Yuku free message boards

If the mere acknowledgement of a truth is never racist, it is nevertheless clear that certain beliefs are racist even if they seem to be supported by factual evidence.

For example, if I inferred from a list of black pathologies that black people are in some way, or in several ways, innately inferior to white people, that would without question constitute a racist belief. (So, for that matter, would the belief that blacks are innately superior to whites.) The reason? Such a belief is rooted in the false premise that "black" and "white" are anthropologically coherent categories. They are not as an overwhelming consensus of anthropologists themselves assure us.
Human populations vary subtly and continuously from one geographic region to another, and have for millennia; the conceptual lines drawn in the 19th century dividing humanity into three races correspond with no fixed set of biological distinctions; there is, in fact, greater genetic variation within races than among them. To cite an obvious example, South Asian Indians are variously classified as Negroids, Caucasoids, or Mongoloids by arbitrary criteria. If you prioritize skin color, you can make a case for the Indians as Negroid; if you prioritize facial features, Caucasoid, if you prioritize hair texture, Mongoloid.

Given then that racial categories are anthropologically dubious, how do we account for trends (such as the statistics on black pathologies) that seem to follow them? The answer lies in the method of studying racial differences. Comparative race studies rely on self-identification by their participants; in other words, you're black if you say you're black, white if you say you're white, etc. The results of such studies, therefore, do not establish biologically rooted correlations but rather perceptually-rooted correlations . . . in the case of standardized test scores, for example, the data establish correlations between thinking of yourself as black, and scoring lower on standardized tests.

Such perceptually correlated disparities are aggravated by the culture of victimization that permeates black communities a culture dominated, in recent years, by hip hop which, literally and figuratively, drums into the brains of young black people that to be black is to be racially oppressed, and which has largely succeeded, in the case of gangsta rap, in equating pathological behavior and black authenticity.
The phenomenon of perceptual differences translating into actual disparities leads us, at last, to a meaningful distinction between the rhetoric of racism, which is increasingly easy to deploy, and the reality of racism, which is increasingly difficult to find.
What is racism, rhetorically?
It's a reflexive, irrational, all-encompassing alibi for black failure derived from a hyper-sensitivity to racially disparate outcomes; it is also, more familiarly-with few exceptions whatever a black person says it is.

What is racism in reality?
It's the false belief that the intellectual, moral, or spiritual potentials of individual human beings are limited by the geographic origins of their distant ancestors; it is also any action predicated on that belief.

i just wanted to reiterate, in the context of recent posts by klip and leviathan about racism in general, that any discussion of race is strictly about groups and not individuals. a statement about a group entails that the same statement applies to all members of the group ONLY IF the statement specifically says so (all X's are Y) I have made no such statement. the main object of my ire is the formal as well as the informal practice of affirmative action. i have a more general argument against aa of which the 1 about race/iq is 1 particular component. take education, for example: the lack of blacks at the higher levels of academia is often explained in terms of oppression for which amends must be made. in light of my posts about race/iq, it should be obvious that i think that this oppression is at most only a partial, logically secondary, explanation for the status quo. but even if i grant, STRICTLY FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT, that oppression is the sole cause of blacks' poor average academic performance, i do not understand the logic of insisting that they be proportionately represented at the better schools despite their inferior qualifications. it would seem to make much more sense if the money and energy devoted to practicing aa were instead devoted to improving black education to the point where they could achieve the test scores and grades required for admmision without aa. i feel particularly strong about this in the case of sa. if aa were rescinded, BEE policies were softened up a bit, and the "new" sa were to become in general more meritocratic (and maybe even try to get sa a little bit further down the list of murder capitals) , the markets' approval of these steps would infuse the sa economy with the kind of investments necessary to make improving the lot of poor blacks economically feasible. let's make the pie bigger instead of arguing how to divy up the slices.

at this point, we would face a dilemma: would the additional revenue be best spent on short term programs like the BIG, or on improving black education to the point where wits, rhodes, etc. were 75% black without the practice of aa? this is where my arguments about race and iq come to the fore, as i suspect that the long term benefits of the later type of investment would fail to ever materialize. i therefore favor the former approach. actually, what would be best would be some middle ground between extremely short term plans like the BIG and extremely long term plans revolving around the desire that all levels of sa society be demoraphically proportionate. what i have in mind is more technical training that would allow sa to take advantage of her unique mixture of managerial expertise and cheap labor so as to become a manufacturing center, particularly in the textile field (but not too cheap, i am not talking about a return to the admittedly exploitative measures of colonialism or apartheid; just fair market value). some people might not be happy with the perpetuation of the racial stratification that this (might) entail, but i firmly beleive that the average individual as well as all groups would be better off than they are now or than they would be under any other plan.

as the governing party, the anc must decide if they favor 1) improving the average as well as the minimum status of all south african residents or if they favor 2) the creation of a small black middle class and an even smaller black upper class composed almost entirely of party favorites. we should note that if we pursue the former (1)in the short term, the later (2)will undoubtedly be realized to some extent further down the road (without the necessity of party connections), but that if we pursue (2) as our immediate goal, this will be a drag on economic growth because of the nature of such redistributive schemes, hence precluding the achievment of (1).

i dont know much about the internal workings of the anc but i suspect that this is the kind of debate that differentiates zuma-type folks from manuel-type folks. on this last point, i would love to hear more from people more familiar with the anc than me.

as i mentioned in my last post, my interest in race/iq stems mostly from my concern with the practice of affirmative action. if it is not appropriate to talk about race, then obviously aa as it is currently practiced should be abolished, as it is exclusively preoccupied with race. perhaps it should be replaced with income-based aa. this might be more appropriate in the us than in sa, as us economic disparities are more evenly spread out thAn in sa. we should note, however, that the us supreme court recently declared that aa was an unfortunate practice that must nevertheless be perpetuated, as this was the only way to ensure "diversity". why income based aa was not considered, and why racial diversity is the only kind that matters i dont know, but i have my sneaking suspicions. when income-based aa was introduced by the oakland, california board of ed for admission to a prestigious "magnet school", laotian immigrants and "poor white trash" kids took the majority of spots.

returning to the race/iq debate itself, mr. olson's argument has several flaws.
1) he complains that "It makes no sense to talk about "races" when we are all complex mixtures of many different peoples." despite the fact that the HGDP he is writing about uses just that term as a point of departure. when they went out looking for amerindians to collect data from, they knew who to look for didn't they?
2) he states that no mechanism can explain why higher intelligence would be naturally selected for in a cold climate such as the one experienced by the original "out of africa" emmigrants (apparently they weren't running away from bad anc govt. ) when i have already pointed out that such an environment would require a lot more planning and organizing than one in which food and shelter were readilly available
3) he notes that skin colour is conferred by only a relatively small # of genes, while thousands go into the composition of the brain. this would be relavant if i were claiming that negroes don't have brains at all (literally), but doesn't do much for the discussion of iq. how many genes might be responsible for the 1 standard deviation in average iq and the lower genius (180+) rate that is being discussed? probably not much more than those necessary for the transmission of nose shape, cheekbone placement, or hair texture.

Nothing wrong with a decent mongrel.

Maori mob in Perth called Mongrel Mob [offshoot of NZ bike gang] are salt of earth.

Good people are mongrels and good mongrels bite hard on the balls.

Present income is easy, but we are looking at historical disadvantage. Each case to be evaluated on its merits would require a thorough background check.
I still like the idea.

Try to keep up!! Half of the "whites" of Europe and Britain have genes showing they have North African blood.

Darwinism, despite its radical effect on science, has yet to temper the self-centered way in which we assess our place and actions in the world. Think of the shadows now falling across our planet: overpopulation, pollution, dwindling and maldistributed resources, climatic disruption, new and resurgent plagues, ethnic and religious hatred, the ravaging of forests and jungles, and the consequent loss of thousands of species per year--the greatest mass extinction, it has been said, since the age of the dinosaurs. So long as we regard ourselves as creatures apart who need only repent of our personal sins to retain heaven's blessing, we won't take the full measure of our species-wide responsibility for these calamities.
An evolutionary perspective, by contrast, can trace our present woes to the dawn of agriculture ten thousand years ago, when, as Niles Eldredge has observed, we became 'the first species in the entire 3.8-billion-year history of life to stop living inside local ecosystems.' Today, when we have burst from six million to six billion exploiters of a biosphere whose resilience can no longer be assumed, the time has run out for telling ourselves that we are the darlings of a deity who placed nature here for our convenience. We are the most resourceful, but also the most dangerous and disruptive, animals in this corner of the universe. A Darwinian understanding of how we got that way could be the first step toward a wider ethics commensurate with our real transgressions, not against God but against Earth itself and its myriad forms of life.