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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.
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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