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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.
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'.
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.
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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