Piffle, you are ignoring the reality that most of the failing ones are also white.
The result of it, is that if you were consistent (fat chance), you would also had to agree that genes in most white folks are also a problem.
Nah, I will have to go for the opinion of the Hoover Institution, the main objective of NCLB is to increase the levels of students, regardless of race, any reforms need to take into account the progress made and there needs to be a change on the way incentives are set.
Right before the civil rights legislation was signed the black illegitimacy rate was about 20 percent. Now it is close to 70 percent. I do not think you can blame whites for that, or at least not “white racism.” One could blame the welfare system for making it easier for a black woman to raise children without the help of a man.
If the average African has an IQ of 70 (which would put them squarely in the “mentally handicapped/special needs camp”), most African Americans should, even with racial admixture, be pretty damn dumb. I mean, not just Forrest Gump dumb. But “I cannot read, add or subtract, or tell time” dumb. The Eurotrash genes in us shouldn’t be able to raise our IQs by that much, since most of us only have about 20% European ancestry. And lot of those can be traced to Scots-Irish slaveowners, whom everyone knows were dumb too.
It’s funny, because most of the recent African immigrants I know seem to be more intelligent and better educated than the average person in the environment. When I was in grad school, I recall that the ESL African students spoke English much better than their supposed smarty-pants Chinese counterparts. They also spoke both their native tongues and their colonial tongues (often French). A person with an IQ of 70, or even 80, would find this difficult, would they not? I expect the racists to come back with the tired rejoinder about outliers. These are folks who don’t even know what an “outlier” means statistically, or even how one would test for an outlier, but nonetheless that’s their old fallback. Outliers! They heard a professor use that word one day and so they’ve adopted it to make themselves sound clever.
Okay, you know what? I’m going to come out and say it. If you are still defending The Bell Curve and similar works, you are racist. Why? Because I’ve already clearly outlined a couple of the major reasons why professional biological anthropologists (and sometimes argument from authority is perfectly valid, y’all) do not consider race categories as adequate descriptions of human genetic variation, and yet those have been ignored in favor of “I feel like it means this” arguments. It has also been mentioned numerous times that a) intelligence is much more complicated than one gene b) intelligence and IQ tests are not necessarily related and c) IQ tests are culture-bound (is that test linked above serious? If it is, I don’t think I’d do very well today, considering it’s based on cultural knowledge from early last century).
God, I hate, hate, fucking HATE ev psych. The social sciences may be considered “soft”, but that doesn’t mean that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can sit in their armchairs and pull theories out of their asses. Guess what? The Pleistocene did not actually resemble 1950’s Middle America. You are a product of your culture. Everyone is. Culture fucking matters. You cannot simply say that genetics did it, because the hallmarks of our species are extreme behavioral adaptability that is heavily influenced by culture.
Look, seriously, it’s probably not kosher, but I will freely email the PDFs to that AJPA issue that discusses race in a scientific, modern manner. I’ve already recommended a book; I know others. For goodness’s sake, educate yourselves on this. I was not joking when I said that this is like arguing with creationists. You don’t know more than the people who spend their lives studying this, even if you think you do. GAH!
Wait. That’s a completely different discussion. I commented originally because you seemed to imply some relationship between the native intelligence of blacks and school performance in the U.S. And, actually, I do blame white America for what happened to the black family. They, as a group, were always poor. But something happened that broke apart the families. I think people were well-intenioned, but even the best of intentions can have unintended consequences. It’s very sad.
But it has nothing to do with the native intelligence.
New Deal Democrat, or you can blame institutionalized racism that is subtle enough for white folks to get to ignore, while being plenty obvious enough to the people it directly affects, as well as a continual erosion of our social safety net. Anyone who uses the word “easier” and “welfare” in the same sentence in this country really needs a reality check. Being able to deny institutionalized racism (as well as sexism, homophobia, and so on) is a manifestation of privilege. I highly recommend this essay.
Watch me not care. 
Thus sayeth Bob Marley, “We feel it in the one drop!”
The guardians of political correctness are concealing the relationship between meeting the standards and the racial composition of the schools that meet and fail to meet the standards. The are also concealing the degree to which schools are failing to meet the standards and the percentage of the student body that is black.
And those who can’t let the '50’s go are completely ignoring every scientific argument.
1850’s or 1950’s?
Have you read Mismeasure of Man? You might consider doing so. It might open your eyes as to why people think you’re idiot.
Hint: it’s not just because you’re a racist.
I will stop believing in The Bell Curve when blacks start behaving and performing as well as whites. Until then The Mismeasure of Man is a description of a world that does not exist. Charles Murray describes the world that does exist, and he explains it.
How do those 'scientific arguments" explain the persistence of high black crime rates and inferior black academic performance?
Did you even read my posts? That’s not even part of what we’re arguing right now. I’m arguing that, scientifically, the biological race concept is complete hokum, and that IQ tests are not an adequate reflection of that vague concept “intelligence”.
However, since you’re interested: Crime rates and poor academic performance are both highly correlated with poverty. This link is really, especially clear in the latter. Schools in wealthier communities can have difficulty covering costs each year; a school in a poverty-stricken area has it much worse. I went to both public and private schools as a kid, and there’s just no comparison. Hell, my family moved to the suburbs so my brother could go to the nicer school than the inner-city public one. This is a well-known issue. You simply cannot expect a child who, first of all, may not be receiving adequate nutrition or care in the first place, to do very well in a school that has outdated textbooks, elderly computers, and a large number of students per class. In my experience, No Child Left Behind has made it even worse because a teacher now has even less freedom to tailor a curriculum to the individual class.
Crime rate is also highly correlated with poverty, as I mentioned before. Moreover, black people are preferentially targeted by the police, as well as subject to greater incarceration rates and punishment in general. Racism doesn’t have to involve burning crosses. If you, as so many of us are, are the type of person to lock your car doors driving through a black neighborhood, you are also more likely to come down harder on a black criminal than a white one as a jury member. This is the sort of covert racism that most, if not all, Americans are part of. You can justify it all you want, with statistics about black crime rates and all, but this attitude is not in fact reasonable. As many civil rights movement people have said, if you were going to be really reasonable about who you’re afraid of, you’d be most afraid of white guys aged about 15-35. And the thing is, this sort of racism is insidious and incredibly common. I admit to having similar pull-my-purse-in type reactions, even though I know it’s stupid and wrong and racist, and it’s even against my own experience. Seriously, I’ve had more trouble with white and Hispanic guys than I ever had with black guys, but the cultural narrative is of the Scary Black Man. All I can do is recognize that and do my best to overcome it. You are no different than any of the rest of us in this matter.
Read some ethnographies. Lots of anthropologists are now working in subcultures in the US, and many of them do quite a good job of laying out the historical context of the community they study. Read the works of people in those subcultures. Read that C. Loring Brace book to understand the long history of scientific racism in the US. Read people who study actual people and actual cultures, rather than those who are mostly interested in preserving the status quo. Try to get beyond your own preconceived, social-bound stereotypes. I have other articles! There’s a very good linguistic one where the anthropologist talks about Critical Race Theory and how college students speak about race. Really, anthropologists and other social scientists have been paid the tiny, tiny bucks to study this shit, and there’s a lot of resources out there.
Yep, conspiracy theorist also, you can not get more crackpot than that folks!
Umm, if they’re concealing it how exactly do you know about it?
CMC fnord!
crowmanyclouds, see, the scientific establishment won’t let anyone tell the truth, man, and it’s people like New Deal Democrat who have figured it out, because they’re so fucking enlightened and can see beyond the conspiracy. And they have to battle it out, because the scientists don’t want you to know the truth, because… um… being pc means you make a lot of money, right? And they’re all in the government’s pocket. And you totally get fired for this stuff! Because they don’t like to be told they’re wrong! It’s like the evilutionists and those abortionist doctors who make the big bucks down at Planned Parenthood and the climate scientists who probably just bought stock in wind power companies. Plus, aliens built the Pyramids, pass it on!
A man had a suspicion his neighbor stole his donkey.
When the man went to speak to the neighbor, the neighbor was able to give him a number of excellent reasons why there was no possible way the neighbor could have been the thief. As he was leaving, the man heard his donkey braying in his neighbor’s backyard, and he confronted the neighbor with this fact.
“I have given you many reasons it could not be me,” said the neighbor. How can you possibly take the donkey’s word against mine?"
The donkey that brays for racial differences is the everyday world of practical results all around us.
Academic institutions cannot get people from different SIRE groups equivalent standardized evaluation results 8 and 13 years on from identical training (in the case of medicine from MCATs through specialty boards).
Sports institutions–sprinting or basketball, e.g.-- show marked disproportions of represented populations despite multiple populations wanting to be a professional in that arena.
IQ tests or formal exams, whatever their correlation to real-world skillsets, measure something and therefore persistent differences despite equal preparation means that races are wired differently, even if that something is of no consequence.
Gene prevalences vary by racial group. We don’t find much Hemoglobin S in US whites and the cystic fibrosis geneset is perhaps ten times more prevalent in US whites than in Asian Americans. Still we persist in pretending that there is no credence whatsoever to the notion that racial groups are genetic in any way, and when we do admit that we pretend that Nature has somehow decided to vary only genes for skin color, hair type, bone density or disease–never anything affecting the geneset for intelligence. That is off limits, both in Great Debates and everyday society, and apparently, by academic fiat–Nature herself.
In real life, we work around this by looking the other way. We don’t talk about it in polite society. We pretend the NBA is just a cultural phenomenon. We accept applicants into universities or professional training such as medical school based on the color of their skin while deliberately ignoring their antecedent opportunity, because if we don’t there would not be any black doctors. In 2009 black matriculants to medical school underscored asians bya score of 8.5 to 11.1. This is an enormous gap in this measurable standard, and no amount of effort has closed it. It is a gap that persists into licensing and specialty exams; a gap that is reflected in similar statistics in any STEM field; a gap that is consistent across every continent, every political climate; every social construct; every country. Yet we persist in blaming circumstance where circumstances have been equalized and a vague “institutional racism” where the supposed perpetrators (of whom I am apparently one) have fought ferociously in their professional life to open up doors to black applicants for the simple reason that society needs to have a place at the table for everyone of every color and every background.
We have been trained to ferret out racism and we have been conditioned that anyone who looks to genes when there is performance variation has some sort of nefarious agenda. We will be looking for a long long time, but in the end, science will win. It will defeat me and my racism or it will defeat the rest of you and your egalitarianism. While I hope you win, I see no parallel in nature that assures me that is very likely. I suspect in the interim we will just limp along pretending we are all equal, but knowing inside we are not.
The donkey of reality brays, and it becomes ever more difficult to take refuge in the reasons why we should not believe the donkey. As more and more highly intelligent blacks take their place in society while their broad category of “race” continues to underpeform in some areas, the charge of institutional racism will stop being persuasive rhetoric. As sperm bank children sold as “intelligent” (via proxy code for that trait such as “Donor is a PhD in Engineering”) are evaluated for outcome, it will become less persuasive that we are a tabula rasa engraved only by circumstance. As genetic science advances, we’ll have a more concrete understanding of the flow of populations through the ages, and we’ll be able to track with much more precision various advantageous genes. We won’t be dependent upon categories so broad as SIRE groups anymore out of which to create out averages in an effort to come to grips with disproportionate representation.
I have enjoyed my stay here on the Dope. I wish all of you the best. Underneath the frequently hostile arguments I recognize the same drive I have: to understand why the world is the way it is in the hope that we can create a better one.
I prefer this tale:
http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/TwoWolves-Cherokee.html
Feed the good wolf Chief.