For the same reason people talk about using gene therapy to one day prevent certain cancers and other diseases, even though we haven’t yet developed this capability. Talking is the forerunner to studying which is the forerunner to implementation.
I want you to read this article: Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good intentions
The author lists numerous studies showing how black people are routinely victimized by racial discrimination.
Now I want you to be honest with me. What’s the feeling you have after reading that article? Do you feel anger? Outrage? Sadness? Or are you skeptical…and perhaps wondering if you should post a “devil’s advocate” rebuttal in the comment section?
Because I’ll be 100% honest. Even though I’m black and I’ve seen first-hand how grossly unfair society is, my gut reaction after reading this article was “NUH-UHN!!!” There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to believe that things could be so bad given all the lip service paid to diversity and equality. Perhaps I’d be insane with rage and fear if I allowed myself to fully accept it.
I believe that America wouldn’t be able to accept the notion that black people are intellectually superior to white people. It would be like trying to convince people that up is really down and down is really up.
The reason white people don’t seem to have a problem with the notion of Asian intellectual superiority is because the intellect of Asians has never been questioned. Their morality, their integrity, their courage, their sexual prowess, sure. But not their intelligence. Plus, as foreigners they are seen as competition. Asians have always been held up as the “one to beat” rather than the “one to beat down”.
Society has inculcated all of us with the notion of black inferiority, however. And although we talk about the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination, I think deep down most Americans want to believe that black people are where they are because they belong there. To believe otherwise is to acknowledge how truly unfair the world is. The human psyche can’t really handle that.
So hell fucking yeah I really think people would respond the way LoHD described. Why do I believe this? Because that’s how they respond right now. People believe whatever it is they want to believe.
I live in a state where the agencies responsible for coastline management aren’t allowed to predict ocean levels rising. NASA has faced Administration pressure to stop them from discussing global warming. The CDC isn’t allowed to consider the health implications of gun violence. This isn’t conspiracy theory nonsense, this is exactly the way things work right now, on far less controversial issues.
Note how I say the results would be ignored, because people just couldn’t stomach that idea. And you rebut me by changing the hypothetical so that it’s no longer one in which white people are the dummies, but instead Asian people are the smarties.
I think the way in which you changed things to make them more palatable and possibly more plausible to yourself, even when it’s only a hypothetical, illustrates my prediction nicely :).
Yep. Explained better than my attempts. Good post.
The sticky metric is “race” and “ethnicity.” And in particular, “black” and “hispanic” as self-identified groups. Because only those two groups lag academically when opportunity is accounted for.
But I agree with you. Scholastic achievement is not a very good indicator in isolation of how people will perform in most jobs. And given the profound differences in academic performance, I think it’s fine to simply accept that if we want diversity in careers where academic performance is a filter, we need to have one standard for whites and asians, and another for blacks and hispanics. There is absolutely no other way to get diversity, and that’s more important than is having only the highest academic scorers in a given profession.
I don’t think most people actually care if their Doctor had crappy academic scores, as long as they could pass the basic licensing exams. Ditto attorneys.
It does become a stickier problem for areas like engineering and tech when companies want to use screening exams to get the best candidates, but it’s not the end of the world to set aside some positions to gain a general diversity.
They’ll use the “Golgafrincham” solution.
What, you didn’t get the memo?
Oh!
Nevermind.
MandaJo got it in one, when she posted about this earlier. The idea of super smart Asians doesn’t threaten white people because the same conventional wisdom also tells us Asians are inferior in other socially valued ways. So in the final analysis, whites can consider themselves representatives of the “golden mean” while putting blacks and Asians at the end of the bell curve. The Western tradition of scientific racism has always been about white supremacy.
If it came out tomorrow that Asians are more likely to have smart genes, it would not cause too much discomfort because this conforms to racialist thought already. No one would scramble to make their genes mimic Asians because this would require people to see Asians as an ideal to aspire to. And I just don’t see this. There is far more pressure for Asians to be seen as white-like than the other way around, as least in the U.S. This wouldn’t be the case if Asians were viewed as being at the top of the racial totem pole.
I’ve participated in diversity/outreach programs that were explicitly open to Native Americans and Pacific Islanders (including Fillipinos). And don’t forget, white women are the biggest beneficiary of AA.
AA is not a “black and hispanic” program.
You have got to be kidding me. Change the terminology anyway you like, but it’s the same thing.
I think you’re wrong. But maybe it’s because you live in North Carolina (IIRC), and I live in CA, and in Silicon Valley in particular. There are lots of towns and cities here with as many Asians as whites living in them. Whites around here are often reluctant to send their kids to schools with too many Asians in them because the don’t want their kids to have to compete against them. Now, I don’t know that people are thinking the advantage is genetic, cultural or some combo, but there is certainly is a recognition among quite a few even successful whites that Asians have some sort of advantage over their own kids.
No, it’s really, really not. If white people are the dummies, that means the average white person’s IQ is below the IQ of everyone else, including black people. That’s completely counter to the prevailing racist stereotypes. You instead changed the hypothetical so that Asian people are the smarties, leaving white people comfortably at or above the average IQ over everyone else, including black people. That’s completely in line with the prevailing racist stereotypes.
Seriously, take a minute and consider the idea. What motivated you to insert Asians into monstro’s hypothetical? Why did you choose Asians instead of African Americans or Latinos or some other group?
AIUI, if you were to ask the genetic technicians at Monsanto to design you a baby with superior intelligence, or extraordinary athletic potential, or even a specified height at maturity, they would not know how to do it. Not enough is yet known about the human genome.
I just want my baby to be Roundup Ready.
I just think it’s an easier analysis if we are considering just 2 groups. But put in 15 groups if you want.
Because with Asians, it’s less of a hypothetical. Lots of white people ALREADY think Asians are smarter than whites. We can look at how people actually behave instead of trying to figure out how they might behave.
What would your response be if I said: Imagine how white people would behave if they thought Latinos were naturally better athletes than whites?
No, we can stick with two groups: let’s make it white people being dumber than black people.
Right–so you’re looking at a hypothetical in which people have their racist stereotypes confirmed. Racists are comfortable with the idea that Asians are smarter than white people. In that case, sure–people might accept it. Monstro suggested a hypothetical in which racists were confronted with science that upended their racism ideology.
That, to quote monstro, “This discussion has been interesting, but not as interesting as it could be.”
The hypothetical isn’t just “blacks are smarter than whites”. That’s controversial enough, but that’s not really why the hypothetical is more complicated (and thus interesting) than the OP’s.
Fair enough–I was zeroing in on the bit of it that would, I think, be hardest for a lot of folks to accept. We have racist narratives by which Native Americans are spiritually wise, Asians are math geniuses, Arabs are poets, Jews are People of the Book–but I don’t really know of a racist narrative that compliments the minds of black people. But yeah, you’re right, saying that white people are uniquely dumb is an interesting hypothetical.
I think it’s reasonable to presume that the public reaction would be different for different ethnic groups were data found to suggest superior genetic intelligence.
It doesn’t seem outlandish to suggest that there would be more public resistance and dismissal if it were found that black people had superior genetic intelligence than if it were found that Asians or Jews had superior genetic intelligence.
Which is exactly LoHD’s point. Lots of white people already think Asians are naturally smarter, so any evidence that supports this wouldn’t cause cognitive dissonance like it would if evidence suggested blacks were smarter.
Nor would this breakthrough cause white people to investigate gene therapies to make themselves like Asians, which is what you suggested they’d do. Whites are comfortable with where they sit in the racial hierarchy because they see themselves as “best all around”, and that would not change if Asians were proven to be smarter.
I wasn’t correcting you. 
I was just pointing out that “blacks are smarter” wouldn’t be the only thing that would cause people’s heads to explode. It would also be the notion that white people’s superiority is only a manifestation of their disproportionate power and influence rather than anything innate. This part is missing in the “smarter Asian” comparison.