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Look, I think almost everybody here is in agreement with you about the extreme political/ideological difficulties in addressing this problem. To the extent that Americans are even willing to openly acknowledge the existence of the problem at all, we are viciously polarized about the root causes of it, and about what an attempt to fix it would even look like. One side (presented somewhat uncharitably) thinks we just need to expropriate more resources and guilt from the dominant white culture and the problem will somehow fix itself; the other side is hotly divided over whether genetics play any role at all, and the anti-genetics side has spent years screeching about the evils of eugenics, so they’re certainly not going to assent to any attempt to address the problem on a genetic/heritability level.
The practical difficulties of disentangling the genetic and cultural factors is a real one, but not a priori insurmountable. The existence of genetically-identical (or at least nearly identical) populations split along cultural lines, with large downstream effects in terms of life outcomes, is trivially observable. (North Korea vs. South Korea being the most obvious one.) We can infer from this that the reverse is achievable; undoing the cultural divide would ameliorate the differences in outcomes.
Now, with American blacks, we don’t have such a starkly-clear control group. We do have American descendants of Igbo immigrants, whose life outcomes are very markedly better than ADOS blacks; however, since Igbos are a fairly endogenous genetic ingroup and are not genetically identical to the ADOS founding population, it’s difficult to disambiguate to what extent genetics explain the difference. (Although at the very least it deals a powerful blow to the thesis that white racism against people with dark skin is the entire root cause of blacks’ worse life outcomes.)
Ultimately I think you and I are in agreement that the idea of bringing black life outcomes into complete parity with white life outcomes is a pipe dream, short of a decades-long coordinated eugenics program. (And maybe even that wouldn’t be enough.) Since that’s not going to happen, we can at least try to fiddle with the cultural dials in whatever way we can; perhaps we can draw some useful conclusions from that regarding the extent to which culture contributes to the life outcomes we’re observing.
The other side, as you put it, mostly does not divide itself over whether genetics play any role. There is a wide variety of red tribe opinions on the matter, yes, but broad agreement on the solution to the problem of poor african-american behavior- they should assimilate into the red tribe. There is broad agreement on the causes of dysfunction in contemporary black culture- the government was promoting social programs to undermine the family and blacks were in the wrong place and time to get hit with the brunt of it.
Genetically, the closest analogues of AADOS blacks would be Jamaicans; they're likewise mostly west african with some british isles admixture. Jamaican immigrants do much better than AADOS, but selection effects. Has anyone run a comparison of AADOS middle class vs Jamaican immigrants?
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