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Most people believe this for legal minority/guardianship required. Most mentally disabled people have guardians, and I'm pretty sure legal minority for children is justified based on childrens' lower intelligence. The question is, is/was the black IQ low enough to meet this standard? Nowadays not at the median, but more generally in the past, less intelligent people received less rights because rights had to be won more and life was harder. For example, serfdom. Also non-genetic effects would have caused Africans to have really low apparent intelligences since they had no education or training available in Africa.
Black people are definitely a race and it follows that in the historical US South skin color was in fact a perfect indicator of race. Now on a global scale it is not (someone with black skin might be Polynesian, Indian, or black African for example) but it was a perfect criterion in 1860 North Carolina.
It probably was otherwise it wouldn't have been demanded throughout history. Surely slaves are cheaper than W2 workers. For example slaves don't have to benefit from the Baumol effect. Nowadays the alternative is automation but I doubt we had that automation around in 1800 AD.
Guardianship exists, in theory, in the interest of the child/disabled person. Enslavement definitionally exists to benefit the slaveholder. This isn't to say that some system of slavery can't be worked out that also gives guardianship-like benefits to the slave - or that guardians don't often take advantage of their charges in some way - but let's just say that as much as guadianship isn't perfect, the historical record viz. slaveholders prioritizing their slaves' welfare and flourishing over their profit margins really isn't great.
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Guardianship is different from enslaving, though. It's perhaps adjacent, but for mentally disabled people, it's based on the individual actually being mentally disabled rather than group-based identity (though obviously the subset of mentally disabled people do end up forming an identity group). For children, there's more than just lower intelligence, including relative inexperience, weakness, smaller size, and maturity (associated with intelligence, but arguably different), as well as the fact that it's definitionally a stage of life that literally everyone has to have passed through to become not-children (or baby or infant or etc.), so it's got a set per-individual expiration date.
If, by some miracle, the current state of scientific literature on IQ and intelligence and correlations between races and other genetic groups became common knowledge tomorrow, I'm skeptical that a movement to bring US race relations back to pre-Civil War times would be successful. We've gone several generations now since not just the Civil War, but also the Civil Rights movement. "Equality" as a virtue has become so engrained in this society that the most effective anti-equality forces right now are succeeding because they're pushing it under the spoken justification of equalizing old inequality. In that setting, this becoming common knowledge isn't going to somehow be the tipping point to a neo-Confederate takeover. In a way, it's cosmic justice for slavery that fear of bringing it back has so mind-killed so many people at so many places of power that it has gone to cause real harm in our ability to understand the world, which in turn has caused real harm to lots and lots of undeserving individuals.
Given the prevailing desire for equality (with a rather unhealthy dose of desire for equity) in America, I'd be more concerned about some mandatory reparations program justified not based on history but rather based on group IQ, where I, as an immigrant, no longer have an excuse to disqualify myself. And I'm pretty sure if we do go full Harrison Bergeron, whatever comes out in reality is guaranteed to be a thousand times stupider than what was in fiction. What would be interesting is if it compels some serious investment into genetic engineering and gene therapy research especially in relation to intelligence and race, in order to equalize the averages over generations, Bene Gesserit-style.
If AGI/ASI really does arrive and make our own human intelligence obsolete anyway, this would also complicate things somewhat, as financial status could become decoupled from intelligence. Or if not, everyone belonging to certain races could be given earrings with a free Claude subscription for life, in an effort to achieve equity between races which, depending on how things go, could be counterproductive or work too well or both.
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