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The last time I participated in this community I was in November. When as part of some discussion about how DnD had gone woke or something, /u/RandomRanger posted a very long comment where, to paraphrase, he said that black people were an inferior stupid race who bring crime and dysfunction wherever we go and that in order to stop the west from being "overrun" with blacks, white racists would need to "block" us in a way the didn't account for "international law" and "human rights". I replied calling him a cracker bitch and was temp-banned by the mods.
Now I know my outburst was against the rules, it was uncivil, I was reacting with anger, and I knew at the time I'd get banned for it. But I don't know, when I see someone essentially laying out a justification for bringing back slavery, how am I supposed to respond, as a black person? Am I expected to lay out some "well have you considered..."-ass intellectual rebuttal, Am I supposed to beg and plead for my own rights? "No sir, Please sir, I'm one of da good ones see!" I'm sorry but I don't have the patience for that
When made my first comment here where expressed profound distress over the possibly that HBD is real. I got a lot of responses along the lines of "well, what's it matter to you? you're an individual and population level statistics don't apply to you." I never thought that they applied to me. But when people in this community use HBD and crime statistics to argue that things Jim Crow and Apartheid were good and just and maybe should even be brought back THAT FUCKING AFFECTS ME. I'M BLACK
I remember another person asked me if I sincerely related to black underclass criminals and no I obviously don't but I relate to people like Toussaint Louverture, Malcolm X, Steve Biko. The intelligent black men who dedicated their lives to fighting the people who wanted to keep us in eternal subjugation for all the same goddamn reasons. And when I read what RandomRanger says about how society ought to forcefully disempower black people for the sake of having a "civilized" country. I'm reminded of the poem written by Claude McKay during Red Summer when white supremacists were terrorizing black people across America:
So bring it on! I don't care if we won't win but I'll FIGHT LIKE HELL for my people and if I die I know I'll have died a proud black man who stood for dignity instead of cowering negro who submitted to slavery. I'LL NEVER BE ACCEPT BEING A SLAVE!!!
(Side notice: why is parent modded to -14? Are there so many lurkers who disagree with him? I see this as evidence that the voting does not confer useful information beyond the alignedness with the local groupthink. Some sites (LW) do manage a culture where contrarian-but-interesting takes are upvoted. If anyone has css ready to hide post votes, I would be interested.)
The poster child for HBD is the intelligence advantage of the Ashkenazi Jews, to the point where Scott himself used them to tentatively advance that idea. Yet for some reason, I do not recall anyone here suggesting that only that group should have the franchise. Instead, HBD is used to argue for propositions which for some strange reason happen to rhyme with racism of old.
Personally, I am in favor of colorblind meritocracy all the way. We do not need to use ethnicity as a proxy for intelligence or whatever, we can simply select directly for it. Picking people who are known to be intelligent is much more effective than picking Ashkenazi in the hope that the individual variation is in your favor. Ideally, we could do this regardless of HBD.
The only reason to bring up the HBD hypothesis at all is if the SJ whines about disparate impact and unequal outcomes, which for them imply that the system is racist and unfair, and needs to be changed. And sometimes they might be right, in that our systems (e.g. criminal justice) are less colorblind than we would like them to be. But sometimes the answer may well be that genetic or cultural group differences are to blame for the unequal outcome, and we should just shrug and move on.
I have another, less savory reason to insist that people are treated equally before the law. Good old Niemoeller. If I were to grant that small racial differences in genetic inclination to violent crime are a reason to disenfranchise one ethnicity, I will have no reason why I should not lose the franchise for being a man -- after all, the crime sex gap is rather impressive.
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