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But if HBD is true, the Igbo or Jews will disproportionately occupy higher positions, and you need to explain it.
Realistically, the alternative to "we deserve it because we're smarter" is "we don't actually deserve it, we're just oppressing you", which is clearly worse for racial relations.
HBD as a fact of nature is already leading to racial tensions via disparate outcomes. The Hausa or white supremacist are already angry because they don't have positions of power. Discussing that there's a good reason isn't the problem. Denying discussion of the good reason, leaving oppression on the table as the only potential explanation, makes it worse.
Sure, a politically color-blind world, where race is considered about as relevant as hair color and no one cares about racial distributions of anything, would be preferable in practical terms, but that's not the world we live in. And in such a world, HBD could simply be a nerdy niche topic that no one except a few scientists cares about. HBD isn't the problem here.
I've seen (some time ago, I don't remember where) two cases of people arguing exactly the opposite, one in the case of whites-vs-POC, the other in Jews-vs-gentiles (the latter, IIRC, was arguing, in part, against one of Scott's posts, and had a quote or two from Turkheimer). The argument is that someone in the "underrepresented" group who sees the "overrepresentation" of the other group as a problem, and believes it is because of some behavior the overrepresented group is choosing (that they are "cheating" in some fashion, whether via secret plots by the Elders of Zion, racist cops shooting unarmed black men, or whatever), then the initial goal will be to make them stop the behavior.
Sure, this is bad if the overrepresented group isn't actually cheating, because you can't stop doing something if you're not doing it in the first place. But suppose you persuade a person in the underrepresented group who cares about the overrepresentation that said issue isn't due to "cheating," but an inevitable inherent characteristics of overrepresented group, well, maybe he'll say "okay, if they're not cheating then it's not really a problem." But, both essays argued, this is relatively unlikely — most people who have a problem with the "overrepresentation" have a problem with the overrepresentation itself, not the "cheating" that purportedly causes it.
So instead of a guy who sees Jewish overrepresentation among "elites" as a problem to be solved and thinks said problem is due to Jewish bad behavior, you get a guy who sees Jewish overrepresentation among "elites" as a problem to be solved and thinks said problem is an inevitable product of the existence of the Jews. You see why that's worse, right? Same with the other case; instead of a black man who thinks he's being kept down by whitey's racist actions, you get a black man who thinks he's being kept down by the continued existence of white people (the view once expressed, on a now long-defunct blog, by one "Solomon Wong," that "anti-racism" is "white genocide"; that, since white people cause people of color to "underperform" simply by existing (and that it is this, not low pigmentation or European ancestry, that is the inherent, defining characteristic of the white race), the only way for people of color to defend themselves against this "vampiric" attack is to eliminate white people, and thus white genocide is Good, Actually).
Both works ended up arguing that, instead, the "proper" way to address this issue is to wage the Sailerian "War on Noticing" to keep people from becoming aware of the overrepresentation to begin with. In the Jewish-vs-gentile case, the advised strategy was simply to have anyone who points out Jewish overrepresentation "cancelled" as a "Nazi" until everyone stops Noticing. In the white-vs-black case, it was that we didn't do "colorblind liberal individualism" hard enough. That while we got (WEIRD individualist) white people to "not see race," and to care only about their own individual well-being and not the relative position of their broader ethnic group, we didn't do enough to bring a similar lack of 'racial awareness' among blacks, and that we need to try again, harder and more deliberately this time, to bring everyone around to Not Noticing.
The Holocaust happened both because people didn’t like the Jews and believed them to be inferior.
If you have strong racial animus it’s probably not the case that a proper understanding of genetics will help. But, historically, neither has the opposite.
You’re not going to get the “just stop noticing systemic racism” genie back in the bottle because we already blew past the compromise of colorblind liberal individualism, and now that’s racist.
Only way out is through because you have to get enough of the elites and activist class to be willing to go back to the compromise. You don’t get concessions by having a quietist tradition that concedes defeat in the cancel culture war.
Oh, I personally agree. But still, as you note, "it’s probably not the case that a proper understanding of genetics will help" either.
And I don't see that happening, either, because the elites and activist class won't be benefited — in terms of their relative power and status, at least — by going back, not compared to the current ideological progress.
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I don’t think Hanania is necessarily even disagreeing with you. After all, he clearly believes in HBD. But his point is that shouting it from the rooftops is bad for race relations. HBD publicity proponents say ‘no, actually if we just explain why these groups are over/underrepresented, people will accept reality and return to meritocracy’. Hanania says this is naive, and that it will only lead to more resentment.
More resentment than shouting from the rooftops that it's oppression? That seems unlikely to me.
Will it immediately fix race relations? Certainly not. But I don't think it will make things worse either.
You're missing the implicit point that it only matters if the currently favored groups "accept it". If race relations are bad because lower-class (or even middle-class) white people are upset at racial preferences for those groups, it's OK for them to be told to “Just suck it up, that’s life fam, sucks to be you I guess”. But if race relations are bad because currently favored groups notice they're underrepresented in good things, that's a problem that needs solving.
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