Sure.
For instance, if you were to evaluate SAT scores of black children from high-income families (close to $100,000/year) or who have highly educated parents (graduate degrees) against similar white kids, their scores would be markedly lower–so low, in fact, that you’d have to compare them with scores of white kids from poor (under 10k/yr) families or from families where the parents did not finish high school.
I don’t think black kids in those circumstances are undernourished.
I suppose you could blame “stereotyping” but that’s kind a weak and unsupported excuse for such an enormous score difference. And if you took the cream of the black student crop–say the ones who are matriculated into college–and looked at their pre-med test scores (the MCATs) the score difference is even more pronounced. Presumably those kids, since they are the academic cream, are already past worrying about stereotypic threat.
Still, you’ll always find someone who thinks such enormous quantitative differences must be something other than innate disparate abilities. It’s an article of faith, though, and not supported by any success anywhere at identifying those vague unknown non-genetic reasons.
I think it is fair to accuse me of continuing to bait idiots like you who throw out slurs instead of data, in the hope, apparently, that calling someone a racist constitutes a counter-argument where no data exists.
Look, MrDribbles–calling someone a Nazi, a racist, or a eugenicist has nothing to do with identifying and presenting a counter-argument to the point of whether or not populations are disparately enabled. If you’ve got some data somewhere showing that two populations have had equal results quantified, put it out there and be satisfied you’ve made your point. If you are just going to label people, the only one you are dribbling on is yourself, with your own pathetic little attempts to insult instead of presenting data.
Thanks for the chuckle over the ‘shitty doctor’ effort at tossing in a freebie slur. Got any data for that? I’m not aware that anyone on the Board knows my actual identity, but if they do, I’d guess it wouldn’t take much background-checking to make a mockery of that particular comment, irrelevant as it is.
CP, some of your claims are consistently counterfactual.
It’s not true that the score differences are always enormous. For the most part, the score differences are less than a standard deviation. In some states, like Nebraska, the difference in standardized test scores is 8 points, with black kids scoring 92 versus the white kids’ mean of 100.
A household income of 100k is really just the salaries of two bus drivers, or even two janitors who work a lot of overtime. Income alone doesn’t say anything about child rearing practices, prenatal and infant health care, diet, psychological health.
(I’m quoting from Tim Wise’s blog b/c he gives a good capsule rundown of infant mortality issues wrt to income for black American women. I don’t endorse his conclusions.)
The difference in infant mortality rates even among college educated black women, together with the high abortion rate for black American women, suggests strongly that black American children are being concieved and gestated, and raised under different conditions than their white American counterparts.
You’re taking a subpopulation in a racially divided society and saying that “they’re past worrying about stereotypic threat”? You mean like what - a Klansman showing up at the MCATs?
Okay, sure, that’s not likely. On t’other hand, these are people who’ve grown up in a racially divided society and found their way to the top, and you compare them with white children of privilege.
On a personal note, that may illustrate my total fucking disbelief in your thesis, I grew up as rural white kid in the south. I knew a lot of rural black kids, some of whom were extremely smart. My family would have had more money than the black kids, and less than the parents of the preppy white kids- we were military.
As time ground forward, these black kids disappeared from the gifted and talented programs - not because they weren’t smart, but because they were one of the few black kids in the G&T, then the only black kid, and the teacher figured they weren’t that smart, y’know, and they actually had to have a job after high school was out, unlike the darling girls of the local car dealer, who weren’t nearly as smart, but had preppy clothes and were of the same cloth as the teachers, etc. I could go on, but I’m developing a bile issue here.
The point is, every black person is going to be swimming upstream their entire lives, in a way that any random white person is not. I don’t think you can reasonably obtain data in the US that will not be tainted by the pervading racial divide. So, null hypothesis is not rejected.
I do not disagree that multiple reasons can be postulated; what hasn’t happened, to the best of my knowledge, is that any reasonably large representative cohort has done anything “counterfactual” to the data I’ve presented here on this Board. I expect that a given subset of particularly bright black students would outperform a subset of ordinary white students–in such a case I’d argue that that subset of black students is genetically smarter, so to speak. I’m underwhelmed by the constant advancement of this idea that even wealthier blacks are still disadvantaged somehow, compared to poverty-stricken whites, but where they are disadvantaged, surely that’s an indicator of poor choices, and poor choices reflect poor cognitive skills–not some external reduction in opportunity (for that income level).
I’d be happy to look at your Nebraska data. Googling “black-white test gap Nebraska” turned up this cite as one of the first ones:
*"In Nebraska, black student achievement is lower than anywhere in the old South, the federal report indicates. In eighth grade math, for instance, the average score among Nebraska’s black students in 2007 was 240 on a 500-point scale, compared with the national average for blacks of 259, according to the federal data. The average score for black eighth graders was 246 in Alabama, 251 in Mississippi, 258 in Louisiana, and 261 in Georgia.
The study plotted the evolution of average scores of black and white students on the series of federal tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress that were administered every two to four years in both math and reading from 1992 to 2007. Nationwide, the average math score in 1992 for white fourth graders was 227 on a 500-point scale, compared with an average score of 192 for black fourth graders that year, resulting in a black-white gap of 35 points.
The average score for white eighth graders in Nebraska in math was 291, almost exactly the national average, resulting in a black-white gap there of 51 points, far larger than in any other state, according to the report.
Mr. Breed said he and other Nebraska officials had gotten word about the findings several days ago.
“We’d kind of had a heads-up that it would not be good news for Nebraska,” he said. “It’s not great to be in the group that has a large gap, but it is what it is — and it’s not acceptable.”"*
I think you missed the part where black children from families making upwards of $100,000/year underscored poverty-stricken white kids (<$10,000/yr); perhaps in your anxiety to advance your position that I am wrong.
It’s my personal opinion that the idea that blacks–particularly ones who have established decent incomes–are somehow constantly swimming upstream their entire lives in a way that any random white person is not, is demeaning and patronizing to blacks. Al Sharpton’s determination to create victimhood writ large. In my own professional world, the only thing that garners real respect is competence, period. But if anything, in the business arena, every large company I know of (and I work for one of the largest corporations in the world) bends over backward to specifically recruit, promote and retain black employees, and gives them a much wider margin for job performance.
Nebraska’s Racial Achievement Gap
Is Nearly the Worst in the Nation
"In Nebraska, the math gap in the average test scores reflects a disparity of around 5 years of schooling.
A look at the results shows that in reading, the picture is no better. For fourth-grade reading, Nebraska’s overall score of 223 is slightly higher than the national average for public schools, 220. But black 4th-graders in Nebraska scored only 194, a racial achievement gap of 36 points, or about 3½ grade levels, in the key skill of reading."
No one will be more pleased than I if we can eliminate this gap. I have no dog in the hunt for Man’s Best Race.
My contention is that the data to date do not show such an elimination.
Sorry. I botched that reference. I had seen data on some Midwestern states where the test score gap was less than a full STD. Nebraska apparently follows the high welfare payment upper Midwest pattern, where black student achievement relative to white is the worst in the US, substantially worse than anywhere in the South.
It’s Iowa where the test score gap on math and science achievement tests is 8 - 10 points on a scale where the white mean is 100. So I’m not denying that there’s a gap. I’m pointing out that you repeatedly overstate the case.
I can’t remember citing a specifically quantitated amount of difference.
My contention is that what differences there are, are a result of genetic differences once opportunity has been normalized, and that the difference in educational tests has been persistent and is not narrowing over the last twenty years despite very focused efforts to make it go away. This diminishes credibility to the hypothesis that the gap is gradually narrowing, with the implication that it will go away completely at some point.
The study you cite is for public schools (and I’m not sure it’s very representative of suburban schools, so it selects out for a weaker band of white students); I’d argue that–on average–the cohort of students in public schools is already a tier below the top black and white students. Nevertheless, in the study you cite, the gap in 1990 for 17 year olds in math was 20 points and in 2008 it was 27 points. Despite these sorts of data points, the press constantly reports gaps as “narrowing” and this leaves an impression that it is until the individual points are examined.
The implication from your reply is that if one scales the results to a mean of 100, the difference is minor. I do not think that is the case, but I’m not sure how put into perspective the score difference. In the article I cited above, a gap of 36 points (which would be about 18 on your scale) equates to 3.5 years of school, so perhaps a gap of 31 (Iowa, Math, grade 8, 2007), which would be 12 or so on your scale is a year or two behind…that does not seem trivial to me.
You stated that the gaps were consistent and enormous. They aren’t consistent and they aren’t enormous everywhere.
The scores for black 8th graders in Oregon, for example, show a gap of 7-8 points if we set the national white mean at 100. This is only half a standard deviation. If we could get all black students to perform like the ones in Oregon, we’d be well on our way to ending the problem.
Now, this isn’t going to happen, for a variety of reasons, and nothing that the government does is likely to have much of an effect, unfortunately. The states with the largest gaps are the ones with the most generous welfare benefits, and the most liberal civic cultures.
Got me, I was raised in the south. There were black people and white people. When I was done grown up some Hmong showed up, but I don’t know their MCATs.
I’m interested in the reaction to this, and if there’s substantial, widespread evidence for this claim (it may already have been provided–sorry, all these “blacks are genetically inferior” threads are a blur). Seems to me this would significantly weaken the “DNA explains this” argument.
Ah, OK. It’s just that the way you stated that sentence I quoted, one would think it was based on more than just your gut feelings based on your personal experience. But I guess not.
The sentence you quoted was the one after the personal experience was laid out, a personal experience which was explicitly stated as personal experience - hence the use of the phrase ‘on a personal note’. It was meant to illustrate the sort of scenario that makes me doubt that the data you keep coming up with is illustrative of more that racial inequality in the US.
Allow me to put it in non-personal terms. To reject the null hypothesis that races are roughly equivalent in most criteria, you would need data from a place and time where black people have the same opportunities without historical or current economic, legal and social inequalities. I don’t think this situation applies in the US, for example.
Thus, I cannot reject the null hypothesis, and I think that your hypothesis, while interesting, is not supported.
On a personal note, I love the way you make your points, by the way.
This is simply not true. Sociological studies are just different than studies that, for example, test the effects of drugs on people. You are correct that it is not possible to have an absolutely perfect control group when trying to test whether a person’s intelligence is influenced more by their genes or by their enironment. However, there are other ways to get around that problem (e.g., performing the studies on populations that have different environments, controlling the data for different environmental effects, rigorously eliminating elements of bias from the tests). It is not necessary to simply thrown one’s hands up and declare the whole enterprise a failure because it is impossible to find a perfect control group.
Also, I think you are kidding yourself if you think that opportunity inequality for black people in the US today is anything like it was in the past. But people who want to make the argument you are making can find any little element of such inequality and decide that that invalidates all of these studies without having to dig deeper.
I realize that there are methodologies for sociological experiments. However, they are difficult to do well at the best of times, and require controlling for many subtle variables. Race is a huge variable, and in the context of American history, intrudes onto many other variables. I haven’t seen lashings of sociologists coming forward in support of your thesis - are they all convinced? If not, why not?
On a personal note, I also think you’re kidding yourself, but I was too polite to mention it.
I think, and this is my personal opinion, that you are kidding yourself into* thinking that your opinions about race are derived from the data * (and supported by it) and not the other way around.
I suspect that your opinions came first, and you’re trying to shore up the opinions. Maybe you’re not kidding yourself, and you realize that you’re doing this, but so far you haven’t copped to this approach.
I suppose it’s also possible that you spend your time finding snippets to support a view to which you don’t subscribe, but that would take a lot of work, and would, I suppose, technically be trolling, so we can leave that hypothesis aside as being less likely.
I’d still be interested in knowing why there is not a massive groundswell of sociologists supporting your views, since you seem to feel the sociological data is clear.