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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   30593 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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That’s the issue though. American schools shouldn’t be worse than Nigeria or Jamaica etc. We spend a ton of money on them.

It isn't the schools - in the first world the problem is always the students. There is one very obvious explanation for why non-ADOS blacks do better in America, which is that they (or their parents) were pre-selected as desirable immigrants. But this doesn't seem like the whole story - Caribbean blacks in the UK seem better off than ADOS blacks in the US despite their ancestors moving here to take on low-skill jobs at a time when migration within the British Empire was unrestricted.

There are two obvious HBD just-so stories:

  1. Slave ships reached the Caribbean first, so the American cotton planters got the crappy slaves the Caribbean sugar planters didn't want.
  2. The process of maintaining a self-sustaining slave population in America between the ban on the slave trade in 1808 and emancipation in 1865 was highly dysgenic because masters preferred dumber slaves who were easier to control.

There is also the obvious cultural theory.

Or that voluntary migration is in itself a filter.

This isn’t hbd but I think there’s a cultural angle in the sense that African American culture doesn’t push education or high achievement. They’re not really a work culture in the same way that other cultures are. When the culture around you favors gangsters honor culture, sports, and music over reading, math and working, it’s not going to go well for you unless you specifically reject that culture.

This isn’t hbd but I think there’s a cultural angle in the sense that African American culture doesn’t push education or high achievement.

Shamus Khan's Privilege touches on differences even in an affluent high school school that lets in minorities and poorer people to get its diversity bona fides.

The issue in that school is not so much that black students that get there aren't studious (they have to be, to be selected at all). It's that, in his view, they always stand outside the system in a way because race stops them from seeing it as legitimate in the way that white people or even some other minorities (people like Vivek who are more unabashed about believing in the American Dream than a lot of progressive well-off white people - look at his tense debate with Don Lemon and the interview on the Breakfast Club for when these mindsets collide).

The system recognizes this and it hurts them.

As stories like George’s piled up, I began to see the difference with Carla as a racial one. Carla questions the general legitimacy of a St. Paul’s education. St. Paul’s is a bullshit system you need to learn, not a legitimate understanding of how the world works. Or put less harshly, it’s one among many legitimate ways of understanding things. What’s “bullshit” about St. Paul’s is not that the school’s vision is invalid but that implicit to this vision is the belief that its particular way of understanding the world is the way. This is what frustrates Carla: that her way is not recognized.

Though Carla is recognized as an excellent student and is quite popular at the school, this approach to the school does make life difficult for her. Faculty feel something different in her work. They often told me they wished she were “warmer”; both her work and her personality were often “cold.” She did good work, but it was “formal” and “distant.” And students similarly told me that they felt a kind of “distance” from her. One of Carla’s closest friends confided in me: “Sometimes I feel like we’re just going through the motions here . . . I don’t know, with her it’s sometimes different. Like we’re not really connecting, almost like we are, but I remember it like something I saw in a movie, not us. Like it happened to someone else. Like our connection is someone else’s, or something I saw. Not all the time. But it’s weird. I don’t get that from everyone. Or really anyone else.”

Rather than learning to truly embody the school in a way that is natural, Carla learns, in her translation, to “act it.” Her refusal to think of St. Paul’s as the natural order and instead as one potential order among many results in a distance from the school and others within it. We might think of this distance in negative ways, or as a kind of oppositional consciousness, where Carla claims her “previously subordinate identity as a positive identification.”5

Of course, you could argue that this is just a just-so story from Khan to deal with both him and black people noticing the things HBD predicts they'll notice but they can't otherwise explain:

Carla was one of the few students who talked to me about all the students who could be at St. Paul’s—who perhaps deserved to be—but were not. While the school and its students talk relentlessly of hard work, merit, and excellence, almost no one talked about what this emphasis meant for those who weren’t at the school. In other words, if St. Paul’s was a meritocratic place—if you got there because of your hard work and your own personal excellence—then why was the school made up of mostly very wealthy students? Why were there comparatively few black or Latino students? Why did blacks and Latinos not do as well as the white and Asian students? Why, though girls consistently did better than the boys, was the student body still half boys and half girls? Why did students tend to come from cities or areas just outside of cities? Why were they mostly from the East Coast? Why were many students the children of parents who went to boarding school, particularly St. Paul’s? Most of these questions are rather easy to answer. In fact, the answers seem so obvious that we tend to dismiss questions like these. But if we really believe that the school is a place for those who are excellent, who work hard, and who deserve their place—and that nothing else should limit who applies, or gets in, or goes to the school—then these questions become very hard. Carla asked these questions. And her answer was that these privileged groups had a way of “knowing” the world that was their own. Not hers. As it turns out, her answer is quite a good one.

Honestly, it may be due a re-read to see if he really makes his case, it's a short book.

Pre-selected filter doesn’t make sense to me. We have 50 million here with a significant portion being partial white. And all of them have educational opportunities. Even the worse Baltimore school I would think has more opportune than a non-elite school in Jamaica or Nigeria I would think. Maybe that’s wrong. So even though on net there are way more in Africa I have my doubts that many have the schools necessary to climb out. Maybe I’m wrong there but I don’t think we are filtering out a billion people for their best versus 50 million here.

Plus Hannania has shown stats that children of African immigrants with degrees still do poorly on IQ test.

Or the best just don’t want to be politicians and end up in a comfy seat at GS making a million a year with DEI job security.

Something is going on and I don’t have a theory I trust for that.

They're not worse than Nigeria. They're worse than the elite of Nigeria.

In a lot of these places people don't go to public school because "public" is for people with no choice. Private schools on the other hand don't have to try to educate everyone.

One of my classmates went to Yale. She was very smart and studious but I have to wonder what would have happened had she been stuck in some stereotypically hellish inner city school with the worst performing students.

But, honestly, a lot of it is just pre-school social family resources. People from her class come in with an expectation of studiousness (which parents reinforce with private tutoring and other means). Hard to hold it against American schools that in a universal system many people...don't.

(That said, it is insane to me that teachers have to expect violence. You'd think that would be a bare minimum thing).

Nigeria only has a population 4.3X our black community. Maybe throw in the Caribbean and some other countries and you get to 10x. That just doesn’t seem big enough to filter at the rate we are seeing especially when a large pop of that population probably doesn’t have parental wealth to even enter the filter (for schooling/travel expenses).

That just doesn’t seem big enough to filter at the rate we are seeing

It isn't?

I'm honestly asking here: there's very few Ivy League spots. Even if every person in Harvard's 2026 class counted as "black" it hardly seems a huge rate.

Especially if Murray in Facing Reality is right: Harvard can skim off the top of the most academically inclined blacks. Everyone else then does their best with what they have. Even if that means "talented locals" rather than "peak of Nigerian elite".

Versus ADOS for taking a disproportionate share of the spots. Not for overall numbers.

I don't mean to be thick. I'm just not grasping the argument.

Jews, for example, can be disproportionately represented despite making up a small segment of the racial superclass (which is not as poor or badly off). Why doesn't the same logic apply?

I’m sort of going on gut instinct. But I guess I’m assuming.

  1. American blacks on net have higher hbd than African Blacks since we go with the 1 drop makes you black rule here.
  2. Approximately 50 million American blacks. All with access to our education system, public libraries, internet connectivity, etc.
  3. 40 million or so West Indian blacks and 1 billion or so in African (though different age pyramids). A significant portion of which may have ability but no access to libraries or education etc to even enter the American filter.
  4. My instincts tell me atleast around half but maybe more of African elites in the Ivy League or in politics are from category (3) versus category (2).

Obama/Kamela not being American ADOS but Scott, Brown, Thomas are. It just seems those outside of the American environment are more prevalent that I would expect.

Huh. I actually share most of those assumptions (my full opinion on HBD is...up in the air). It's more that I just don't share the sense of statistical implausibility. I was just wondering if I just wasn't getting the math.

I guess, ironically, HBDers who gleefully cite things about how overrepresented Jews or whoever are in this or that place has simply deadened my reaction to the idea that some segments of the populace will just do way too well (based on what a layman thinks is "fair"). If you tell me a highly restricted group of the best off people from a billion-strong pool do well enough to seize a couple of thousand spots a year from one of the worst performing ethnic groups in the US...it's hardly the biggest overepresentation they've claimed.

To me, when you combine the intuitions that:

  1. Black migrants probably have a lower crime rate
  2. Black migrants probably from better educated families.
  3. Black migrants are probably likely to be in two parent families.
  4. If HBDers like Charles Murray are right then there should be a huge shortage of the top-top ADOS students. Of course supplementation would be necessary if you didn't want to drop standards (more).

I find it harder to be shocked.

I would find it more unintuitive if it was across the entire college system.

Money is not freely convertible into the things that make schools conducive to learning, nor is there one set of things that works for educating all types of people. Some people will learn if you just let them loose in a room full of books and things to tinker with. Others need to be proverbially chained to the desk and smacked with rulers, Prussian/Irish Nun style.

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