Despite the usual modern representations, Othello isn’t likely to have been Black the way we’d understand it. At least,the Moors that Elizabethans were familiar with likely wouldn’t be considered “black” today.
The whole “who had it worse?” is irrelevant to LHoD’s point.
He explicitly avoided an such comparison.
The point is that various people like to claim “group A” overcame opression, so if “group B” has failed to overcome their oppression, it must be because there is something innately wrong with them"
LHoD’s response is that differing forms of oppression inflict different forms of trauma that can affect the ability of the group to overcome specific trauma.
= = =
Of course, Chief Pedant’s remarks come across as if they were a deliberate attempt to mischaracterize the discussion. Certainly, no one is claiming that students sit in class ignoring their coursework as they mourn their ancestors. However, there are multiple factors that a social history can affect. To take one example from a quote earlier in the thread: Chinese and Jewish students are often held up as counter examples to the black experience. However, each of those groups have a couple of millennia of a culture that promotes literacy. In both cultures, there are bound to be constant references, in the home, to the value of books and of reading. Even if a particular family does not explicitly reinforce those values, most other families in the neighborhood will. Children will typically see parents and nearly all adults spending time reading. This will not necessarily be true in other homes. It is hit-or-miss whether any child from other cultures will grow up in a similarly literacy-oriented environment.
Africans, particularly those imported as slaves, passing through the breaking process, and then living for decades in an environt where it was illegal for them to learn to read, have no similar cultural associations.
That is one factor. Now if we go through all the various social traumas associated with slavery, Jim Crow, ghettoization in the North, etc., there are probably a lot more issues that interfere with black kids’ learning. (And while successful black parents probably recognize the value of hard work in education, we have no data on how they overcame the obstacles to success. They may not have gotten there through “book learnin’” and even if they did, they may not create the same overall environment of reading in the home and their children may not be exposed to similar attitudes to reinforce it outside the home.)
An enormous black advantage over a white or asian child in wealth and parental education still does not produce black children who can compete academically. It is for that reason and that reason alone that the (black-specific) ancestral suffering is raised. The standard current-nuture explanations such as opportunity fail. A different straw must be grasped to explain a stubbornly persistent average difference which is universal across every political boundary, in every country.
When a highly privileged child is unable to perform on par with a substantially underprivileged child, one may posit current nurturing reasons for that.
Ancestral suffering is not a persuasive reason, period. I have not even seen it advanced for any group other than blacks (nor does it need to be, for the academic world is chock full of students with horrible ancestries).
The idea seems to be to bring this notion up as rapidly as possible when the very difficult issue in that first sentence is raised: high opportunity doesn’t overcome putative nurturing detriments. Then you can just conflate all current nurturing confounders with the horrible ancestral history, and all you have to do is wave your hand and talk about how uniquely blacks have suffered in order to shut off debate.
It works, if the audience buys that some rich black child with educated parents cannot learn calculus because his grandparents suffered. It does not work as an explanation for me. If the black parents have graduate educations, and the white kid’s parents have high school or less, it’s a bit of a stretch to raise the notion that some sort of vague learning culture deficiency is at play.
The general performance outcomes for blacks, whites and asians in most fields of endeavor are the same across the world. We won’t be looking for the next crop of asians to be taking over power sprinting; we won’t be see the next group photos of CERN scientists be dominated by sub-saharans; we won’t plan to drop race-based preferences for academic pursuits in any country that wants proportionate representation.
And the reason is not whether or not Gramps suffered.
Here are the reasons you reference:
“-Gramps was effectively denied access to the GI Bill.
-Gramps was denied access to loans.
-Gramps was first to be fired from his job.
-Gramps couldn’t get good jobs he was qualified for.
-Gramps lived in a shitty neighborhood therefore and couldn’t accumulate wealth the way WhiteGramps could.
-Mom and Dad, like most kids of their generation, tried drugs. But unlike WhiteDad, Dad got arrested for trying drugs and thrown in prison. This is due in part to the shitty neighborhood Dad grew up in, due to the racism against Gramps, and in part due to racist police policies, and in part due to racist criminal codes.
-Dad couldn’t get a job with a felony record, even though White Dad committed similar felonies.
-So I grew up in a high-crime impoverished neighborhood with an overworked mom who hadn’t had access to educational opportunities that WhiteMom had had access to.
-Some dude on the Internet thinks it must be my genes that make studying more difficult for me.”
Not a single one of them is a reasonable explanation why children of wealthy and educated black parents score on par academically with children of poverty-stricken whites.
It’s absurd to try to carry on the same argument in two different threads, so reference that thread to see why you’re objectively wrong and carry on your sputtering about being wrong about that over there, please.
I did invite discussion of it in later posts, and on the one hand I’m glad I did, because I learned something about the fate of black Europeans during WW2 that I didn’t know before–but you’re right that it’s not relevant to my point, and inviting that discussion in this thread was probably a mistake.
For anyone who is interested:
Rethinking the achievement gap: Lessons from the African diaspora
TLDR: The academic success of African and Caribbean immigrants belies the stupid notion that black people are innately intellectually inferior.
It’s sort of ironic that the OP appeared on the same day that this happened:
*"For more than four hours, Noemi shivered through the biting chill and the abject terror of being hidden away inside the refrigerated cellar of a kosher grocery store as a murderous gunman rampaged above.
The cold-storage room had been her salvation when she dashed inside Friday afternoon, escaping the bullets that felled others. But as night fell, she huddled with fellow hostages and worried that it would become her death chamber.
“We’re very afraid, and we’re very cold,” Noemi told a friend, 29-year-old Anthony Ravaux, in a phone call just after 5 p.m. “Tell the police to hurry.”…the siege of the Hyper Cacher market, in eastern Paris’s Porte de Vincennes neighborhood, had already taken a terrible toll, with four hostages dead and France’s half-million-strong Jewish community feeling newly vulnerable to the scourge of radical Islamist violence…
The hostage-taking began just after noon, when Amedy Coulibaly, 32, a French citizen of Senegalese descent, walked into the store and began to shoot. The attack played out hours before the start of the Jewish Sabbath on Friday night, a particularly busy time for a kosher shop…
“They were only targeted because they were Jewish,” the woman, who declined to give her name, said of her colleagues. “They’re just normal people trying to do their jobs.”…
Amid the standoff at Hyper Cacher, Coulibaly told a French television station that he had shot dead a Paris policewoman on Thursday and that he was working in concert with Said and Chérif Kouachi, the brothers implicated in Wednesday’s attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
“We coordinated from the beginning, when they started with Charlie Hebdo and I started with the police,” Coulibaly told the station, BFM TV.
As he spoke, the Kouachi brothers were orchestrating their own high-stakes drama 25 miles away at a mom-and-pop printing business in the village of Dammartin-en-Goele.
But unlike the brothers, who had taken a single hostage when they commandeered the commercial building Friday morning — and later let him go — Coulibaly had an entire grocery store full of terrified employees and customers…
…on the streets of Porte de Vincennes, residents expressed a gnawing fear that the events of the past three days had unleashed a wave of violence with no end.
“This is only the beginning for what’s awaiting France,” said Sam Cohen, a 22-year-old who wore a black hoodie atop his black kippah. “Everyone’s going to grab a weapon, and there will be more and more dead every day.”*
Why are you obsessed with Gramps? It’s not about Gramps, it’s about society – and racism, discrimination, and other factors that may serve as obstacles just for black people would reasonably affect rich black people as well as poor black people.
Stop bothering us with the facts!
You realize the problem with this argument, right? It’s of the same form as
“The academic success of Indian immigrants in the United States belies the stupid notion that Indians (i.e. people from india) are innately intellectually inferior to white people.”
In both cases, the problem is that immigrants to the United States aren’t representative of the population from which they are drawn. Indians are, probably, less intelligent (on average) than Europeans, it’s just that the 3 million or so Indian immigrants to the states (and their descendants) represent a tiny, selected slice of the population (in large part, selected for higher IQ).
Now, your argument makes more sense than the one about Indians, because the Caribbean diaspora is much larger. Around 45% of Jamaicans have left Jamaica, compared to around 3% of Indians, so an average Jamaican-American is more representative of Jamaicans than an average Indian immigrant is of Indians. Still, one can’t take immigrants, necessarily, as representative of the population from which they come, and their success doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the traits of the population as a whole.
(Again, I’m agnostic on the causes of the black / white gap in the United States, and wouldn’t be surprised if the ultimate debate gets settled either way).
You’re somewhat familiar with the idea of hereditary epigenetic influences, right?
It’s been awhile since we had a good thread for the scientific racists to spread their message. I wish it had been longer.
For the record, I’m not using the term “scientific racist” as an insult but am choosing to use the term academics use.
Is it even worth asking for a cite for something like this?
I doubt that this statement is in any way accurate. I suspect that is nothing more than word games regarding “enormous. . . advantage,” “wealth,” and “education” that still relies on averages where such attributes are not actually present in the averaged populations, making assumptions about each of the terms that are not supported by actual data.
It also avoids addressing the point I made while pretending that that situation and others cannot possibly be responsible for the outcome (which has not actually yet been proven).
Sadly, it hasn’t–there’s another thread in which that garbage is being tossed around like confetti on New Years Day. Both links I offered earlier go to that other thread.
This particular analogy, however, is one I’ve seen several times, and I thought it’d be worth addressing it head-on.
The difference is most likely cultural. As John McWhorter and Thomas Sowell point out, black folks in the Caribbean were victims of the slave trade, yet do well in school.
[QUOTE=John McWhorter]
Yet many groups have triumphed over similar (or worse) obstacles—including millions of Caribbean and African immigrants in America, from Colin Powell to the thousands of Caribbean children succeeding in precisely the crumbling schools where black American kids fail.
[/QUOTE]
Since we can rule out genetics, and we’re talking about the same schools by and large, it comes down to culture.
Lynn estimated Indian IQ at 83, based on a bunch of other studies between 1966 and 2000. Again, those numbers are probably not terribly reliable because India is a poor, malnourished and disease ridden country. But the abysmal PISA scores from a few years ago do suggest it’s pretty low.
Jews in Egypt. Passover, Moses, remember?
Yeah, but… the American enslavement of Africans actually happened.