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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?
With respect, I think you're misreading me. I am making no argument as to why there are group differences; I am simply pointing out that a frequently-given explanation (prior trauma) is clearly and obviously a non-answer. Clearly, races are distinct in terms of outcome at the group-aggregate level; equally-clearly, we see that outcomes of races do not correlate directly with discrimination.
I do think that we've got a lot to untangle if we did want to claim it's all group-founder effects. If we posit that the primary determinant in group outcomes is subgroup selection and founder effects, we could also look at the outcomes of indentured servants who were shipped across to the burgeoning Americas as well; if selection effects explains all, then we should find a clear delineation in demographic destiny between the children of free colonists and indentured servants (who we would expect to be very close to the descendants of slaves). We could also dig into the histories of Irish immigrants who came over en masse in response to the Famine, as well as digging into those sentenced to transportation to, e.g., Australia.
Of course, the big issue is that if the secret sauce is selection effects and we're just getting the cream of the crop from various nations, then we could look at the pool of people who didn't immigrate from various nations and see if the world really is divided into Economic Go-Getters and Everyone Else. And now that I mention it, wouldn't the descendants of the original American colonists be the ultimate economic migrants? Shouldn't we see parity between their descendants and the others?
Again, I make no claim as to why group outcome difference exists. I just note that it does, that it's durable, and that historic discrimination doesn't account for it. As far as I'm concerned, the reason for different group outcomes is that people are different, and groups contain different people, and because I believe this, I am very skeptical of any "But for Factor X, these groups of people would have identical outcomes."
This is just a causation/correlation problem. Just because discrimination has a significant negative effect on group outcomes, that does not imply historic discrimination will correlate directly with discrimination. In my view the two central factors determining group outcomes are historic discrimination/disadvantage and selection effects/the circumstances of arrival. These both work against African-Americans significantly, but for Asian-Americans the negative impact of discrimination is counter-acted by selection effects.
I didn't say it explains all, just quite a lot and a very large part of why we see many more recent immigrants groups perform very well.
Vague waffle. How are the people in these groups different and how is that affecting outcomes?
Again, I bring up what those two factors would imply about the pool of non-immigrants; if we assume that groups are blank slates, then we should see the same demographic outcomes in non-immigrants from Nigeria, and from Israel. Do we? And again, does this assumption encode American original-colonist exceptionalism as an expected outcome, where we should assume that the best outcomes should belong to the stock of those that did the hardest initial work on arrival? Do you think there is any reversion-to-the-mean going on, and at what rate?
And yes, I'm being vague. From my perspective, I'm a guy who can watch the night sky and has an OK memory hearing astrologers confidently announce that a plague is happening because Mercury is in retrograde and that is what causes plagues, and lining up that with the other times I know that Mercury was in retrograde and there was no plague. I am not a doctor or a microbiologist or even an astronomer, but I don't need to be; all I need to do is evaluate "Does condition X, which I hear people claim as the reason for this observable event in the world Y, actually correlate with Y, or do we have cases of X not causing Y and in fact being associated with the opposite of Y?"
My own default position is vague because it's complicated. My thoughts are that sets like black Americans and Jews are a huge, confounded mass of distinct lineages and cultural influences, and that what might be true about subsets of those groups could not be true about the whole. My default position is that while knowing someone's race gives you information about their likely group outcomes, every group contains diligent sinners and callow saints and that looking at the individual in front of you and tracing their specific life outcomes to their specific choices and reactions to the events of their own specific life is the only way to get a non-statistical answer.
And so, if anyone is going to say "But for X, these groups which have wildly divergent group outcomes would have near-identical ones.", then they'd better be able to show the general principle first that groups are not distinct in the absence of X, and second that X moves the needle for a high confidence interval of groups that I can think of in the expected direction."
By non-immigrants, do you mean Nigerians in Nigeria and Israelis in Israel? If so, then I'm not sure what the thrust of your point is. The different levels of prosperity of different countries are affected by various historical and geographical factors.
Again, not quite sure what you're getting at here. With regard to reversion to the mean, yes that definitely is happening to some extent but we should also recognise that these things are often very inter-generationally persistent. Indeed, this is the whole argument for programs to help certain groups with poor outcomes, that it is quite difficult to break the cycle of low education, low earnings and poor childhood circumstances for the next generation etc. without some external help.
If we want to look towards solution to the problems regarding the performance of different groups this appears a deeply unsatisfactory and pointless conclusion. Of course it's complicated, everything about society is complicated, but that does not preclude us from making general statements about the position of certain groups. Obviously the outcomes of each individual will depend on their specific circumstances, but the disparities between groups indicate broader forces are at play.
I think the problem here is that you seem to be confusing 'X moves the needle' with 'groups affected by X must be below average in outcomes'. I think discrimination does and did affect the outcomes of Jewish and Asian-Americans, is just that it's moved the needle from over-achieving somewhat more to overachieving somewhat less.
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