No, YOU focus. I just explained nine different reasons why a rich black child might not perform as well as a rich white child, which is precisely the same thing as explaining why a rich black child might instead perform as well as a poor white child. The difference between my explanation and yours is that mine is based on documented evidence, while yours is based on a magic McGuffin that you’re still questing for after lo these many years.
I’m open to any explanation with good evidence. My prior is that the difference is due to culture (nurture), for multiple reasons – I’m not close to convinced that IQ tests adequately measure human intelligence, much less the genetic components of human intelligence; culture has been the best explanation for nearly every difference in outcomes for the last few thousand years; the Flynn effect, which proves that there can be significant differences in IQ test scores between groups (like, say, the Irish 100 years ago vs the Irish today) with no difference in group genetics; and the fact that there is experimental evidence that specifically refutes the genetic explanation.
It’s not Gramps’ dilemma, it’s the student’s own life. My hypothesis is that there are multiple things unique to the black experience that serve as obstacles, both in the past and today, for black students to succeed. It’s possible to overcome these obstacles, but the presence of the various obstacles (which might include things like media depictions and role models, peer pressure, teacher expectations, day-to-day racism and discrimination, and many other possible factors) makes it less likely that a random black person will succeed than a white person under the same circumstances.
Wow, that’s profound. Except that it isn’t what I said. So, I guess, your form of argument depends on misquotation, distortion, straw-man projection, and really bad reading comprehension.
In his defense, what else could he build such an argument on?
One factor I forgot to mention that can hold a high-income black kid down: differential discipline. This is something that’s just coming under clear research now. Many teachers (and I try not to be one of them, but it’s certainly a concern and something I stay aware of) appear to discipline black boys and girls much more harshly than white boys and girls for similar offenses. This may be a form of confirmation bias, where teachers assume that black children are worse-behaved and therefore notice their misbehavior more than they notice the misbehavior of white children.
Another factor: justified parent mistrust of school personnel. If parents faced racist hostile teachers when they were students, they’re going to have different attitudes toward school than white parents, and those attitudes may bleed through to their kids, who may not have as positive associations with school as their white counterparts. If kids get in trouble, black parents are far likelier to ask whether the misbehavior was genuine or whether the teacher was responding in a racist fashion; this may make it difficult for school and parents to coordinate response in the case of genuine misbehavior. (Of course if black parents don’t ask themselves that question, they risk doubling the injustice of a racist punishment, which is not going to be good at all either for the kid’s psyche or for his willingness to trust adults in a way that will be conducive to education).
There are a lot of hurdles that high-income black kids face that low-income white kids don’t face. Again, the running up a down escalator is a good metaphor for high-achieving black children. Maybe the high-income black children have better running shoes than low income children, but that doesn’t change the direction of the escalator.
PISA scores (which are probably a decent indicator of intelligence) in India are, to quote this blog, ‘unspeakably bad’. And they’re only from two states, one of which (Tamil Nadu) is average HDI and the other (Himachal Pradesh) is higher than average. http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/first-pisa-results-for-india-end-of.html
I don’t think 'culture has been the best explanation for nearly every difference in outcomes" is necessarily all that accurate. (To take a non-race related example, it’s now become clear that cognitive and behavioural differences between men and women are largely the result of basic biology, to a much greater extent than we used to think). You have some other good points, though. I think the causes of IQ differences are still too murky to conclude much, so I’ll just say that hopefully within the next decade or so you’ll find out if you’re right or not. I don’t think the case for ‘culture’ here is as strong as you think, but I also don’t think the case for genetic explanations is as strong as Chief Pedant seems to think.
But the success of Indian south asians both within India and in countries where they have emigrated is remarkably higher than that of sub saharan africans in every quantitative field I can think of.
Can you think of broad exceptions?
India has nuclear weaponry for goodness’ sakes. Looking at Indian history v sub-saharan is like looking at MIT against the 4th grade science projects. There is no parallel of sub-saharan africans emigrating out to conquer scientific fields, and no history of blacks with sub-saharan africa assimilating and improving complicated technology from other nations. Majority-black countries anywhere in the world, on average, are utterly dependent upon foreign intelligentsia.
South asia exports brains, and ironically enough, when Indians were exported as laborers to african nations, they became more successful than the native populations.
IQ tests don’t need to completely capture the intelligence of a human being to measure something real. But that is beside the point.
Just in general, do you think intelligence is based on our genes or not? On a scale of 0-100% how much influence do you think genes have on intelligence?
Virtually none? Assuming of course the people growing up were not starved or otherwise stunted, I think a great deal of the variation comes from raw genes. You have examples within the SAME FAMILY where some kids are better at math than others. Do you REALLY want to trot out the sociology metric to explain away all such variations?
For genes to matter, they don’t need to influence all of intelligence, or even most, just SOME. If even 20% of a persons intelligence was directly related to their genes, it’s OVER. The game is lost. Because gene/allele frequencies are NOT evenly distributed between individuals OR populations.
That is the reason why you have so many variations in skin tone and other features where the distribution of alleles varies between groups.
People don’t reject these arguments because they don’t make sense, they’re quite obvious. They reject them because of the awful implications and unfairness of it all. Well guess what, I HATE the unfairness and injustice of such distributions too. But that should not color our view of the world as it is.
Nature is NOT egalitarian, it is brutish and cruel. Dana Reeve got cancer and died right after her faithful and loving attention to her ailing husband Christopher Reeve, leaving their son an orphan, Stalin lived to a ripe old age. Is that fair? No, that’s NATURE. We need to stop presuming that nature gives a crap about what we consider just or fair, it doesn’t. WE care, and that is enough. But the best way forward is to see the world as it is, with both eyes open, not as we wish it to be. Because then we are in a better position to change the world and engineer it closer to our own image.
I want research done to help make everyone smarter, brain implants, positive selection where the sharper embryo can be selected over others. These activities are the ones that can raise the baseline of achievement across the board and actually dull the gaps that nature, in all its cruelty, unleashes on the world.
Large gaps in intelligence undercuts the very CORE of a meritocratic society. People increasingly rely on higher end skills to make a decent living, and if the basic tools to excel in such fields require ever higher cognitive ability, then large chunks of the population are at an inherent disadvantage through NO FAULT of their own.
Rhetoric like “work harder” to do something like learn to code and earn larger sums of cash in the work force are hollow when the tools that allow one to succeed in such fields are not doled out in equal measure. This is why this is a larger problem that must be solved. And we won’t even begin LOOKING for solutions as long as people pretend that none of the variations and gaps between individuals and populations has anything to do with what we are gifted through the genetic lottery of our genes.
Perhaps our idea of “focus” is different; otherwise one of us does not understand English.
I am asking you to focus on why wealthy and educated black families have children who underperform whites and asians who are from poverty-stricken and uneducated parents.
If you think that’s the same question as a comparison with a cohort of wealthy and educated white families, perhaps you need more practice with English.
I’ve underlined the part of your explanation below to help you figure out where you are comparing the wrong cohorts.
“-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.”
Hear it again: Development of sophisticated technology of any kind is a reasonable proxy for intelligence. (Don’t worry though; wooden clubs are nice too.)
In the suggestion of someone’s post is that an entire country is intellectually lame, internal development of sophisticated technology is pretty good counter evidence that such an implication is too broad.
“PISA scores (which are probably a decent indicator of intelligence) in India are, to quote this blog, ‘unspeakably bad’.”
The Flynn effect only works if you accept that, 50 or 70 years ago black IQ in the US was in the 60s, which would put adult black males of the era into a mentally retarded capacity of functioning. That was the average black IQ for adult males (!), according to Flynn, who puts adult average black male IQ about 85 now.
It is virtually impossible to compare IQ tests across the decades. It’s not a standardized test, and its application to the public does not occur within rigorously similar cohorts.
The basic hope of bringing up the Flynn effect is to demonstrate that IQ must not be genetically driven, or must be a completely meaningless proxy for neurophysiologic function. Sure.
If only we were talking about the same circumstance.
But we’re not.
We’re talking about a black child from a wealthy and educated family being unable to perform on par against children from white and asian families with far less wealth and education.
The performance outcomes are dramatic, and higher education struggles with this every day.
The traditional go-to explanations for an academic score gap were opportunity, wealth, and parental education. They have all been eliminated as nurturing variables which can close the performance gap. As a consequence a school looking at a black applicant from a wealthy and educated family must assign to that student a special consideration for race, because her scores are so woefully below her SES peers and because there are so many other students with poor backgrounds who have better scores.
It’s a stretch to take the putative obstacles you find so persuasive and, a priori, decide they are greater than the obstacles faced by poverty stricken whites and asians from uneducated families. Grasping at that straw is necessitated only by the fact that the “opportunity” explanation has so miserably failed. So we have backpedaled as rapidly as possible to “media, teacher expectations, non-specific racism,” and the like.
That’s terribly kind of you, and to return the gesture, I’ve quoted the correct post of mine to help you figure out that you’re not addressing the reasons why a black child of high-income parents might not achieve as well as a white child of high-income parents. Focus, focus.
I used to tutor inner-city high school students. It became very evident to me early on that there was a lot of peer pressure among black students to not achieve academically, as doing so would bring upon accusations of “being white.” I found the experience very demoralizing.