Are you a racist? Warning signs

The BBQ Pit
1141

I sort of like being disagreed with, although it would be easier if you understood the points…

But let me remind you again of the stakes at hand:

If we want to preserve the gains for the black middle class in the US, we are going to have to accept that they are unable to perform academically on par with whites and asians. Perhaps you might want to promote your alien brain parasite theory as the likeliest cause. One cause that is NOT going to be accepted is background opportunity, and the failure of that traditional explanation is a disaster for race-based AA.

In today’s news is the appeal for U Texas v Fisher.

I don’t know if you follow the dilemma academia has as closely as do I, but this is our problem when we look at admissions candidates:

Black students from privileged backgrounds have the best academic records and scores among all black candidates, and perform the best among their black peers once they are matriculated. However, when we look over the other candidates for admission, whites and asians from equivalently privileged groups vastly outscore the black students at every privilege (SES) level. The ONLY way we can get the best black students into decent higher education is to extend a race-based AA. If we don’t do that, then we have to use techniques like taking the top 10% of every high school (for example) and the top ten percent of some mostly-black inner city school gets us very very weak candidates who then cluster in lame-ass classes and haven’t a ghost of a chance to get through the rigorous classes from which tomorrow’s upper middle class is going to come.

OK; back to U Texas/Fisher. U Texas wants to preserve its system of preferentially taking privileged black students over less privileged whites to attain “diversity.” Fisher is arguing that this sort of “diversity” is bullshit, because privileged black students cannot be shown to add anything except the color of their skin. But for U Texas, a race-based preference is the only way those high-functioning blacks will get admitted. Without that, their degree of privilege (essentially, background opportunity for a decent preparatory education) is so high compared with how crappy their scores are that they would never be considered competitive applicants.

When we refuse to admit that there are real genetic differences in the skillset for academic outcomes among races, we take away the ability for schools to preferentially admit the best black candidates.

From the U Texas news article:

“The panel’s majority accepted the university’s argument, not made previously, that admissions officers needed to consider applicants’ race to ensure that more of its black and Hispanic students came from integrated, high-performing high schools, the brief says. No evidence in the record establishes that such minority students contribute to the education offered there any more than do the minority students admitted otherwise, the brief argues.”

1142

Go read your post 1130 again:

Do you really think this statement has any internal consistency? That if you can’t know the priors, then you must consider the priors?

1143

Unfortunately, this would not happen. You are confused about cause and effect.

The cause of poor average scores within self-identified races (once we adjust for background educational opportunity provided by socioeconomic status) is genes.

Actually, it’s in the best interest of East Asians to self-identify as “other” or “choose not to identify” since they as a group are over represented. But a black student–or anyone who thinks they could pass a black student–should self-identify as “black” in order to receive preferential consideration for admission.

For example, the gap in Medical College Admission Test scores is quite remarkable for the disparity between the black and white/asian matriculants.

See here.

A black student applying as an East Asian would not even get his application reviewed because the MCAT score would be so low. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education commented there would not be a single black physician accepted to any of the better med schools without race-based preference, because none of them–none–scored high enough to be competitive without race-based preference. This is so even though the best black applicants come from very high SES backgrounds.

1144

This is nonsense, both in the science and in the strategy. I want to preserve the gains for the black middle class, as well as improve conditions for black people in the future, therefore I most oppose the racist pseudoscience of the past, like the idea that black people are inherently less intelligent, that was used to justify oppression and exploitation. Your ideas, in my view, would result in the opposite of what you claim.

Snipping the rest of your AA stuff, since we both support AA in education.

No we don’t – there are other reasons to support AA other than the racist ideas of the past that were used for so much evil.

1145

Meanwhile, in reality:

We find no racial componentin the evolution of the achievement gap through the first eight years of schooling and that most, if not all, of the gap can be explained by socioeconomic differences. Our results suggest that the rising racial test gap found by previous studies is likely due to excessive measurement error in the
early grades.

also:

A recent study based on newly available national data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) provide the strongest evidence to date that the test score gaps in early school years can be explained by differences in family and school environment. Fryer and Levitt (2004) show in a set of analyses based on the ECLS-K data for incoming kindergarteners in 1998 that the black-white math and reading test score gaps can be entirely accounted for by a small set of observable family and child characteristics such as family SES, mother’s age at first birth, number of books at home, and child’s gender and birth weight.

So, everything you say is wrong.

1146

Wrong – there is direct evidence that refutes genes as having anything to do with lower test scores for black students.

1147

You may be interested to know inability to understand a joke is related to low IQ.

1148

That you don’t understand something is not a strike against it.

When the a priori likelihood weighs heavily (i.e. when the evidence is not especially strong) and we don’t know the a priori likelihoods, then we don’t know the answer and cannot conclude anything.

1149

Speaking of not understanding–just because you don’t know the evidence doesn’t mean there isn’t any.

Also, what you said is still wrong.

1150

More good quotes from Wikipedia. Man, CP is really wrong on this one:

A 2005 literature review article by Sternberg, Grigorenko and Kidd stated that no gene has been shown to be linked to intelligence, “so attempts to provide a compelling genetic link of race to intelligence are not feasible at this time”.[105] Hunt (2010, p. 447) and Mackintosh (2011, p. 344) concurred, both scholars noting that while several environmental factors have been shown to influence the IQ gap, the evidence for a genetic influence has been circumstantial, and according to Mackintosh negligible…The 2012 review by the Nisbett et al. (2012) concluded that “Almost no genetic polymorphisms have been discovered that are consistently associated with variation in IQ in the normal range”. …Nisbett and colleagues (2012) consider the entire IQ gap to be explained by the environmental factors that have thus far been demonstrated to influence it, and Mackintosh does not find this view to be unreasonable… Geneticist Alan Templeton …Summarizing the findings of admixture studies, he concludes that it has shown no significant correlation between any cognitive and the degree of African or European ancestry…Mackintosh (2011:338) quotes a statement by Nisbett (2009) to the effect that admixture studies have not provided a shred of evidence in favor of a genetic basis for the gap.[22]

1151

And more from Wikipedia on race:

Anthropologist C. Loring Brace[39] and geneticist Joseph Graves contradict the notion that cluster analysis and the correlation between self-reported race and genetic ancestry support biological race.[40] They argue that while it is possible to find biological and genetic variation corresponding roughly to the groupings normally defined as races, this is true for almost all geographically distinct populations. The cluster structure of the genetic data is dependent on the initial hypotheses of the researcher and the populations sampled. When one samples continental groups, the clusters become continental; if one had chosen other sampling patterns, the clusters would be different. Kaplan 2011 therefore concludes that, while differences in particular allele frequencies can be used to identify populations that loosely correspond to the racial categories common in Western social discourse, the differences are of no more biological significance than the differences found between any human populations (e.g., the Spanish and Portuguese).

1152

You keep going on about that pesky, stubborn black-white testing gap. But there’s also a hispanic-white testing gap. There’s x-white testing gaps all over the place. Why don’t they count? Do you disagree that the countries/geographical regions I listed have IQs in the 80-90 range? Do you care about IQ? Or just academic placement tests?

It almost seems like you’re saying blacks are uniquely handicapped.

1153

Don’t mention the Hispanic/White testing gap! It proves CP’s whole theory is wrong!

1154

Not really. I feel like he’s a race realist trying to bring those hard truths to the naive egalitarian libs, but he’s trying to sugar coat it so it’s more palatable or something. Maybe I’m wrong. I follow his threads for the off the chart lolz and it does seem like he mostly focuses on blacks.

Speaking of entertainment, I sometimes like to visit racist blogs/forums (especially after juicy race baiting news headlines) and one of the funniest trainwreck topics is when someone points out a lot of white countries have IQs close to the inferior brown ones.

  • M-muh heritage
  • Everyone knows they’re not really white anyway
  • Pollack jokes confirmed for true
  • Oppression, economics and unequal opportunity are important now guys
  • Brown immigrant interbreeding is dragging the proud white race down in country A but not country B because…reasons.

Second to that are the people who troll about East Asians being the master race (or are actually Asian themselves).

  • They study 12 hours a day! They have no lives! So we’re still smarter by being balanced.
  • Joke’s on them, we’re taller, more athletic, and have bigger dicks. But don’t apply this logic to black men, that makes me super uncomfortable.
1155

Excellently written account, thanks.

1156

This is a perfectly acceptable way to wordsmith the “race and biology” issue. As I have said a zillion times, it’s all about being a splitter or a lumper.

A lumper might say, "Give me the mtDNA-defined L3-M/N migration anchor point split and their descendant lines as one group, and give me all the lines which aren’t that as the other group. A splitter might want a thousand races.

What is important to understand is that, although there are many ways to lump/split groups, the question at hand is, “IF you create that grouping, is it the case that gene pools differ among the groups you have created?”

If the gene pools do differ, then you have a reasonable basis for a given phenotypic expression or skillset outcome if control for the nurturing variable.

For example, if we create a group of self-identified blacks and another of self-identified whites in the USA, we can easily show that gene pools vary between those two groups. Every study (and I’ve shown many here) support that, as does the average “appearance.” If we were to measure creatine kinase levels for self-identified black males and white males in the USA, we’d find an average difference so strong that a laboratory gives different reference levels according to “race.” This is true even though “race” is not tightly defined and there are outliers.

But we’re talking about average differences, driven by historical migration patterns for source populations. In this case, most of those USA self-identified blacks come from pre L3-M/N anchor point populations who stayed in West Africa, while the self-identified whites came from post L3-M-N lines who left africa and migrated over Europe.

The average difference of the outcome for creatine kinase level is genetically driven, no matter how many ways you wordsmith “race” and “genes,” and “other ways to cluster” and on and on.

So this idea that we can somehow get rid of the biological differences among the current self-identified races by explaining other–or even better–ways to classify people has absolutely no bearing on the current point:

If we DO use self-identified “black” and “white” for groupings, it’s easy to show those two average gene pools will vary. The literature for genetic studies is chock full of comparing these two groupings, and always points to different average gene pools. Our understanding of human history exactly fits this; obviously any gene evolved within a post L3-M-N descendant line would would only be available to descendants, most (but not all) of whom stayed out of africa over the ensuing 70,000 years since that anchor point.

I’ve posted lots more articles explaining this, and frankly it’s kind of frustrating to keep repeating the same teaching points over and over again since the drive to wordsmith an egalitarian viewpoint is so strong.

But look up frequency data for MCPH1 haplogroup D variant to see how remarkably penetrated it is into eurasian populations and how infrequently it’s penetrated into sub saharan populations for a specific gene example. Or look into a whole introgression of 2 or 3% neandertal genes into eurasian populations versus african populations for exactly the same historic migration pattern reasons.

Hope this helps clear up some of your confusion and gets you thinking/reading in the right direction!

For starters find Eric Wang’s article on Darwinian selection of 1800 genes among Los Angeles populations drawn from Han, white and black groups (as I recall). I’ll go find it for you and explain it if you have trouble getting through it. But the basic idea is that he found 1800 genes whose penetration pattern is such that selective pressure, and not just bottlenecks, drove their penetration. In other words, all these genes that do change are not just trivial curiosities, but real evolutionary changes.

1157

I’ll address this when I have time. But re read my splitting/lumping and you’ll have a good start. All of the “buts” you can think of have no bearing on the fundamental problem of biology and race unless you have some data that, IF one chooses “black” and “white,” one ends up with the same gene pool on both sides.

1158

Whether or not average gene pools vary between various races/groups/etc., this says nothing about genes for intelligence. There is no evidence that the vast majority of human characteristics – sense of humor, knuckle striations, fingernail thickness, belly-button-deepness, inner-knee sensitivity, scrotum wrinkliness, and a million others – vary by race. Some characteristics may vary by race to some degree, like skin color. But this doesn’t mean that intelligence is one of them. And, in fact, there is evidence that genes have nothing to do with the test-score gap.

So all of these interminably long posts about differences in gene pools are just sideshow. It tells us nothing about intelligence, just like it tells us nothing about scrotum wrinkliness.

1159

I am well aware of the entire essay. Nearly everyone with an academic career to protect must present the same party line. However, each of us can look at the data on our own. The first, and most important notion (and the reason for my cite) is that there is a biological construct to “race.” As to the idea that there is a “complete absence of data,” I leave to anyone here to explain why the persistently disparate performance of wealthy and educated blacks against impoverished whites is a “complete absence of data.”

1160

Whites and blacks both are exposed to basketball from early childhood on a very widespread basis. Both groups are exposed early and widely to basketball idols. Children who show ability from both groups–and probably whites, more than blacks–get nurtured for basketball. Any white child with any ability develops NBA dreams and drops out of basketball only when it is obvious he cannot make the next tier. The starting pool of white wannabes is much larger than the starting pool of black wannabes, and white wannabes have vastly superior nurturing advantages, including better facilities, better coaching, better and more stable social situations and so on.

None of that is the case for ice hockey.

I suspect you know that, but just want to make an asinine statement like the above because it’s a nice knee jerk to add to the other bullshit here.

The idea that the lack of black ice hockey professionals has some kind of parallel to basketball or football is beyond stupid.