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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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