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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
This conspiracy theory about an "edifice of anti-blackness" is where you went wrong, IMO.
It never existed. There are always racist people, and there is always an ethnic angle to political conflict. Mostly this doesn't matter too much, because people are not and have never been any bigger on ethnic identity than any other. Racism is not an explanation, but a symptom.
The edifice of modern society based on international capitalism, division of labor and technological advancement is not and has never been anti-black. Black people who ran into it had a variety of outcomes, from slavery to slave trading empires. Every other group on earth did too. The native Americans died mostly of unknown and uncured diseases. The Mughals got overthrown by a beverage company. The Aztecs got overthrown by a local rebellion against their tyrannical rule spearheaded by a few Spaniards. The Aborigines were just....ignored mostly, so dysfunctional they were never an organized threat to anything.
Not every group of people was well selected for this new world. The long-civilized and long broken to the yoke of empire parts of the world tended to do better than more primitive cultures. This isn't a moral reflection on those people, but a recognition of their lesser ability to navigate the sort of complex systems and institutions necessary for a modern society. Civilization is partially genetic, as each society selects over time for those who can follow and prosper under its rules.
Take one aspect as an example. Literacy is one of those things that is not necessary or common in lower civilizations but becomes absolutely essential the more advanced a society is. People from largely illiterate societies by definition have not been genetically selected for whatever genes contribute to literacy. Over hundreds or thousands of years, once they develop a culture of literacy, they will become genetically better at it.
The reason Japan could resist colonization, and China could recover so quickly once they resolved the power struggle is civilizational, by which I mean a mental suitedness to complex society that has become partially genetic. Culture becomes genetic over time. This is why Ashkenazis have high average IQ, but Mizrahi don't.
We see that some cultures developed genetic templates that are superior under the current dispensation. These are not centrally "white" genetically, but tend to come from the heavily selected upper classes of several major genetic groups, all of which have a millennium or three of cultural literacy. Europe, China, Japan, India, the Semitic peoples, etc.
Some cultures developed genetic templates that are not well suited to the current dispensation. These are not centrally "black" although many (all?) black cultures are included. Tribal societies everywhere have struggled, from native Americans to Hmong immigrants post-Vietnam war. The Mongolians are not exactly tearing it up in international finance.
Much of the inequality everyone decries is just the mismatch of genetic templates from more primitive societies being exposed to the modern world. This has changed over time and will continue to change. HBD is a moving target. The future will be written by those cultural institutions that determine our current genetic selection.
They haven't been genetically selected for whatever genes contributed to literacy based on the results of that contribution to literacy, but if the beneficial alleles weren't heavily pleiotropic and selected for based on other effects then none of the rest of us would have them either. You can get something like "hang on to lactose digestion longer" from a single mutation, but "easily figure out how to turn abstract squiggles into concepts and vice versa" has got to be a side-effect of genes with other effects on the brain. It doesn't surprise us too much that an illiterate descended from ancestors with spotty "ideograms on birch bark" at best could eventually encounter "talking leaves" in other languages, then invent a syllabary for his own language, then spread literacy to half his contemporaries within a few years afterward.
It's possible that those genes then underwent greater selection later in societies with writing systems, but a priori it could be that they instead underwent less selection later. The worry that reading acts as a crutch and weakens our reliance on and our practice of memory and true understanding dates back as far as Plato, and its modern version is as near as that "students using AI do better on homework and worse on tests" study The Economist reported a few days ago.
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