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I could agree with this in the abstract. Intelligence does not equate to moral worth, right?
Except our society very much does equate intelligence to moral worth, and more importantly, equates intelligence to success in life. As a practical matter, very few white people aspire to be professional basketball players or think that their lives are made worse because they are genetically disadvantaged in their basketball potential. But intelligence affects basically everything. And the hard HBD proponents don't just say "Well, black people have lower IQs, but that's okay."
I often see the "Well, Asians score better than whites on IQ tests and that doesn't bother me" argument, but very clearly, whites are doing fine despite perhaps not being the highest IQ race on the planet. If there is a real, genetically-determined IQ gap between whites and Asians, it's small enough as to make little or no difference, whereas the gaps between whites and blacks are stark and significant.
Note that none of this is me claiming that these gaps can't be real. I'm just saying that if you were a black person seeing how poorly your fellow black people are doing in the world and told "Sorry, it's just your bad luck to be born the race whose dump stat is Intelligence," you would probably have a problem accepting this with equanimity.
Which society? TheMotte?
Adolescent Self-Esteem: Differences by Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Age
How likely do you suppose it is that in a society where intelligence is equated to moral worth, the stereotypically most intelligent and most socially conformist, and objectively the highest-scoring major group has the lowest self-esteem, and vice versa?
Insofar as we define whites on the planet in a convenient enough manner. Ukrainians aren't white, I guess – and Appalachians should be proud that Episcopalans and Judeo-Hapas in private schools of New York and New England who hate them and politically oppose them have a skin tone close to theirs and get honors on their behalf.
Not to be crass, but it's not just basketball.
Social media, porn sites, ads and all sorts of American, and now not only American entertainment are bursting with black-male-white-female content, with «muh BBC» mockery of «white boys», «once you go black» memes, with even Effective Altruists wringing their hands that they treat black men as irresistible «sex toys» in their polyamorous rings (what racism!) in the wake of Bostromgate. You really don't need to look hard for it. American society is very conscious about interracial stuff and in denial about fetishizing it (e.g. here's a 8chan board). It's an elephant in the room, don't even try to snarkily spin this into a me issue, as is the custom. I guess I've first realized this when reading Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! book one, the uncomfortable chapter dedicated to, I assume, nursing insecurities of intelligent elderly Jews:
Granted, the trilogy including this chapter is replete with all other sorts of sex – sign of the times. And I know that accurate tinder/dating/marriage statistics do not support the implied pattern. The question is of social impressions and beliefs.
Sex is right at the foundation of human sociality. Do you suppose there are very few white people who think their lives are made worse because they are not seen as impressively masculine?
I think you’re not quite getting at how white versus black masculinity is seen. Yes, blacks are viewed as bigger, stronger, tougher, and sexually bolder, but Americans do still have a concept of men needing to do the right thing, which black men are very definitely not stereotyped as doing.
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Yes, I do suppose that.
+1 for citing one of my favorite books, though.
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This isn't the message, though. Being born to a particular race certainly can be bad luck depending on the race and society based on the discrimination that goes on in that society. But the average IQ - and more broadly the average of any trait - of your race has no real bearing on your lot in life. It's your own personal intelligence that has the bearing on your life. And that personal intelligence isn't influenced by the average intelligence of your race - it's the other way around, where the average intelligence of your race is influenced by the personal intelligence of you and everyone else in your race, because that's literally how one would calculate that.
In theory, yes. But people aren't just individuals, they are also members of communities - familial, ethnic, racial, national, etc.
"Even if your people are naturally less intelligent, you might not be" doesn't seem like it would be much consolation. Especially if it turns out you aren't one of the lucky ones at the favorable end of the bell curve.
So, given a choice between "The lives of you and yours are unfortunate because you are intellectually inferior and there isn't much that can be done about that," and "The lives of you and yours are unfortunate because of historical discrimination and institutional racism, and we can fix that," which one do you think most people are going to choose? How easy would it be for you to accept option a?
See, I agree with everything you’re saying here, and have argued the same things multiple times in this space. That’s what’s so odd to me about how hostile you get towards me and other users here who have advocated a formalized geographic and/or cultural separation of blacks from other higher-performing racial groups in this country. I believe it would be a genuine act of care and would drastically improve the lived experience of most black people, for precisely the reasons you’ve outlined. Yet you continue to (usually by implication but occasionally explicitly) accuse me of having other, more malicious motives.
I understand why you might have other concerns which would stop you from carrying through the argument you’re making to (what I believe is) its most appropriate conclusion, but I ask that you take this opportunity to at least reflect on why someone would conclude from the argument you’re making that maybe the best solution is to engineer a future in which black people will not have to live every single day of their lives being forced to unfavorably compare themselves to whites and Asians.
Honestly, I don't think I've ever been particularly hostile to you. Obviously I disagree with your ideology, but I don't recall ever being uncivil to you.
I accept that you are sincere in wanting a peaceful separation where we all just get along on our respective sides of the fence.
I just don't believe most white nationalists are so benevolent. Sure, they might not all want a race war if there is a less violent alternative, but they don't actually care about the well-being of black people; they just hate and resent black people because they perceive blacks to be making their own lives worse.
Let's say that's true. I think even you must know that your project of the US setting aside a chunk of the country for African-America and subsidizing them for a few generations is about as likely as AIs turning into benevolent overlords who give us Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. So I don't see white nationalism leading to anything but a race war, whatever your personal intentions might be.
I really don’t. I’ve pointed numerous times to the waves of middle-class blacks who have moved to Atlanta and other largely-black cities in the South over the past decade, reversing the Great Migration which brought their ancestors to the North and the coasts four or five generations ago. Meanwhile, whites are voting with their feet, streaming out of California and the Northeast and fleeing to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and other implicitly-white enclaves. (I lament that at the moment these places are only implicitly white - certainly nobody can look at the demographics of Florida and Texas and conclude that these are Whitopias - but given the churning internal migrations this country is undergoing right now, who knows how things will shake out?)
People are translating their revealed preferences into concrete action and physically separating themselves. This is happening right now. Of course we’re talking about baby steps relative to what I’m ultimately aiming for, but I think it’s disingenuous to pretend like it’s not happening or that it couldn’t possibly lead to more bold steps in the future.
"White flight" has been a thing for generations, and general population migrations for much, much longer.
Creating Whitelandia and Blacklandia is more than just a bold step, it would be essentially a forcible deconstruction of the United States as it exists now, and the explicit acknowledgment of hard racial boundaries. This is the stuff of speculative SF novels (written by white nationalists), not of contemporary society. Could your project happen in, say, two hundred years? I wouldn't rule out anything happening in two hundred years, including Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. But as far as trying to move in that direction now, good luck, but yes, I am going to judge your project by the ideology of your fellows.
Self determination of black Americans as separate nation was Communist party project (in style of pre-Stalin Soviet national policy).
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/black-belt-republic-1928-1934/
It was not the most succesful plank in CPUSA platform, to put it mildly.
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Do you find the fact that the so-called “black national anthem” (“Lift Every Voice And Sing”) was sung at the Super Bowl - before “The Star-Spangled Banner” - to be a meaningful step? Like, that seems to me like a very bold and extremely public move toward acknowledging the next step in the formal ethno-national awakening of black Americans. Hundreds of millions of people watched a luxuriant celebration of blacks as a separate and distinct people with their own “national anthem”, and I think this is a profoundly meaningful portent. If you don’t - or, if you don’t want it to be - that’s fine, but I think you should give a bit of credit to people like me who see it as a fulfillment of our predictions for how things will develop.
A black/white ethnic split is on the same level of plausibility as a red/blue national divorce (which gets a lot of play in centrish-right circles, e.g. michael anton* wrote an awful 50 pages on in an explicitly dissident right magazine). It's at least a little more plausible, in that kicking out the blacks wouldn't shear every institution, business, or organization in half - but that's pretty faint praise.
Most black people have white friends, and hold no strong animosity against white people. They work at their jobs with white colleagues, have white friends, use products produced by whites, watch TV shows written by whites with white stars, hire white plumbers when their pipes leak, etc. They're also attached to their cities, communities, their physical homes ... all of which physical relocation would tear up. What could possibly interest them in blexit?
And 'racism' continues to decline. Even in 1990, interracial marriage still polled at <50%. Now it's 95%. A "black national anthem", played for the sole purpose of whites accepting blacks more, isn't a portent of anything. Black separation didn't happen after slavery, it didn't happen during segregation, though there were attempts - and racial tensions are now .5% of that. It's not happening.
You can find a few things that, if you squint at the words, support any trend. But for every indicator trending towards black/white separation, a hundred things point the other way. Even (although, realistically, this data is meaningless) measures of geographical racial segregation find integration has increased recently.
* I mean, probably michael anton? Maybe it's a joke I'm not in on? It's really bad. It's just Tom (the republican)'s paragraphs upon paragraphs rebutting Malcolm (the democrat)'s individual sentences of imagined 'libtard whining'.
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I think it's on a continuum of racial disharmony that has been increasing over the past decade. In itself, it's not necessarily a bad thing (celebrating black anthems and MLK has been part of the national religion for decades now); you map it to something more sinister because you see everything through that lens. We've had more ridiculous posts here on the Motte essentially arguing that any movie with a black protagonist who could have been white is anti-white racism.
I don't disagree that there is A Problem. I would prefer a return to the 90s ideal of striving towards a colorblind society and peaceful coexistence. Of course you are going to say that's implausible and unrealistic. Let's say both our aspirations are unrealistic; I lean towards the one that doesn't lead inevitably to a civil war and doesn't require me to regard all the black people I know as future racial enemies. (Yes, I know, that's not what you think you're doing, you think you can someday persuade them to move to Blacklandia.)
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Again, I don't think this is the message. There are plenty of things that can be done about lower intellect to give people better lives - just as many as can be done to effectively improve people's lives by countering historical discrimination or institutional racism, by my lights - and plenty of people specifically push for policies designed to do just that. I do think the message gets negativity attached to them because of the lionization of "intelligence" as the indicator of worth or value in a person, but then the solution is clearly to get rid of that lionization. I'm pretty sure concepts like physical strength or martial prowess used to be a far greater indicator of someone's worth as a human being (at least among males) in the past, but that association is mostly gone now in modern society. I think we can do the same for intelligence. And, frankly, I think we must if we are to create at all a functional society going forward.
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IQ gap is a very abstract concept. I doubt regular people are going around correlating how they interact with people, with what that person's race's average IQ is compared to theirs.
What isn't abstract is how often you are harrassed, abused, or otherwise victimized, and what tribe that person comes from. When you are openly discriminated against during job interviews, and what the open racial preferences of the company were. When you are in groups, and which people are openly racially hostile towards you.
Never, have I ever, had a naturalized Asian-American do any of those things to me, or anyone I know. To whatever degree there are abstract, market dominant minority effects at play between European-Americans and Asian-Americans, they have manifested zero immediate negative consequences in my life. Only the most terminally online person would resort to nonchalantly claiming that some IQ different between whites and asians doesn't bother them. Whatever the differences between whites and asians, asian people have likely never bothered him. And not in the "Ugh, that bothers me" sense but the "I think that might be a felony, or at least a misdemeanor" sense.
The same cannot be said about how many equity policies have forced me into contact with groups that hate me and seem eager to victimize my family. Or worse, have the state do it for them.
Never, have I ever, had a naturalized Asian-American do any of those things to me, or anyone I know. To whatever degree there are abstract, market dominant minority effects at play between European-Americans and Asian-Americans, they have manifested zero immediate negative consequences in my life.
It's not commonly noted, but these things do happen in small ways. The self-segregation of asian students from white ones does happen in some schools - particularly at ones with large asian populations like Cal. Also, I've seen cases of anti-white discrimination crop up in professional contexts; cases of Indian caste-bias, or of the marginalization of whites in some east-asian companies operating branches in CA.
People keeping to themselves doesn't bother me. But RE: Indians hiring discriminately, I really wasn't talking about Indians. I know they are technically Asian, but the Indian Subcontinent is it's own thing for a reason. My wife was actually told point blank during an interview she wasn't going to get the job because she wasn't Indian once. She has an ethnic sounding last name (nobody knows why), so maybe they didn't realize she was white when they offered to interview her.
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Okay. But you're grinding an entirely different axe. We're talking (based on my original response) about whether it's reasonable to expect that blacks (and Latinos) should just accept that white people are smarter and be happy.
Well, Jews and some Asian ethnicities are smarter on average than white people. I, a white person, hold no ill will towards them.
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Why shouldn’t they? You have to accept that on an individual level which is the level that really matters. I care if Terence Tao beats me on the job application, but I have to accept that just the same
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I donno man. I just don't know.
I mean, going back to my previously mentioned, white suburban, not a minority in sight, upbringing, dumb white kids were just dumb. And they often grumbled that life wasn't fair. The speeding tickets they got for going 100 in a 45 weren't fair. The F's they got on tests weren't fair. Getting fired from the jobs they struggled to show up for wasn't fair. And no amount of pointing out them that these things were the consequences of their actions made a dent in their conviction. Even that they were the easily foreseeable consequence! Well, maybe for normal people. Not for them.
I'm not sure how many of them ever articulated that they even perceived it to be an IQ problem. I mean, naturally everyone around them knew they were dumb as a box of rocks. But they always thought they were as smart as everyone else, and that life wasn't fair.
Luckily nobody gave a fuck, because they were all white. There was no "Dumb ass white person" political action group. There was no equity program for those utterly incapable of not making a bad decision.
If IQ test data between Blacks and Whites is accurate, you've got a truly staggering proportion of the African American population that are just dumb. And if they are like the dumb white people I've known, they don't think they are. They will never believe they are. And, like the dumb white people around me growing up, society serves itself best when it doesn't take their complaints about "fairness" seriously.
As for how they cope with it, ideally, that would be on them. Alas...
Agreed - dumb people are dumb, and one characteristic of dumb people is an inability to accept cause and effect, that actions have consequences, to take responsibility, etc. As well as suffering from Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. (I've known a few dumb people who knew they were less than bright and more or less accepted it, but most... don't.) Obviously this is equally true of dumb white people and dumb black people.
Yeah, that is the crux of it. My argument is not that IQ tests imply unfortunate things so we should not believe them, or that we should pretend things that aren't true because it makes dumb people feel bad. My argument is a purely practical one: given that dumb people demonstrably can't accept this, then if it's true that blacks and Latinos are dumb at much higher rates, why would you think they should just "cope" and be happy? That's not a reasonable expectation of human behavior.
What is the solution? I don't know.
Some things don't need to be solved, the solution, if we must have one, is what the French did. Stop. Pointing. It. Out. Do not collect racial data. Do not write opinion pieces about racial differences. Attempt as much as possible to pretend that race is like hair color. We did this for a while and things were getting better. I believe, perhaps in futility, that we can return to that place. But can we at least acknowledge that it was a clear miss step? That the racial grievance departments have done real and incredible damage to society?
Well, I agree. I don't think we're going back to "color-blindness", though. Even if we all collectively agreed to stop collecting data and pretend we live in a colorblind meritocracy, it will be impossible not to notice persistent disparities, and the real and lasting damage has been done - a disparity is prima facie evidence of racism.
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These are two separate issues. Obviously, they should accept it because accepting reality leads to better outcomes for the entire nation – and I posit that even dumb people are able to understand patriotism; and if they aren't willing to put the nation above their race, then @Hoffmeister25's plan for separation promises higher odds of success than the status quo.
It is also generally personally adaptive. You can extract concessions via unfair complaints, but can you use them well if you don't even realize the unfairness? This doesn't seem to work for blacks. Meanwhile a low-IQ black person who acts in full knowledge of what his IQ implies will (if properly educated) abstain from hare-brained get-rich-quick schemes and crime, work honestly in sustainable ways, and not support destructive (first of all to the black community itself) movements. In short, behave like a member of a lower-IQ Asian minority such as the Hmong, who are not thriving economically, but also are not nearly as troubled as the black community – my earlier argument about self-esteem aside, and speaking only of objective outcomes like credit scores, family structure, crime&incarceration, disease; misfortunes which are, in the case of blacks, attributed by various tribes to «systemic racism», black culture, or HBD.
As for whether they would – well, obviously they haven't yet, and they never will if everybody of consequence only affirms their suspicion that whitey has tricked them and appropriated what's theirs by right.
But it is not clear to me that dumb people cannot comprehend meritocracy.
Or is there some lower bound for this idea? Everyone here seems on board with the theory that more intelligent people naturally tend to become more competent, thus contribute more and are entitled to earn more benefits. It's not because everyone here is sure of being near-maximally intelligent or feels entitled. It's because we believe merit-based economy is better than spoils system, for the whole society. I realize this would be harder to accept if most users here were dirt poor, but probably not very much harder. The principle holds.
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