As I mentioned in my earlier posts, any biological differences between races in the area of athletics were thoroughly debunked a long time ago. I participated in the threads on this website where we discussed this in excrutiating detail. The current discrepancies you see in the professional leagues are a sociological anomaly that has no scientific basis whatsoever. If you were observing boxing 80 years ago, you would have said that it was obvious that Jews were biologically superior boxers. Not so much today. Thirty years ago, you would have said that blacks were biologically equipped to play baseball. Now that could be observed of Central Americans. Blacks are no more better physically equipped to play certain sports than Koreans are to run grocery stores. All of this is sociological, and will change.
The Federal Government also has the problem of disengaging the local populace from the process. Washington is remote, city hall you drive past daily. It’s important to civic engagement. I think electing Senators for instance is one of the owrst things that ever happened in America. It got us disengaged from the local.
Sorry, you’re wrong. While it is true that there are waves of ethnicities that will dominate a sport due to sociological factors (and boxing is a good example, there are real physical differences. Strongman competitions are pretty much dominated by Scandinavian types. Look at the Olympics and you’ll see sprinting dominated by those of West-African descent. While marathons are dominated by those from Kenya and surrounding areas. To say that they’re is not—cannot—be physical disparities between races (or what is commonly characterized as races) flies in the face of reality.
And why would that even be surprising? We see that their are characteristics that have been selected for and passed on: skin color, hair texture, eye shape. Why is it so strange that these easily recognizable traits might be accompanied by other population-specific physical traits that are seen only through performance?
These black folk are going to be mighty confused the day they “overcome” and there are suddenly a whole bunch of smelly hippies telling them that they are greedy and selfish and ruining our planet with their awesomeness.
White guilt has a well-defined beginning and end… but being persecuted for being awesome is a torture of which the menacing group knows no satiety.
I don’t know how to quantify this, but when white people stop turning to the nearest black person and expecting them to speak for the entire race of people, as if black people are both interchangeable and in touch with every other black person. Not all white people do this, but I have seen it over and over again. When this stops, or at least when nearly everyone sees why it is ludicrous, then they will have overcome.
And the question has been answered!
Probably. Or at least State. Because the current system where rich districts can pay for well-funded schools (the rich get richer) while poor districts can only afford drastically under-funded schools (the poor get poorer) is not a very good way to provide equal educational opportunities to all students.
Don’t forget Ok, assessment tests biased towards white culture – wait a minute, asian people do even better than whites on those tests.
Basically it’s a big epicycle game. The simple and obvious explanation for what’s going on is that the Egalitarian Hypothesis is incorrect.
However, for people on the Religious Left, a cornerstone of their dogma is that all racial and ethnic groups are equal in innate mental abilities. From their perspective, this principle CANNOT be wrong. It’s like asking a fundamentalist Christian to honestly consider the possibility that the world was not created by God as described in the Bible. It simply cannot be, as far as they are concerned.
Thus, epicycles must be created to explain away the failure after failure of liberal programs to correct the inequalities which exist in America.
I agree 100%. There’s always room for more epicycles.
Yep, exactly. That’s what I was alluding to.
Chief Pedant, your own cite suggests numerous reasons for the divide when one takes away the factor of income disparity, none of which are “innate differences”. Afrocentric curriculums, general school quality, white teachers’ prejudices, the well-established existence of stereotype threat/stereotype vulnerability, etc.
And as you suggest, “black” is a social category in the US, self-assigned (and, I would argue, historically and societally assigned to anyone who looks as if they could have black ancestry). Many black people in the US are in large part genetically European. So how can they be deemed intellectually inferior to whites? Because they’re a bit African? But as my BBC cite above suggests, second-generation Africans often perform better academically than Afro-Caribbeans and poor whites in the UK. Cultural attitudes towards education amongst e.g. Nigerians compared to Jamaicans may account for this.
Until we can raise second-generation black African children and European white children in a lab [accounting for all ethnicities!], there is no way to find what innate differences there may be; as it stands prejudice, school quality, cultural attitudes are all contributing factors that stand in the way.
So essentially there is no possible evidence which could possibly falsify the Egalitarian Hypothesis, as you see things.
I looked over all those reasons and found them weak and speculative. You may do your own due diligence examining them.
I do not disagree with your points regarding the looseness of “black” as a category, the confounding nature of other variables, and so on.
Nature v nurture has been endlessly debated here and elsewhere.
My observation is that those who believe human populations are not innately different hold that belief as a Core Belief, unassailable by any observations. Their arguments for better data remind me of tobacco companies whose approach to concerns about healthcare effects of tobacco was to criticize methods and analysis, and continue calling for more proof.
Black-white-asian differences are world-wide and remain about the same across all nations with all histories; they cannot shown to be unique to the United States. None of the many and extraordinary efforts have been able to eliminate those differences.
It should be obvious that parsing out various sub-populations of blacks and comparing them to various sub-populations of whites or asians might result in a reversal for that particular set of sub-populations. What is interesting (and promotes my impression above) is that where such a parsing demonstrates a superiority for blacks, it’s taken as a clear rebuttal that there must not be average differences in the black-white-asian cohorts. Where parsing into finer sub-groups demonstrates inferiority for blacks, it’s taken as some sort of skewed study that only selected a sample unrepresentative of the broader group.
It makes us feel better to believe that all human groups are basically the same. I understand that, but I find no evidence for it, and if someone is determined to lump “self-described blacks” into a cohort, that is their prerogative. When they do so, they will find that that particular cohort performs differently from the large and loose cohort called “asian” or “white.”
It’s a bad idea to lump people into race-based cohorts. It’s an equally bad idea to blame society alone for the outcomes of a self-defined cohort. It opens up that cohort to an examination of potential differences, and it legitimizes studies which are very divisive and very harmful (my opinion, of course).
The fact that I want all populations to be born equal does not mean that they are. I am not expecting the Inuit to take over the NBA any time soon. I am not even expecting whites to resume the NBA prominence they had when society barred a man from playing because of the color of his skin. I note that when that constraint was removed and merit became the standard, athletes self-described as black rose to the highest level of that pursuit despite the absence of equality in opportunity. Students self-described as black have not risen to dominate engineering despite over 4 decades of active and aggressive efforts aimed at promoting that particular cohort.
We have got to stop lumping people. And we have got to stop pretending we are all equal and that the only possible explanation for the underperformance of groups we seem so determined to promulgate as a category is, for example, racism.
Finally, it’s impossible to accurately infer what’s in a person’s heart from a message board, but for what it’s it worth I will be most delighted if I am wrong. I have no axe to grind and nothing personal to gain. I am, however, unable to dismiss the evidence out there simply because I do not want it to be so.
I suspect that, going forward, a substantial sub-population of blacks in America will be highly successful. I for one, have longed for such a day. I do not believe there will be an attendant success for an even larger segment of the black population and I am deeply saddened by that.
For those of you demanding more proof that it’s nurture and society, and not nature, which separates us, I offer a cautionary note: We are unraveling the genome. Be careful what you wish for.
Why? I want to know the truth: that’s what’s going to enable us to best improve public policy.
Just to follow up on my last post, I would argue that alexandra’s position is fundamentally the same as that of a hypothetical tobacco industry executive who will not accept that smoking causes lung cancer. As far as the actual evidence is concerned, anyway.
ETA: I just noticed that Chief Pedant drew a similar analogy. I basically agree with him.
Given your position on global warming, and the documented cooperation between tobacco companies and oil companies in astroturf campaigns, there’s more than a little irony in your making this analoy.
Daniel
Actually I do see a relationship between global warming and the egalitarian hypothesis. Both fit nicely into the anti-west sentiment which is so popular among the Religious Left.
Why do you think the Duke Lacrosse hoax gained so much traction?
I don’t see any irony in being a skeptic (or a “denier”) about CAGW as well as about the Egalitarian Hypothesis. Perhpas you could spell out your point?
The exact same fake grassroots organizations that promulgated the “Global Warming is a Myth” myth also worked on the “The Tobacco-Cancer Link is a Myth” myth.
Daniel
I still am not sure what your point is, but do you have a cite for that? I would love to know which organizations have worked against the belief that smoking causes cancer and used fake grassroots efforts. (Just like our hypothetical tobacco industry exec who will never accept that smoking cigarettes causes cancer.)
No, it isn’t. There are a ton of “poverty pimps” out there who do nothing but make money off victimhood. I’ll offer Jesse Jackson and Quanell X as two primo examples.
I am sure those who hold (as an a priori Core Belief) that all groups are equal are content that the notion of “biological differences between races in the area of athletics” has been “thoroughly debunked.” The use of that phrase (“thoroughly debunked”) to substitute for evidence is quite common on this board.
I call nonsense. It’s a strawman. Only a twit would consider what happened in sports decades ago to be reflective of anything remotely close to equal access. Without equal opportunity it’s foolish to pretend that various sports just sort of cycle through various completely arbitrary participants.
As equal opportunity becomes more pervasive and the field of participants becomes more inclusive, the cream which filters to the top will be an increasingly accurate reflection of which populations contain the highest proportion of individuals gifted for that sport–and it will not be a proportional representation across all interested populations.
Of course there are other variables. What nature does is establish a maximum potential; what nurture does is develop that maximum potential to varying degrees. The NBA is an excellent example of a population so superior at that sport that despite lower opportunity and poorer nurturing they nevertheless are over-represented. What should be debunked is the notion that asians and whites are underrepresented in the NBA because they are lazy or simply content with lower salaries and less success than an NBA career would provide them.
It’d have to be a hell of a lot stronger than what has been provided thus far. Chief Pedant thinks that science may offer up stronger proof - it may do. Personally I would expect that it would not show a huge amount of diversity between Americans of different skin colours compared to the amount of diversity amongst those who are 100% ethnically African.
:dubious:. Can you expand on that? Cos I’d assume that evidence for the relationship between smoking and lung cancer is a lot stronger than “this one statistic suggests a causation, and I’m going to argue that this cause is more important than all the other suggested causes”.
But I think we’ve got this thread bogged down into this one debate so I’m going to open a new thread shortly, I think.