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When people both here and elsewhere say that HBD is true but that society should still treat people as individuals or practice colorblindness, I get really mad. I don't disagree with them, but I still get mad
Because what I want to say in response is that that isn't good enough because your premise was supposed to wrong! The edifice that was used to justify anti-blackness for centuries was supposed to be completely discredited, put into the dustbin of history. You can’t enslave, discriminate, oppress, and demean a people based on the assumption that they’re inferior and then…turn out to be right. That’s not fair!
But I can't express that belief because of how obviously irrational it is. It's a demand for cosmic justice, not a real intellectual rebuttal. Yet I can't help it
Please try harder to step out of your point of view. If you truly believe that Black people are inferior, which you just said, this is because you have accepted a certain set of rules that means the qualities of Black people are inferior to the qualities of other groups of people.
A long time ago I had a boyfriend who was Black. He could barely count when he went to pay for things (this is not an exaggeration) and I'm not sure he could even type to text or if he used speech to text for everything he wrote. Yet still there were qualities he had that impressed me. He was so kind, had a great memory, so musically talented, so friendly, even when we were doing something so casually like going to a movie or dinner he made it feel like a special occasion. He passed away a few years ago but I still remember him fondly and think I became a better person and my world was improved by being with him even though it was for such a short time. He had various health issues he was saddled with from his birth he had no control over that eventually ended his life far too early. But despite all this I do not today or ever in the past see him as inferior to me in any way. I am not religious but I believe every person is equal and that we must treat each other as such. It offends me that people might have seen him as an inferior person to me. And I feel the same way about other boyfriends I've had in the past, regardless of their race, people in my family, who are all the same race as me, and every other person living or dead.
The broader point I want to make is that there is more than one measure of a man. If you belong to mainstream bourgeois western society today, there are certain skills and traits that are predominant and revered. I have Noticed that most of these traits align with the traits of White people especially and to a lesser extent East Asian people. These traits are portrayed as intelligence, time efficiency, cleverness, and so on. But intelligence brings with it an arrogance, time efficiency the specter of impatience, and cleverness a tendency to manipulate. These are not inherently superior traits, and often are perceived badly by people outside of the modern West.
In other words, if you buy into a worldview that places Black people as inferior to any other race, perhaps your worldview is wrong.
It's not so much that wealthy Western countries decided to lionize intelligence, time management, and cleverness, despite the possible vices at the extremes of the golden mean. Rather, being clever, intelligent, and punctual is conducive to creating a wealthy society. Because of these Western traits, a great many people have been pulled out of poverty. Being simply kind didn't do much to help feed everyone as much as developing the systems needed to produce 10x the food people could ever need, making food so cheap it is often given away without pain or sacrifice.
It's not fair, necessarily, and I have a lot of sympathy for people who are not the best at everything. But if we fail to acknowledge the outcomes of each society are downstream of the people and culture who produced them, we risk cutting off the legs on which we stand.
I don't disagree and I understand your point of view, but as someone who travels a ton, and who can see the good in the Mexicans and Thais and Jamaicans of the world as much as in the Swiss and the Japanese and the WASPs, I don't accept the given superiority of the latter group over the former in a cosmic sense, while at the same time, hoping that the latter people can have the conscientiousness to assert their values over more dysfunctional ones. HBD is actually the most effective and kind tools we have to do this. I don't believe in lying to anyone, I believe that even Black American people can accept HBD statistics if they are spoken to like mature and intelligent people. A huge percentage of them don't like a ridiculous dysfunctional leadership any more than the rest of us.
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Are you sure that this is due to low intelligence rather than being simply undereducated? Inner city schools can be appallingly bad.
Now I don’t claim that they would be producing Nobel laureates very often with better instruction. But one of my uncle’s stepfather worked as a math teacher in juvie when he was younger and claims to have successfully taught math(I think pre-Algebra) to, by definition, some of the dumbest teen boys in west Texas. Mississippi with its population of poor black kids manages to teach fairly decently- actually better than all-white midwestern states with very high adult IQ scores.
No no no he was simply very low intelligence in terms of math and verbal intelligence and so on. A huge chunk of my family on one side are teachers or work in education and I don't buy the "blame the schools not the students" line at all. I grew up in a relatively affluent suburban school next to a northern migration city with a huge Black population, and the Black kids in my very same school were all in remedial education programs while all the Asians were in advanced programs. I don't know how everyone didn't notice this in first grade and then assume HBD was right from the start, it boggles my mind.
From what I understand teaching methods in Mississippi are closer to traditional education methods rather than the liberal "phonics isn't real" thing so I'm imagining that explains that
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Humanism is functionally a religion, and this is functionally a religious belief. That does not invalidate it; far from it. But I think it's better to recognize what are statements of faith as such.
People have a hard time separating "moral worth" from... not exactly "economic worth," but something like that, that complicates their analysis of "equal in humanity" and "equal in literally everything that has value in modern society." I think liberal-progressives are especially bad at separating those and that's why they overcompensate so hard.
Your boyfriend, RIP, sounds like a lovely person, and as a carrier of the spark of humanity, the Imago Dei if you don't mind the religious terminology, has the same moral worth as anyone else. Trying to make him, say, a Cambridge professor or an astrophysicist would not have served anyone well.
But what does one do with that, at the population level? How does a multiethnic, multicultural society wrestle with "some groups are going to be overrepresented in some things, and underrepresented in others," and the downstream effects thereof? I don't know. I don't know of a good answer there, I just know the "hundreds of bonus points for college admissions and hiring decisions" answer is a bad one.
I would disagree with this last one, that cleverness meaning a tendency to manipulate is at its lowest in the modern West. Or was in the Golden Age/Cold War period, and ticked up substantially post-2000ish. Corruption and fraud are much higher basically everywhere else.
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This isn't a hostile comment; I'm just curious. Your capitalization of "Black" suggests that you're in favour of leftist racial politics. But are you aware that they don't capitalize "White" the same way? Neither makes linguistic sense, since they're adjectives not based on a proper noun.
From what I can tell, modern journos decided to start capitalizing "Black" specifically because it's silly and wrong, as a way to signal tribal affiliation (like putting obvious pronouns in one's bio). So capitalizing "Black" will annoy people on the right, but capitalizing "White" will annoy people on the left. Is it your intention to do both?
No, I don't think this is a charitable interpretation. I think modern journalists started doing it to be respectful. I capitalize Black because I think it is silly and wrong and points to the hypocrisy of the left and the surrealism of our society as a whole. I do it because it is the "correct" way in the style guide newspeak of today. It is similar to how some American Indians prefer to be called Indians as it points to the idiocy of the explorers who believed they were in Asia and so on.
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I think in the context of American race politics, both "Black" and "White" are normally used to refer to specific ethnic groups, and are therefore correctly capitalised. American Blacks are definitely an ethnic group - they have a distinct identity and their ancestors have been in America and mostly endogamous since 1808. American Whites' status as an ethnic group is less clear - their distinct identity (as White, rather than the various European nationalities their ancestors came from) comes from an artificial project designed to hold the Democrat's corrupt bargain between northern "white ethnics" and southern racists together, and they weren't meaningfully endogamous until the taboo on Catholic-Protestant intermarriage weakened after WW2. But the Democrats' racist project was successful, and in the current year "White American" is an ethnic group and American White nationalists (and Black nationalists) are bad people, but intellectually coherent.
Applying the American ideas of Black and White to the rest of the world makes you stupid - outside American there are black people and white people (based on broad racial characteristics, and not capitalised because the words are purely descriptive like "short" and "big-nosed") but neither is an ethnic group. For a European to be a White nationalist is not even wrong - there is no White nation over here.
You are, if anything, understating thé taboo on Catholic-Protestant intermarriage; before WWII different kinds of ethnic Catholics wouldn’t marry other ethnicities of Catholic. But it’s also more or less true that red tribe whites are functionally an ethnicity these days, and this is what ‘white’ as an ethnic group normally refers to(because it is the majority, and often a large majority, of the white population outside of New England).
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HBD is not just about intelligence. And, no, I don't mean distance running or altitude breathing; I mean other mental traits.
Intelligence is easy mode, both because we have a test to measure it (IQ testing is the single most successful result in psychology) and because it is easy to say that someone should not be penalized just for being born dumb if they are morally praiseworthy in other areas; that the kind, hardworking janitor still deserves respect and a good life even if he still counts on his fingers. That is, indeed, a core socialist argument for why CEOs should not get paid much more than unskilled labor.
Bur, of course, HBD is also about conscientiousness (or executive function, or grit, or whatever the hell they are calling it now), and propensity to violence, and time preference, and so on. It's another thing entirely to say that a lazy, violent janitor deserves the same good life and social admiration as a CEO. But the shape of the argument is exactly the same. Therefore, proves too much.
The beliefs (all of those traits are genetic to a degree) and (we should punish [broadly defined] some of them but not others) aren't contradictory. It all comes down to what you hope to achieve when you punish (or fail to reward) something. You can't punish someone for having low innate intelligence and expect them to get smarter. You can, however, punish someone for being violent and actually expect them to be less likely to choose violence.
Of course, the effect of high iq can be duplicated through other means, to a degree: A person who is dumber can often achieve the same things as someone who is smarter, but with more effort, so by paying some highly skilled profession X and paying some less skilled profession X-Y, you're increasing the likelihood that someone will either go into the skilled profession by using relatively much smarts and relatively less grit, or by using relatively much grit and relatively less smarts.
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The moral worth of an individual doesn't dissolve the practical problem @Chi_Wara is lamenting over.
Even if every person has equal moral worth, human psychology will pattern-match group averages when those averages are large, persistent, and predictive. Crime rates, IQ, and other measurable outcomes are not evenly distributed across populations. When those patterns are visible to everyday joe's, even accomplished individuals will be judged according to their group's profile. And if these patterns are real and not simply explainable by environmental factors, then the social and status costs of sharing physiognomy with the lower performing groups become "justified" in some sense. Anti-racist HR policing can suppress HBD discussions, but it cannot rewrite human psychology and subconscious behaviours.
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I do think there is a weirdly totalizing way that some people think about intelligence and moral worth in humans.
Like, come on, do people who fall prey to this kind of thinking really not have any dumb people who they respect for the virtues they do have?
Even in history, I look back and find less intelligent people I admire. One of my favorite Stoics is Cleanthes. He had a reputation for being a slow learner and a dullard, and he made his money fetching water, digging ditches and generally doing all the little odd jobs people would pay him for. And yet he was humble, loyal, hard-working, thick-skinned when insulted (by the Athenian public at large, or by his fellow Stoic pupils), and just seems to have been an all around good guy. I don't think it is an accident that he was made the second scholarch of the Stoics, even though Zeno had many worthy pupils who were much smarter than him. I also just admire a guy who managed to get into the history books by being virtuous and hard-working.
If you think about it, those are some of the few things that are completely within one's control. We cannot control our height, or our ability to grasp complex subjects instantly. We can control how hard we work and be good people.
A lot of people hate the so-called "Protestant work ethic", but at its core, there's something very egalitarian about it.
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