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Notes -
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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