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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.
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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