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Hey! First time poster here. Please be critical.
I saw this article last week and am not sure how to think about it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-increase-equity-school-districts-eliminate-honors-classes-d5985dee
The TL;DR is that honors classes in this subset of all honors classes had a clear bias in terms of racial makeup relative to baseline. So they stopped offering honors classes.
On the one hand this seems super effective— with a strategy like this maybe in a generation or so when they start offering honors classes again there might be less bias.
On the other hand my intuition says that in general it’s okay to allow students to self-select (or students and whoever is telling them what to do) and decide how much schoolwork they want to do.
It seems relevant to the school-flavor culture war stuff.
Any links to previous threads on similar topics would be appreciated.
Curious to know more.
Edit: not bait, genuine curiosity. Got some good criticism about low-effort top-level-posting, would appreciate suggestions/pointers to excellent top-level posts.
Continued edit: Also curious what about this post codes it as bait? A few people saw it that way.
There’s always going to be racial disparities because there are racial disparities in academic skill as evidenced by testing. Getting rid of honor’s classes because black and latino students do poorly is like getting rid of swimming competitions because short guys do poorly or getting rid of beauty models because fat women feel offended. It is the exact wrong way of looking at the world. The black and latino students, instead of narcissistically believing they are morally harmed, should feel gratitude that they live in a nation where smarter people live and should feel blessed that they have more capable competitors to inspire them. If there is any moral harm occurring, it is that smart students will grow up to have to subsidize the problems of dumb students. In no way do the dumb students possess moral victimhood status, IMHO.
I disagree with this view.
In my opinion, a great deal of harm was caused to Africans when the wheel was introduced to their continent then combustion engines, electricity and telecommunications.
Being forced to compete in an artificial capitalist economy is unfair when you are biologically less suited than others to that competition, but well-suited to your natural environment that is displaced by the capitalists.
There is a lot of talk about the harm caused to the enslaved people that were transported in state-of-the-art (at the time) boats across the seas and the centuries, and their descendants.
Clearly their suffering matters a lot more (in terms of how many people care about it) than the suffering of their cousins who were just as enslaved, murdered and brutalized but on their original continent.
The difference is that one side had a glimpse of 'what could be'.
Non-African capitalists have been dangling the carrot of civilization in front of Africans for centuries now, never to quite reach it.
Imagine if aliens came to Earth and showed everybody what fully automated luxury communism is but only slightly different people than you got to partake in it, everybody else only getting 30% of the utopia. Wouldn't that be a form of harm? Wouldn't you have been happier if you hadn't had a glimpse of paradise on Earth, without getting told that you specifically does not get to have it?
This is essentially the black experience in the West.
The movie Elysium touches on this, I believe, it is no surprise that the director is a white South-African.
Africans are biologically less suitable to capitalism than non-Africans? Unpack that one for me.
At least for the ones forcibly brought overseas.
We see them do a lot worse in metrics that are relevant to success in capitalism such as time preference, literacy, numeracy, civility or manners, almost any metric one can imagine relevant to commercial success, and these metrics have strong biological underpinnings.
Usually whatever gene variant is associated with the worse outcome in phenotype for a capitalist society (ie increased violence or reduced intellectual function) will be more prevalent in Subsaharian African in studies, but these are controversial and not that common.
Some studies related to that can be found here, mostly from the 2010s, I haven't really kept up to date with the most relevant science.
This article from 22 seems to claim that using geographical categorization makes for bad science and leads to violence, continuously referring to a single shooting that happened that year.
While I don't know whether or not it makes for bad science, I think using the fragments of science that are still being published using geographical denominations would probably decrease violence, if one were to believe the FBI crime statistics.
Indeed, they quote one of the scientists:
Regarding the issue with maladaptation to capitalist societies, which some people call 'structural racism':
The few that manage to attain success and status in our capitalist society happen almost by accident.
If there was no audience for their brawling, their singing and dancing or their running and throwing, most of them would not be successful, and these are people that are outliers of their group already.
While these top sportsmen and entertainers do command a certain amount of luxury and status, they are still employees, or even commodities, traded by powerful capitalist owners.
Who's to say what life they would have on the continent? Would they not make impressive warlords? Powerful tribes chiefs?
Out of the few African-American distinguished for some level of legitimate intellectual achievement, I can't help but notice that they usually show significant non-African admixture. Some people question if Obama is African at all, or Indonesian, MLK is another example.
NASA recently named a moon mountain for Melba Mouton. I'd be surprised if she were more than 50% African.
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