The question is not whether non-physical traits can be genetically determined. I think it’s pretty clear that they can be, although often through complex combinations of genes and with different outcomes based on other factors. The question is whether the expression of those genes can be linked directly to the physical variations that we use to classify people by race. When I look at the human beings all around me, and I look at the long sweep of history, it seems self-evident to me that they cannot. I am not saying that I would not accept the evidence if it proved me wrong. I’m just saying that at this point there is no evidence, and based on my current understanding, I have no reason to think that there ever will be.
I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to suggest that some personality traits have a genetic component.
I don’t expect to ever see any evidence that personality traits are genetically linked to skin color, though.
ETA: Or, what SpoilerVirgin said.
Boys of working class and various ethnic backgrounds seem to do disproportionately badly. Perhaps they benefit particularly strongly from single-sex education, which is even rarer for boys in the state (= US “public”) system than it is for girls.
There are very few black teachers and Principles in many predominant black schools. School counselors do not give blacks student information of scholarships and grants. Black students receive twice the discipline than white students, for very small infractions. Too many parents are trusting white teachers to instruct and inspire their children. Sadly black students know that and lose interest in going to a hostile environment of racism. Black American citizens have two choices either get involved in the PTA’s and attend school board meetings, volunteer to assist teachers OR start their own schools through their churches, which I favor. Education is important and powerful to help black students to think. Too many Black Americans do not vote, and do not attend the hearings when the city council is interviewing for a new school superintendent. Many Blacks do not vote on the petitions when voting. Black Americans in Rosewood and Tulsa didn’t have many of the social problems and racial problems before they were destroyed by jealous white Americans.
Black Americans need to retreat and form their own neighborhoods, businesses, black run schools and with many black police officers. This is what the Latinos, Jews, Italians, Chinese have done. Sadly Blacks think it is a major accomplishment to live next door to a white family and their children go to school with other white students. .
harolddc, welcome to the SDMB. I note that you have responded to a thread that has been inactive for over four years. Many of its participants are no longer posting, here.
Further, your post is a collection of unsubstantiated generalizations. Some of them may contain a kernel of truth, but this is a debate forum and without corroborating evidence, your claims are going to be dismissed or attacked.
Which schools are you talking about, and what proportion of the teachers and principals at those schools are black?
How often does this happen? In other words, cite?
You seem to be implying that white teachers automatically create a hostile environment. Is that what you are saying? If so, could you please cite the evidence that black (or Asian, or Hispanic) teachers do a better job teaching than white ones do?
Are you saying that Latinos, Jews, Italians, anc Chinese have their own private schools and police force? If so, again, I would need to see a cite.
Regards,
Shodan
I assume he is saying that those groups were concentrated in certain areas - certainly true - and that they were able to prosper because they controlled local business and government - highly questionable. I don’t think black folk in Tuskegee are doing any better than black folk in the most mixed communities.
Cite:
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/report/2014/05/04/88962/teacher-diversity-revisited/
I know this thread has been resurrected, but I’m interested in something related to what Lamia brought up: if you compare black and white kids only to those near them geographically, do the differences shrink? I bet they do.
I wonder if they’ve ever done a study of black vs white test scores just in the northern New England states and/or other states that have few cities of size and generally low populations with even lower populations of minorities. If there’s a big discrepancy in states without many inner city schools to speak of and the poorer kids aren’t being segregated to less desirable schools because there’s only one school at all (so they’re getting the same quality of education as everyone else in town with them,) only then there might be reasonable evidence that it’s related to race rather than social or economic constructs.
Thanks for this. I was also wondering about
and especially
Regards,
Shodan
I think this
probably hasn’t been studied enough to determine whether it’s actually a major reason why black students under perform. This doesn’t mean we can’t have a discussion about it, because to a lot of us it sure seems like people are less likely to trust black professionals, and are more likely to assume negative things about them.
There is some evidence for a similar type of problem. Teachers expect less from black students. I expect that this type of “assume the worst” mentality also applies to black adults. Sure, it’s not an overt type of Jim-Crow style racism, but that doesn’t make it any less destructive.
One of the difficulties in arguing for racially hostile environments, lack of black teachers, and so on as the reason for high-opportunity blacks underperforming is that neither parental education nor family income overcome the marked disparity.
Black children with highly educated parents underscore whites and asians with poorly-educated parents. If the parents were able to achieve a high education, surely they should be able to pass along to their own children some tips and techniques to avoid underperformance.
For example, in this 1994 study which parses out SAT scores by race and parental education,, asian students from families where a parent had a graduate degree scored 588 on the SAT Math; black students from families where a parent had a graduate degree scored 436. By way of comparison, asian students where a parent had less than a high school degree scored 478. (Appendix table 3-8)
Thus, for mathematics, asians from families with substantially under-educated still scored well above blacks from families with a much higher level of education.
Both the College Board and colleges themselves have become increasingly reluctant to share date with specific breakouts by race, opportunity and entrance scores. If one considers parental education an advantage over the lack thereof, then lack of parental education is not an explanation for the marked disparity of academic performance. To argue that the problem is a race bias on the part of teachers, one would have to speculate that black parents were able to overcome the putative race-bias and low performance expectation, but were unable to pass along how to do that to their children.
We’ve had this argument before, but I’ll try to leave out the vitriol and the points of greatest contention.
The fact that some black parents are able to achieve does not mean that obstacles don’t exist. It’s entirely reasonable and entirely possible that there are obstacles for black children, or perhaps just some black children, that one individual is able to bypass or overcome, while another individual is not, for various reasons. The second can be the child of the first or vice versa.
In short, if being black makes things tougher, it doesn’t mean that no black person can succeed… and as a corollary, if an individual black person can succeed despite the things that make it more difficult, it doesn’t mean that every single black person can succeed.
I went to a very highly academically regarded private high school, and a black friend of mine (one of very few black guys at the school) commented that he caught nine kinds of hell from his black friends and acquaintances in his neighborhood and at church. Apparently he was seen as “wanting to be white” or putting on airs/thinking he was better than everyone else because he was going to a college prep school and planning to go to college. Very much the “crabs in the pot” type problem.
I suspect this kind of attitude is a HUGE part of the relative lack of academic success for black students. From what I can tell, lower income Hispanic students suffer from a different sort of attitude, and that’s one where going to college/having anything other than a trade type job isn’t really expected or encouraged. Teenage boys go and more or less apprentice with their friends and relatives doing stuff like laying tile, framing houses, etc… and then just segue into those jobs as they drop out or graduate. There’s not a cultural expectation that college is even an option for most of them.
I think the cultural attitudes of your peers have a HUGE impact on school aged kids. Even a black kid from a educated black family would have black peers with somewhat poisonous attitudes that might cause underperformance. I mean, growing up as a white, middle class kid, there was an expectation among ALL my friends that we were all going to go to college eventually, and it only got more intense as I went to high school at a college prep school. Saying that you didn’t plan on going to college would have been like saying you planned to become an alcoholic and live in a dumpster. There was a lot of peer pressure to at least get into college, if not necessarily make great grades. Couple this with parental and family pressure, and you have some powerful motivators.
If a kid’s only getting expectations placed on them from their immediate parents, and not from their peers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, school administrators, etc… it won’t have nearly the impact that it would if all of them are singing in harmony, so to speak.
For low expectations and peer pressure to be an explanatory explanation, one has to postulate that not only do they exist beyond an anecdotal layer; the black students themselves (along with their educated and privileged parents) are unable to decide to perform anyway.
I find this “susceptibility” argument demeaning, as it presupposes that neither black parent nor black student can figure out the importance of academic performance.
Beyond that, the argument has to apply uniquely to blacks, as it not advanced to explain the performance of asians.
No, the black students themselves just may find it harder to succeed anyway. Not unable, but more difficult.
No it doesn’t – it just presupposes that, whatever their beliefs, it may be more difficult for them to succeed due to various obstacles.
It may also apply to any other group with lower test scores on average.
OK, whatever makes sense to you, I guess.
I’d be embarrassed to advance an explanation that makes someone sound either too stupid to grasp the consequences, or too sensitive to ignore low expectations.
But Your Mileage Apparently Varies.
My explanation doesn’t do either of those things – I don’t think you fully understand it. But we’ve been through this before.
I’ll try to lay it out concisely: it’s possible that in our society there are multiple obstacles that make it harder for someone to succeed, academically and professionally in some fields, if they are black. This doesn’t mean it is impossible to succeed, and it doesn’t mean that those who succeeded despite these obstacles found some magic formula – they may have succeeded through a combination of nearly superhuman hard work/determination, talent, luck, and other factors, which may be almost impossible to purposefully replicate. This is just one possible explanation that would explain lower test scores and many other phenomena, and fit the entirety of the facts.
Then if I understand correctly, you are postulating some factor or combination of factors that cause blacks to under-achieve that does not cause non-blacks to underachieve. Call it X. What you think that X might be?
[ul]
[li]It isn’t socio-economic status, since high-SES blacks underachieve as compared to low-SES Asians and whites. [/li][li]It isn’t parental education, because blacks with a parent with a graduate degree score lower on average than Asians whose parents dropped out of high school. [/li][li]It doesn’t seem to be racism, since Jews and Chinese in the US who experienced vicious racism tend to outscore whites and blacks in the US. [/li][li] It doesn’t seem to be language barriers - see, again, the Chinese, and the Japanese in the US. [/li][li]It doesn’t seem to be self-esteem, since self-esteem in blacks does not seem to be controlled by contact with racism (cite). IOW for blacks, none of the other factors that are associated with low academic test scores apply.[/li][/ul] Therefore factor X must be something else.
IOW and AFAICT we agree that factor X exists and explains the differences in black achievement. I think we also agree that factor X cannot be overcome by high SES, by parental training and example, or by anything that any other racial group has used. We simply disagree on what factor X could possibly be. Correct?
Regards,
Shodan
[quote=“Shodan, post:159, topic:482948”]
[li]It doesn’t seem to be racism, since Jews and Chinese in the US who experienced vicious racism tend to outscore whites and blacks in the US. [/li][/QUOTE]
How recently in your town was there a separate school for Jews or Chinese people? It was about forty years ago in my town. When the schools were finally integrated, the black school was abandoned, along with all their cultural institutions (e.g., a state-championship marching band), and the black faculty, despite having the highest percentage of masters degrees of any high school in the state, were first out the door when there were layoffs.
When you talk about the vicious racism experienced by Jews and Chinese people in the US, is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?
And it’s only one factor, of course; I could also talk about the destruction of the black business district by “modernization” plans, or the refusal to lend money to would-be homeowners who were black, or a lot of other factors.
The racism that white people have shown toward black people in our country is significantly worse than the racism white people have shown toward other racial groups in our country.