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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
Let us assume HBD is correct.
That does not make it acceptable to enslave, discriminate, oppress, or demean a race of people - all people deserve a baseline of dignity and respect.
I'd also question the implicit assumption which seems to be built in that IQ is what makes someone superior/inferior. Is the 120 IQ person superior to the 119 IQ person? 110 IQ? 100 IQ?
Yes, I am aware on a population level, IQ is correlated with better outcomes, etc. but it is shocking to me that you have not come across lower IQ people who are wonderful, pro-social, and valuable members to society; or higher IQ people who are monsters. This is why judging people as individuals is incredibly important on the individual level. On the policy level where you do need to be concerned about population level issues, there would be better ways to account for HBD than using race as a proxy for something you could target more directly.
How do you measure oppression? On the face of it in terms of basic rights, this situation is solved. Universal suffrage and all that, the baseline of dignity achieved. Right? Except there is always more to that baseline and in that case the only measure of discrimination, oppression and the rest of it is outcomes. If outcomes are unequal, then oppression had to take place. For some times classical liberals talked about "equality of opportunity". Which is again an interesting concept - but how do you measure if access to opportunity is truly equal except of outcomes?
HBD means nuking tabula rasa, which is the basic dogma of most version of various humanist movements. Be happy with basic constitutional rights, everything else is free for all and there will be various casts, classes and groups, some of them in hereditary worse situation when it comes to outcomes. This is a very, very hard pill to swallow in current equality/equity obsessed society. Hence the vehement resistance to the whole concept of HBD.
Yes, I agree with everything you said (as an aside this is why I try and use the term "baseline of opportunity" to short circuit the equity / equality of opportunity debate). I agree this is a hard pill to swallow for society which desperately wants to believe in tabula rasa, but that doesn't mean it becomes acceptable to treat individuals as their racial averages is their destiny.
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