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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
It is very unlikely that all of the issues disproportionately affecting African American communities are the product of HBD. West African and Caribbean countries whose populations are genetically very similar to African Americans have huge variation in violent crime rates, for example, strongly suggesting these are malleable.
More generally, why would the squalor and violence seen in some African countries and diaspora populations be less fixable than the squalor and violence seen in the Europe of centuries past was? According to the New Yorker this week, the homicide rate in medieval Oxford was as high as it is in New Orleans today, some sixty times higher than it is now.
This is probably a troll, but if it isn’t I work regularly with intelligent and capable Africans in finance, here and in Africa itself, who are very bullish on the trajectory of black civilization in the coming years and decades, and who have every reason to be. Despair is certainly unwarranted.
It is really quite amazing how genetics so horribly strikes Haitians but not to remotely the same degree other black Caribbean populations or black Africans or black British people, etc. It does make one suspicious that maybe a second factor could be at play.
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