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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
Why not?
If your IQ is, say, 130, it's going to be 130 regardless of what the rest of your group's is. It doesn't mean anything for you personally. If anything it means you lucked out harder than otherwise.
The only reason I care for it is as a means of destroying the blank slatist idea that there must be parity of outcomes between groups, and thereby eliminating the unjust affirmative action policies that unfairly hold the brilliant back to promote the mediocre above their competence.
Yes, it massively sucks that so many resources have been wasted on chasing an impossible, pointless mirage. But if the best time to fix the mistake was decades ago, the second best time is now. Any policies founded upon falsehoods will be ineffective compared to ones founded on truth.
I’m guessing OP cares about their community’s well-being, not just their own intelligence.
That was always beyond his influence.
No but "your community and all their future generations are condemned to poverty and violence" is decidedly more depressing than "your community was hurt in the past due to no fault of their own, but is slowly building a better life, generation by generation".
But HBD doesn't imply this. First of all, by most reasonable historical standards, the "black community," at least in the USA, is one of the least violent and certainly one of the least poverty-stricken communities that has ever existed. It's empirically very possible to reduce these things, and the question is how much further can we reduce them, through what methods, at what cost? As I alluded to in my other comment, IF HBD is true and we accept that it's true, then we would realize that treating the "black community" like it's a defective "white community" is a fool's errand that will only be helpful through sheer luck and coincidence and likely quite harmful on net. I don't see why we couldn't come up with creative new solutions to reduce the poverty and violence in the "black community" even further than we have already, but for that, we need the problem solvers to have an accurate perception of the problem.
It's possible that the relational nature of things will mean that the "black community" will always be behind the "white community" and others in things like poverty and crime, but that's a problem only to the extent that people insist on viewing things in a racial/group-based lens. This is a curse that may be with human society as long as we are around, at least until Senator Jay Bulworth's proposal that we all fuck each other until we're all the same color comes about, but it's possible to have more or less of it, much like how poverty and crime will always be around, but it's possible to have more or less of it. I think a few extremist activists bloviating about how 1% of black community are in poverty with a murder rate a whopping 1 out of 100,000/year instead of the 0.5% of the white community in poverty with a murder rate of 0.5 out of 100,000/year would be a better state of things and even acceptable.
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