I think that we can all agree that IQ tests measure the ability to take an IQ test. What that correlates to in real life has never been reliably established. We can also agree that that African Americans do worse on certain standardized performance tests than other groups. Some of think why that is still up for debate, while others think it must be because they are genetically inferior.
“Conservatives” have their own forms of ideological correctness, including pretending they don’t. :rolleyes:
In the bold text, just what are you asserting? Are you denying that IQ is strongly correlated with academic performance, academic attainment, and income?
I recall “politically correct” being used as an entirely positive and unironic term in the late '80s and early '90s. Among my friends, it usually referred to products which were made without exploiting somebody or trashing some place. In our circle, it seemed obvious that a decent person who, naturally, cared about human rights and the environment wouldn’t choose to buy something that trampled those, given a better choice.
Beyond my circle, I remember doctrinaire “radicals” in college who applied a “PC” (though they may not have called it that) concept of the sort the right would later make much hay of ridiculing, to speech. These are the people who would, for example, object to a lecture on feminist history on the grounds that it should be called “herstory,” completely missing both the significance of the lecture content and the real etymology of the words they objected to.
IQ is determined by tests of the same nature that are used to determine academic performance, which determines academic attainment, which determines eligibility and opportunity for high paying jobs.
Hello tomndebb, can you explain this to me please? Assume I’m intelligent but a little bit autistic. (I’m much more interested in understanding my inability to communicate than in whatever topic we’re debating here; I’ll make this my last post in this thread.)
Here’s my synopsis of the other thread; where do I get confused? (Never mind who “X”, Y", and “Z” might be):
Mr. X: IQ is correlated to race.
Mr. Y: That can’t be, because there’s no such thing as race.
Septimus: We can cluster on genotype inheritances. Whether we call those clusters “races” is beside the point.
Mr. Z: The existence of labradoodles proves that clustering into labradors and poodles is invalid.
I’m guessing others may object because they assume I agree with Mr. A, though I never mention “IQ.” Mr. Z, by the way, is clearly unfamiliar with the concept of statistical clustering.
(I’m not being facetious when I suggest I might be a little bit autistic. I’ve never been so diagnosed, but some of my symptoms might fit and might help explain some of this miscommunication. In another thread I said I was undecided about the Shakespearean authorship and was, to my astonishment, accused of being disingenuous: no one could be undecided on that topic!)
I wouldn’t say that IQ is determined by tests of the same nature as those used to measure academic performance. Academic performance is measured by exam performance, homework performance, paper writing, and attendance. The exams used in classes are different from the tests used to measure IQ. So I’m pretty skeptical of this.
And opportunity for income is not determined just by educational attainment. Actual performance is an important factor. If you have two small business owners with equal levels of education, there’s no saying that they’re going to have about the same levels of income.
I am not denying that whites can be Africans. I have already pointed out that there are many white Africans; not only those of European ancestry but also the indigenous population of much of North Africa. I am saying – and I would have thought that this was completely uncontroversial – that the term “African American” does not embrace every American with African connections (or, for that matter, every African with American connections) but instead refers to a specific population with a particular shared history and culture influenced by the experience of the West African slave trade and by American racial attitudes. Indeed, it’s only because of that shared history and culture that the term “African American” exists, and is useful.
White Africans who migrate to the US do not participate in that history and culture and are not generally described – either by themselves or by others – as “African American”. All the white migrants from Africa that I know describe themselves as “British” and, while I do not insist that every white migrant from Africa must do likewise, I think the fact that they so identify is meaningful, and should not be obscured by insisting that an existing term should have its meaning altered so as to embrace them.
How useful can a term be which, as you say, excludes some of the people its words would seem to include, and at the same time, is incorrectly applied to some of those people because it is understood (by many) as a synonym for “black”?
I don’t have anything to cite, but I disagree. Test taking is a skill in itself. Educational performance tests and IQ tests share many characteristics. Skill at one has a strong correlation with the other. And tests are more and more integrated into the educational system. It’s a self serving system. That doesn’t mean that test taking skills don’t relate to intelligence, but you mentioned the other factors in educational performance that have little correlation to IQ scores.
Opportunity to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer, or a stockbroker, and many other professions require educational attainment. There other influences as well. Why do you think people go to college? It’s not going to make them more intelligent, according to IQ proponents.
The term is useful, as demonstrated by the fact that people make productive use of it, your apparent obstinate refusal to understand the term as it actually is used rather than how you would like it to be used notwithstanding. Complaining about this is like complaining about “Latinos” not being used to describe Italians (“But their language is most clearly descended from Latin!”). Words mean what they’re used to mean, regardless of how they came to do so.
Well, we know it’s useful, because it is in fact used quite a lot. And it’s not my impression that it gives rise to a huge amount of misunderstanding.
As for “excluding some of the people that its words would seem to exclude”, that’s actually pretty common in idioms in English (and I suspect in other languages also). “American”, to take an obvious example, is regularly used to refer to the United States. As in “German-American”, a term previously employed in this thread; I doubt that, when people read the term, Alfredo Stroessner was the stereotype who leapt immediately to mind.
You’d have to be exceptionally stupid to think that it’s a synonym for “black”. Is Nelson Mandela African American? Robert Mugabe?
Of course not, but I have in fact heard the term used to refer to black people who are not Americans at all (for example in reference to Haitian earthquake victims)–these usages are often quickly caught and corrected, but the fact that they happen at all suggests the way the term is coded in peoples’ minds.
Then there’s the usage to refer to black Africans who have come to the United States only in recent years. These people don’t personally share the history and culture that you mentioned earlier, yet they are subject to the same effects of wearing dark skin in this society. In a discussion of the social position of “African-Americans,” at least some parts of the discussion would bear on these Americans of recent African origin. But they mostly identify by their nation of origin or specific ethnicity. And they also, for the most part, find references to black Americans as “African” anything to be slightly ridiculous.
Most uses of the term in my experience, beyond the problematic ones above, can be replaced with “black” with absolutely no difference in communicative value. (Most conversations among Americans which could include “African-American” are U.S.-limited conversations anyway, so one can say just “black” and it is understood to mean black Americans–usefully including more-recently Americanized black persons. If the conversation is such that the historical perspective, or black people in other countries, are relevant, then “black” is itself easily qualified by “American,” or a time period.)
Moreover, the black Americans I know these days, without exception, call themselves and their culture “black.” “African-American” is something patronizing white people say.
So I’m not convinced of its usefulness in general parlance. For me it mostly comes across as awkward, as if the speaker is afraid to say “black” when they are, in fact, talking about people in terms of skin color.
Yep, choice of number, (and, frankly, closeness of relationship), is arbitrary, but it actually shows a geographic description with an arbitrary association of Europeans and some Asians under the culturally determined racial heading of “Caucasian” while lumping the rather diverse people of Africa.
We’re still talking geography, not “race.”
BTW, where did this handy diagram originate? Are there any real numbers associated with it?
I’m not saying that anybody needs to use the term “African American”. In many contexts “black” or “black American” will equally well identify the group of people to whom it refers. I’m neither African nor American, and I don’t use it much myself.
But I do recognise the term, and I know how it is used and what it means. It doesn’t include white immigrants who have come from Africa. And I don’t think that making this observation is tantamount to asserting that whites cannot be African, or that making this observation make me a racist.
Part of the problem occurs when you oversimplify your claim for Mr. Y to “there’s no such thing as race.” (I am not sure that Mr. Z is representative of most posters on the SDMB. That sort of point is generally made in response to claims that labradors “are” X while poodles “are” Y, rather than as support for a claim that race cannot exist.)
While there are posters who make such claims you have attributed to Mr. Y, that is rarely the point that most of us make on the topic. The point is not that “there is no such thing as race” but that the use of “race” in terms of human biology, while being handy shorthand in cultural situations, is an arbitrary and insupportable grouping in terms of biology. It lumps large numbers of disparate populations under a small group of categories that have enough distinction among them to render the word meaningless. Looking at the picture to which septimus linked, for example, we find “Bantu” (a language group) grouped with “Bushmen” (by which I presume the author meant Khoi-San), despite those groups having quite distinct genetic features.
If one wishes to discuss populations, (being careful to identify the composition and indicators for those populations), then the discussion can move forward without the baggage of trying to correct errors regarding “race.” Otherwise, we tend to find assertions that “blacks” are great athletes with posters pointing to dominance of marathons and sprints by “blacks” while ignoring the fact that the marathon and sprint winners come from widely separated regions in Africa that have no connection beyond their presence on the same continent.
Your first sentence is often accurate–even if it is dependant on your personal and anecdotal experience. Your second sentence is not. While black continues to be the preferred term among the black community, a large number of blacks use the term African-American, at least in some contexts. It is hardly “patronizing” to use a term that was promulgated by the grouip that it describes and which is used by a significant number of members of the group.
I would take that graph a lot more seriously if distance between labels had any relation to closeness of genetic relation, but it does not appear to. Either that or it is asserting that “Bushmen” are the African population most closely related to Europeans. If this was to any kind of accurate scale it, Africans would be spread out farther than all of the rest of the chart.
(I know I promised not to post in this thread again, but I’ll try to keep this strictly factual.)
I found a paper with detailed explication and a plot on page 5 similar enough to the network diagram I found via Wikipedia to make me suspect this led to that. The paper uses “40 well-chosen biallelic slow-evolving short insertion-deletion polymorphisms (indels)” on 1064 individuals. I assume the plot in Figure 1 is simply of the two highest-eigenvalued KLT components.
On the issue of African diversity, it’s easy to overlook a key point: While Y-dna and MT-dna analyses show ancient diversifications in Africa, geographical proximity means that the different African groups have interbred over the millenia, so autosomal genes may be less diverse than Strassia suggests.
Slaving along the south coast of England, for example, was commonplace into the 18th century. Read up on the Barbary pirates.
Sorry to dispel your illusions.