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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
What exactly would cosmic justice look like to you? More assumptions/"edifices" went into all the enslavement, oppression, discrimination and demeaning than what you gloss as HBD. They must have believed
and many other things including ones that are completely beyond dispute nowadays. You seem to single out the first entry in that list as the only one that cosmic justice absolutely requires them to have been wrong about.
Before the Civil War, the American South was economically thriving; wouldn't it have been equally cosmically more just if the fourth assumption turned out to be wrong, and their economy had collapsed long before it came to that? The third assumption is being enthusiastically perpetuated by many people left and right of the political spectrum nowadays, including you yourself in this post. Why does that not fill you with rage? The worldview of slavers would have been equally falsified if the God of Categories descended from above and decreed that actually the criterion on which you should categorise humanity (to then take averages that determine their collective rights) is the ratio of girth to length of their left pinky, rounded to the nearest 0.2. Most of the "pro-HBD" people are happy to conclude that the second entry in the list is the wrong one, and that settles the question of "were slavers right?" in the negative.
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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