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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 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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