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As a black person...I really really really don't want HBD to be true
This doesn't mean I think it's wrong. It's just that I think that the conclusions you'd have to draw from it being correct are just so awful for me.
I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?
I'll probably have a longer more essay-type post for next week's thread but I just want to get my raw emotions about it out here before then.
It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't want it to be true...I don't want it to be true. It's so unfair
Serious question - does it actually matter to you, assuming that you yourself are intelligent?
What does the existence of an urban underclass mean to you if you yourself are intelligent, choose an intelligent wife, and have intelligent kids?
Why do other people who have nothing to do with you besides the color of their skin have to do with you, provided that the world is AT LEAST colorblind (and to be quite honest, the world is a lot more favorable than colorblind to talented black kids right now)?
Because he will be judged according to his tribe. If you’re a white foreigner in a distant land with only a few white people, and one of your fellow whites becomes embroiled in a huge scandal for committing horrific crimes, you will pay a price for that even if you did nothing. If HBD becomes widely accepted in the West, it will affect in perception all black people, even those who are very smart. If a woman crosses the street before you walk past because of her experience with the ‘urban underclass’, you can’t simply exempt yourself from this insult because you’re not part of it, you are being judged on the basis of race.
And I assume also some sense that these are his people, his tribe.
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But part of the truth of HBD is that there is variation within the races even as there are clear patterns of difference between them. It says that a highly intelligent person is much more likely to be jewish than black, not that there are zero intelligent black people. Convincing people of the truth of HBD means getting them to accept that a 99th percentile black person might only equal a 90th percentile jew means there will be way more jews than blacks at high achieving levels, but also that it means the 99th percentile black is EQUAL to the 90th percentile jew.
Honestly, the only reason a black executive or Harvard grad is assumed lesser than any other person with the same qualifications is because everyone knows affirmative action and other DEI interventions exist. If we didn't have them then we would see vastly fewer black Harvard grads, but the ones we did see would be judged more as Harvard grads than as generic black people because the former trait would not be mediated by the later.
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