# Black people are intelligent! **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [February 2, 2005, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070 "2005-02-02T23:33:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![EllisDee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellisdee/32/4531_2.png) [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2005, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/41 "2005-02-03T17:52:10Z")
> [@holmes](#): > > All “blacks” don’t get sickle cell and sickle cell is also found in the Greeks, Italians, East Indians, and Saudi Arabians, among others. The reason that certain blacks have a higher rate then other people is based on GEOGRAPHY not race. Sickle Cell is an adaption against Malaria…so people who come from parts of the world that have a high incidence of Malaria also have Sickle Cell or variations of it. It’s not race, it’s geography? But isn’t race also caused by geography? Really, aren’t race and geography one and the same thing? Modern transportation is “rapidly” (compared to evolution) working to erase it, but it still exists as of yet. > [@](#): > > How can a disease be race-based if a. all the members of that race don’t have it and b. members of different races do? So, ovarian cancer isn’t gender based because not all women have it? Your “b.” is much more convincing. > [@](#): > > I don’t know about all Asians, but the guy I went to school with could drink a russian sailor under the table…YMMV, of course Quite likely it’s another geographical thing at play. But then again, so is race. How about sunburn? Aren’t caucasions more susceptible to sunburn? To say that race is meaningless because it doesn’t guarantee knowledge about any one particular individual seems to me as counterintuitive as saying that quantum physics is meaningless because it doesn’t guarantee knowledge about any one particular particle. It’s all about trends. The problem is that people get very uptight about being prejudged based on statistical trends. I’m currently on the fence about the practice, but I don’t automatically think identifying trends is completely valueless. Of course, I’m beginning to think that the SDMB is populated with people who refuse to accept any concept of trends, whether they be applied to people (race, gender), laws, animals, or what have you. It gets so extreme that sometimes I feel like if I posted “cakes are sweet” I would get a flurry of responses explaining how all cakes are unique and it is meaningless to attempt to attach the arbitrary label of “sweet” to them. ---
**Author:** ![holmes](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e95f7d/32.png) [@holmes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/holmes)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2005, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/42 "2005-02-03T18:16:40Z")
> [@Ellis Dee](#): > > It’s not race, it’s geography? But isn’t race also caused by geography? Really, aren’t race and geography one and the same thing? Modern transportation is “rapidly” (compared to evolution) working to erase it, but it still exists as of yet.So, ovarian cancer isn’t gender based because not all women have it? Your “b.” is much more convincing.Quite likely it’s another geographical thing at play. But then again, so is race. Race and gender are not interchangible. Try another analogy. How can race and geography be the same thing? All Africans live in Africa, are all Africans the same race? Are all Africans the same color? Geography can influence physical traits, absolutely; the question is who determines what physical traits the ones that matter. Skin color, eye color, intolerance to lactose, intolerance to sodium? Who determines which SHARED traits matter and which ones don’t? > [@](#): > > How about sunburn? Aren’t caucasions more susceptible to sunburn? Define causcasion. Susceptible compared to whom? North Africans are considered caucasions are they more susceptible to sunburn than Northern Irish? Are they different races? Are the Southern Italians a different type of caucasion race, than the Welsh? > [@](#): > > …It’s all about trends. The problem is that people get very uptight about being prejudged based on statistical trends. I’m currently on the fence about the practice, but I don’t automatically think identifying trends is completely valueless. Then define the trend correctly. The correct trend for sickle cell, is West Africans are more prone to have it. African Americans have a higher potential for it, because the majority of the slaves brought to American came from that region, but all Blacks in America aren’t from West Africa. Using the term “black” is meaningless, especially when we know what determines the trait for sickle cell; evolving in a malaria rich environment. Not skin color. > [@](#): > > Of course, I’m beginning to think that the SDMB is populated with people who refuse to accept any concept of trends, whether they be applied to people (race, gender), laws, animals, or what have you. SDMB prides itself on fighting ignorance. Saying that Sickle Cell proves Race exist is wrong. > [@](#): > > It gets so extreme that sometimes I feel like if I posted “cakes are sweet” I would get a flurry of responses explaining how all cakes are unique and it is meaningless to attempt to attach the arbitrary label of “sweet” to them. If you said that a specific type of cake is sweet, when it isn’t; then yeah you’re going to get called on it. ---
**Author:** ![Indygrrl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/58f4c7/32.png) [@Indygrrl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indygrrl)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2005, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/43 "2005-02-03T18:17:48Z")
Ftr, Otto’s thread title was boneheaded to the maximum, but I’m not ready to chalk him up just yet. I’ve liked him up until that, and I have probably posted some dumb things (but maybe not that dumb, well there was that cigarette thread :embarrassed:) and I hope people wouldn’t chalk me up for one faux pas. So, Otto, I’m gonna smack you on your typing hands and tell you don’t do that again. I want to still like you, damnit. And yeah, I’ll echo whoever said black people are human, some are good, some are bad, etc. Let’s get past the generalizations. ---
**Author:** ![Amok](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f17d59/32.png) [@Amok](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amok)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2005, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/44 "2005-02-03T20:43:22Z")
> [@Aesiron](#): > > [m-w.com](http://m-w.com) defines an African American as “an American of African and especially of black African descent” and while I agree that the popular usage of the word just means “black”, it’s still not correct. Dave Matthews and Charlize Theron, both of whom are white, are South Africans living in the US. Are they not African American? Nope. > [@](#): > > And what of the Arabic immigrants from Egypt, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia? Again, no. African-American specifically came into being to replace “Negro”, “colored” and other terms for blacks. The fact that it’s root words can be used to describe other people is irrelevant. Words mean what they’re used to mean. Charlize Theron may be African, and she may be American (is she a citizen now?), but she’s not “African-American”, because she’s not black. For that matter, I don’t usually hear the term applied to black African immigrants. It’s almost always used to mean American born blacks. Applying the term to someone like Theron is arguing that what the word means, what it’s always been used to mean, is somehow incorrect because the definition doesn’t logically follow from the definitions of its root words. A similar case is some people’s objections that anti-semetic can also mean “hatred of Arabs”, since Arabic is a semetic language. But there’s no requirement that words must be logical. They simply mean what we understand them to mean. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Devil\_s\_Grandmother](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/74df32/32.png) [@The\_Devil\_s\_Grandmother](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Devil_s_Grandmother)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2005, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/45 "2005-02-03T23:27:15Z")
> [@Talon Karrde](#): > > What about in art? > > I imagine there must be this whole world of painters, authors, musicians, etc. from over there that most Americans have no knowledge of. And also cooks. The early cookbooks from the middle east are using measurements way before anything in the European corpus. ---
**Author:** ![cheddarsnax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a587f6/32.png) [@cheddarsnax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cheddarsnax)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2005, 11:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/46 "2005-02-03T23:46:12Z")
What the hell? **LINK** please! ---
**Author:** ![The\_Devil\_s\_Grandmother](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/74df32/32.png) [@The\_Devil\_s\_Grandmother](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Devil_s_Grandmother)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2005, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/47 "2005-02-03T23:55:14Z")
> [@cheddarsnax](#): > > What the hell? **LINK** please! Pretty much everything in the pre-1600CE European Cookery corpus that is on the web and in English is linked on [this page](http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/food.html). If you follow a link [to here](http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/recipes_introduction.html), there’s a listing of most fo the dates with commonly accepted dates of authorship. However, I will strongly recommend you purchase a copy of [_Medieval Arab Cookery: Papers by Maxine Rodinson and Charles Perry with a reprint of A Baghdad Cookery Book_](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0907325912/qid=1107475503/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-5083691-2987814?v=glance&s=books). It’s quite interesting. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2005, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/48 "2005-02-04T16:18:40Z")
> [@gobear](#): > > Because a certain ornery fag is making a boneheaded point and needlessly offending our black Dopers, I thought that the scales need to balance. > > America would be immeasurably poorer without the contributions of black Americans. Despite centuries of oppression and prejudice, black Americans have aided in our nation’s progress and defense. > > [. . .] > > Much love to all. Um, I’m white, but I’ll be sure to tell every black person I see today that you don’t hate them. Was this necessary? No offense, Gobear, but this seems really ill-considered. Kind of patronizing, actually. Plus you’ve really ignored virtually every black contribution to America’s musical life, including just about everything from 1950 to the present - you’ve listed only two of the jazz greats, and no one from any of the later musical movements that were created or advanced by black musicians. > [@Ellis Dee](#): > > Don’t the various races experience different susceptibilities to various diseases and chemicals? Asians tend to not imbibe alcohol well. (They lack an enzyme?) Blacks are susceptible to sickle cell anemia. These two examples would be biological in nature, and they differentiate based on race. Not really. Well, to a first-order approximation, yes. But these factors are not really distributed according to our own conceptions of race. Different ethnicities are susceptible to different diseases; sickle-cell is not present in all populations we call “black”, nor is it absent in all populations we call “white”. It’s just that race doesn’t correllate terribly well with actual ethnic ancestry, and few of the physical characteristics we assign to races do either. After all, some folks from the Indian subcontinent are as dark as any black person, but they still count as “caucasian”. Geography certainly doesn’t correllate well with race. Look at the Khoe people in southern Africa - they don’t look terribly black at all, and yet they’ve been there since time immemorial (well, since the Bantu Migration led to their being squished into a rather marginal corner of the continent.) In fact, historically, they’re probably further, genetically, from black Africans than just about every other population in the world is. It’s not that it’s a meaningless concept, just that “race” is a terribly deficient descriptor of the very complex situation that human ethnic groups form. > [@Aesiron](#): > > [m-w.com](http://m-w.com) defines an African American as “an American of African and especially of black African descent” and while I agree that the popular usage of the word just means “black”, it’s still not correct. Dave Matthews and Charlize Theron, both of whom are white, are South Africans living in the US. Are they not African American? And what of the Arabic immigrants from Egypt, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia? WORDS DON’T MEAN WHAT PEOPLE USE THEM TO MEAN! WORDS DON’T MEAN WHAT THE DICTIONARY SAYS!! WORDS MEAN WHAT I WANT THEM TO!!! Christ, do I ever get sick of hearing this argument here. ---
**Author:** ![gobear](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/8dc957/32.png) [@gobear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gobear)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2005, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/49 "2005-02-04T16:33:23Z")
> [@](#): > > Was this necessary? No offense, Gobear, but this seems really ill-considered. Kind of patronizing, actually. > > Plus you’ve really ignored virtually every black contribution to America’s musical life, including just about everything from 1950 to the present - you’ve listed only two of the jazz greats, and no one from any of the later musical movements that were created or advanced by black musicians. You missed the point. The thread was intended as a riposte to **Otto’s** dumb-ass thread. Of course, not all black people are intelligent or stupid or any one quality. I just figured if one idiot is going to cram together black folks into a stupid negative generalization, then another idiot can cram all black people together into a positve stereotype. And my lists were mere samplings, as I wrote in the OP. This forum simply doesn’t allow for anything approaching an exhaustive catalog of black accomplishment in any field. Beside, it’s National Black History Month, so visit your local library today! ---
**Author:** ![Ephemera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8baadc/32.png) [@Ephemera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ephemera)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2005, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/50 "2005-02-04T19:00:04Z")
> [@Excalibre](#): > > WORDS DON’T MEAN WHAT PEOPLE USE THEM TO MEAN! WORDS DON’T MEAN WHAT THE DICTIONARY SAYS!! WORDS MEAN WHAT I WANT THEM TO!!! > > Christ, do I ever get sick of hearing this argument here. If someone else’s opinion of an ambiguous term is different from mine, so be it. I’m not going to get into a heated argument over semantics, which is why I’ve not posted further on that line of discussion and why there has been no argument. Did you forget your valium this morning? ---
**Author:** ![John\_Corrado](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a88e4f/32.png) [@John\_Corrado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Corrado)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2005, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/51 "2005-02-04T19:19:13Z")
To add to the list: While I expect that **gobear** was, honorably, attempting to create a list of those known to be masters of works that are timeless and classics, I would also add to the list those whose works were in many cases emphemeral and would now be considered bland and dated; but nonetheless, I do not think I could stand to live in the cultural wasteland this world would be in without Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Little Richard, and Aretha Franklin. Thank you. ---
**Author:** ![EllisDee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellisdee/32/4531_2.png) [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2005, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/52 "2005-02-05T06:01:00Z")
> [@holmes](#): > > How can race and geography be the same thing? All Africans live in Africa, are all Africans the same race? When did all of Africa become the same geographic location? You could have just as meaningfully countered with “All humans live on earth, are all humans the same race?” Just because we can reference an area with a single word does not mean that it is a singular region. I used to term “geography” in the sense of latitude and longitude; not arbitrary borders drawn on a map. (Despite the irony in that statement, I trust the readers understand what I’m saying.) Other than that nitpick, I basically agree with the rest of your rebuttal. (Except the cake thing. The SDMB is overly sensitive with regards to generalizations, IMO.) > [@Excalibre](#): > > It’s not that it’s a meaningless concept, just that “race” is a terribly deficient descriptor of the very complex situation that human ethnic groups form. This I can agree with completely. It makes sense, and has the bonus of reasonable plausibility. ---
**Author:** ![Cyros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a698b9/32.png) [@Cyros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cyros)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2005, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/53 "2005-02-05T06:16:43Z")
> [@cricetus](#): > > I once heard a kid in class speculating about the African Americans in South Africa being oppressed. Er… all the people from Africa are African, and none of the ones who haven’t left are American. Ah, my husband (Cyros) and I have heard this a couple of years ago on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He was “interviewing” his wife Mavis on her charitable cause du jour and she remarked on the plight of the African-Americans in Africa. /Ms Cyros ---
**Author:** ![Talon\_Karrde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Talon\_Karrde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Talon_Karrde)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2005, 6:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070/54 "2005-02-05T06:37:36Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > What a prince of a man. What a great intellect. To this day, I miss you, Ham. God go with you always. I’ve never met him, but from your description I feel like I miss him too. He sounds like a truely great person. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-people-are-intelligent/288070.md?page=2)