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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.
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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