears his head.
You’d need to somehow compare them to the white descendants of the free antebellum poor(so white subsistence farmers and sharecroppers). And these people exist, but they’re hard to separate out.
It seems equally plausible to me that black culture is screwed up because of influence from planters, not rednecks, and that the similarities to poor southern white culture are more or less incidental. That is, adopting the culture of a landed elite when you yourself are neither landed nor elite is probably a bad idea.
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Most people read into social subtext, so if you say, "blacks underperform for reasons other than discrimination" what most people hear is "blacks are bad, or somehow inferior." Although you didn't say the cause was genetic (in fact you explicitly gave other possibilities too!), it comes off to most people as being about genetics, just because lots of americans learned in school about scientific racism and how genetic arguments were used to justify slavery or discrimination. It doesn't matter if that's ahistorical, school gave many of us that impression anyways.
Also, in some spaces it's not acceptable to attack black culture. The argument goes that: why build society where it's acceptable to act a certain way by fiat, when you could rebuild it so it's acceptable to act a different way instead? Or to accept both ways of acting. So, "believing black people should change" is problematic to many people.
At the end of the day, explaining black outcomes by discrimination is done in order to place agency, blame, and the responsibility to fix; on society at large instead of on black people in particular.
Perhaps not for solely 'discrimination', but if one rejects that historical factors are the cause of racial disparities, what else are you left with? The OC offers as the only alternative 'culture', but that hardly helps; we can then only ask what causes the difference in culture? Hence, if you don't think there's a genetic difference we are left only with history and discrimination.
I don't think people regard this as 'problematic' so much as pointless and unactionable. Where does a statement like that leave us in terms of actually making things better? As worthless a contribution as saying your solution to alcoholism is that people should drink less alcohol.
First, cultural differences are just as much an accidental difference between people as genetics. I do agree that history can influence culture, though.
The framing is important though. If we say culture is the cause, the solutions that come to mind are "socializing black people to act differently." If we say discrimination is the cause, the solutions that come to mind are reparations or something.
I agree the exact cause and effect is largely the same, so I will reiterate that the whole debate is largely a proxy argument for who is an agent. Feminism being also woke adjacent treats men as the only agents, too.
E: typo
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This isn't a novel claim in this space.
I'm not sure whether discrimination is the primary cause for differing outcomes between racial groups, but the question isn't as binary as it may seem. What if discrimination is responsible for the way that group's culture developed, or for selecting certain genes? It's been hypothesized that the type of discrimination jews faced for centuries placed a selective pressure for high intellectual achievement. If jews were pressured into professions requiring high IQ like doctors and banking (jews were the only ones allowed to charge interest in many places), then evolution would filter out the ones too dumb to practice medicine or banking. I'm inaccurately paraphrasing Scott Alexander's argument here but my point is that discrimination has downstream impacts that can last longer than the discrimination itself.
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What is the difference? Most immigrants came to the US not knowing English at all, and they managed just fine. Surely learning to read is easier than learning an entire foreign language.
Many immigrants weren't even literate in their native languages. This PDF (found here) claims that a majority of Southern Italian immigrants in the 1900–1903 period were illiterate. Yet Italians successfully integrated into American society.
Edit: Another source on illiterate immigrants. Apparently, it was a big concern at the time, but today there are no traces of it left. No Italian- or Irish-American knows the education level of their great-etc.-grandparents who first immigrated. In fact, a few centuries ago the vast majority of people were peasants (or even serfs!) with no "need for literacy".
Yes, immigrants were illiterate. But their children weren't. And whatever the weaknesses of urban public education were in the time period you are referring to, I am pretty sure that they pale in comparison to those of the education provided to African Americans in the South during the same period. Funding isn't everything, but apparently "'Alabama spent $37 on each white child in 1930 and just $7 on those who were black; in Georgia the figures were $32 and $7, in Mississippi they were $31 and $6, and those in South Carolina were $53 and $5[.]'" And, many states even forbade private schools and colleges from integrating
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Sorry, who is the “ethnic brethren” of European Gypsies in North India? Are there Gypsies in North India? Do they often emigrate to the West? Because if you think that regular North Indians are “ethnic brethren” of European Gypsies, you are extremely wrong. They don’t even speak the same language, much less share other ethnic background.
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The ethnic brethren from North India that make it to the West are the ones with a job offer and university education. You'd expect such people to have an easier time fitting in regardless of ethnic origin. Also, the Wiki article about Roma people states in its section about genetic inquiries into their origins that the original population that migrated westwards was quite small, as evidenced by founder effects like several heritable diseases being quite frequent in modern European Roma. Given this, it's very plausible that there are also other genetic oddities in Roma compared to the broader population of their ancestral homeland.
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Fair enough. This is basically my take, too.
However, blaming Black American culture for the modern-day predicament of Black Americans is probably outside the Overton window at this point.
No, it’s politically incorrect, but well inside the Overton window. Lots of people believe it and it probably wouldn’t cause much more than criticism if a non woke said it.
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How do you know there is a difference? Do you have a list of multiple peoples who were chattel slaves, and their relative performance over time during, immediately after, and generations after?
This isn't a gotcha; I myself do not have statistics ready to spring on you, and would be interested to know, e.g., how the descendants of the Roman empire's slaves did, if there is any such data (or even widely-present stereotypes).
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Is this your first week reading the culture war thread? Its not a novel argument around here. In fact, it might be the whole reason this culture war roundup exists, and thus the oldest argument on this particular forum.
The argument you are gesturing at is sometimes call Human Biodiversity (and sometimes called "scientific racism" by its detractors) or HBD for short.
Some history:
There was a blog called SlateStarCodex (the blog still exists, but is now continued under a different name: astralcodexten. That is a whole story in itself). A guy named Scott Alexander wrote interesting articles on there. People liked his writing. They made a subreddit to follow the blog, the subreddit took the same name as the blog. Scott Alexander occasionally wrote about culture war issues (it was mostly supposed to by a psychiatry blog). These articles would attract a lot of attention. Scott often did not like all this attention.
Scott had weekly open threads where people could talk about anything. He found that people kept wanting to talk about the culture war and it drowned out all other conversation. So he said 'no more talking about the culture war'. The subreddit stepped in, and created a weekly thread where all the discussion of the culture war would be contained, so that it wouldn't spread and infect all other discussions.
This went on for a while. Eventually some people felt that the culture war thread was being taken over by HBD arguments. Some of those people were moderators of the SlateStarCodex subreddit. They decided to ban discussion of HBD in the subreddit. I was a moderator of the subreddit at the time. I did not like how often HBD discussions happened. I was weakly against banning the discussion altogether. Unlike most readers of a subreddit, when you are a moderator you can't just ignore a discussion because you don't like it. You have to read through all the comments to suss out what is going on. I wished there was less HBD discussion, but I didn't think banning it would mean less work for me as a moderator (and my main complaint at the time was how much work it created for moderators).
Eventually the HBD discussion ban expired or was overturned, I can't remember which one. It left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths. Some people were upset about the HBD discussion, others were upset it had expired. I'd guess that most people that are still around in this community today were more upset by the discussion ban.
Things went on for a while, but Scott was recieving increasing pressure from people and threats of doxxing because he was associated with a subreddit that allowed discussion of HBD and other ugly culture war things. Scott asked for the subreddit to end culture war threads.
The mods agreed, but also decided to create a splinter subreddit that would not be directly associated with Scott, but would also allow the culture war discussion to continue. This splinter subreddit came to be called "TheMotte", a reference to motte and bailey arguments. There was uncerntainty about whether this move would succeed. I can say I was publicly confident enough that I took a bet on it and won the bet. I wish I had also taken a public bet for the move from reddit to off reddit to succeed too. I felt it was more than likely to succeed, but less likely than the subreddit switch.
The move off reddit happened because reddit admins were increasingly removing random comments, and going after subreddits that we had previously thought of as 'canarys in the coal mine'.
It expired, it was always a moratorium. Mostly because of a small cadre of users (TrannyPorno, LeggoMyEggo, zontargs, situation_normal, Et Al...) insisted on making every conversation about HBD. Conversation in the fun thread about the NFL playoffs? Here come the usual suspects to talk about how Atlanta isn't going to make it past the first round because they have too many n*ggers in skill positions.
Wait, was zontargs one of the HBD people?
Not initially, but he sort of became one as time went on. the dissatisfied HBD people formed the founding population of /r/CultureWarRoundup.
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HBD is an answer to the question "Why do different races have persistent group outcomes?". I was asking a different question; specifically, "Why do people frequently claim something clearly specious (group rates of discrimination) to explain (one particular set of) group differences, when literally minutes of thought and research is enough to disprove it?"
I mean, the answer might be "Claiming anti-black discrimination explains all group outcomes is a matter of Wokist doctrine solely, and no one ever advanced the argument in good faith, and its common presence simply indicates how far public discourse has fallen.", but I figured I should at least ask people to take stabs at the argument first.
So you're asking why is politics political?
I would surmise that the literal answer to your question is that most people simply don't find it worth their time to research an answer to this question. I would also contest that this explanation is really so specious that it can be summarily dismissed after a minimum amount of thinking and research. First, I simply doubt that you've actually looked at "literally any other group" and found no exception to the claim that historical discrimination is not the primary driver of group outcomes. I could, for example, bring up the example of Indian untouchables, who have faced de jure and continue to face unspoken caste-based discrimination and still lag behind privileged castes. Second, I don't believe that success in the face of discrimination proves its relative irrelevance in general. Consider a commonly offered explanation that Ashkenazi Jews are simply more intelligent than native Europeans and exhibit stronger enthnocentrism. Let's say that's true - well then, it may be the case that AJs are a special exception. They may have had the tools to thrive despite oppression that a group without such an advantage did not. I can foresee you claiming that this is special pleading, but to make a case for special pleading you'd need to already have a firmly established general pattern from which someone wants to claim exception. Can you list more than just Jews who have had to face a comparable level of oppression for that long in the country where they are the minority and came out on top or at least at parity? Third, it does not seem obvious at all as to what is the appropriate scale for answering this question. Jews have been in Europe for centuries. As recently as the 19th century, prominent individuals not especially invested in furthering a bigoted agenda like deutsch physik felt comfortable making the claim that Jews were of manifestly inferior intelligence to the native European. Were they simply ignorant, bigoted without cause, accurately assessing the apparent state of affairs at the time? When exactly since the departure from their homeland did Jews go from lagging to ahead? Moreover, should one factor in that a group identity like religion (and a preserved common language) could operate across borders while something like race, less so? Should one consider the size of the minority group at all? Fourth, I don't see any clear way to disentangle discrimination from other explanations. It seems just as plausible to me that, say, alleged Jewish ethnocentrism could be an evolved cultural response to oppression as a pre-existing protective factor. It seems plausible to me that persistent discrimination could have kept African Americans more localized in the initially poor South and that compound effects of being in a poorer part of the country and facing vicious discrimination could have done more damage than expected from a simple composition of those factors. Fifth, how do you even define a group? Do you differentiate them by how they immigrated? By some sort of measure of the interconnections in their social network? Genetically?
I don't think finding satisfactory answers to those questions, even limiting it to satisfactory relative to what conclusions can be drawn from extant knowledge (which may very well fall short of a more general standard for what is satisfactory), is going to be anywhere south of at least 100 hours of research. So, if I had to answer someone like you in a setting where my real identity is attached, I'd make the simple calculation that the generic, safe answer nets me the social win and a more detailed answer is simply not worth the time since it won't be actionable or necessary to socially defeat you. I imagine I'm not the only one with that position.
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I think some intellectual humility is probably in order here. Your own argument appears rather flimsy as well I'm afriad. As an addendum to my other comment on your main comment, my objection to the logic of your argument is this; the argument that factor Y is the main contributor to group X's underperformance does not imply that all groups facing some degree of factor Y should also underperform the average. True, we would expect other groups to feel negative effects of Y, but the presence of other factors may be such that, in spite of Y other groups nonetheless outperform the average, other factors from which group X does not benefit (in this case, as I wrote above, one potential 'other factor' being the selection for educated and driven migrants).
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