1) Black people are not actually less “good at stuff”, we just have a habit of defining “stuff” in a way that excludes the things that black people are more likely to excel at.
And, 2) Where black people do statistically worse, it’s not due to any innate difference, it’s because socially accepted “normal” support systems are more useful for people with challenges more common in white populations than challenges common in black populations.
So the idea is, if you change the support systems and measures of success to be more universal, the differences will go away.
And then the metric for whether administrative bodies have succeeded in this is “equal outcomes”. What you call “racism”.
But the inferences on which this affirmative action position are based make rational sense. There’s no logical flaw. There’s no conclusive evidence for these hypothesis either, but they are logically plausible.
The opposite perspective is the same: rational, yet lacking any basis in evidence. That is the perspective that black people, through biology, socialization, and/or culture, are actually “worse at stuff”. And the support systems and performance metrics are fair.
There’s no way to prove something is “fair” or “not fair” in the face of “unequal outcomes”. It just comes down to what you want to believe. There’s no rational basis to come to one conclusion or the other.
I choose to believe that all of the big categories of people are pretty similarly “good at things” but I can acknowledge that belief is a leap of faith. The truth is unknowable.
1) It is trivially true that if you define your measure right, you can make anyone succeed. For example black people are better at looking like black people. But we try to define "stuff" in a way that correlates with ability to do economically useful tasks. There are excellent reasons to do so.
2) You are ignoring the obvious fact that blacks do NOT get anything like equal treatment. They start with terrible schools, in neighborhoods that are aggressively targeted by police, and grow up with realistic expectations of going to jail that are amply born out by lived experiences. It takes willful blindness and stupidity to ignore that there are excellent reasons why we should expect poor black performance.
Given that the inferences on which this affirmative action position are based require willful blindness and stupidity to believe, there really is a giant logical flaw. It is most emphatically NOT plausible to say that we should expect equal performance from children whose fathers are in jail, whose schools are atrocious, whose neighborhood is dangerous, and who rightly believe that they are being unfairly targeted by police. Both how common these factors are and how important they are to actual outcomes is borne out by extensive research.
The scientific truth is that we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other. The reason being that we have no way to separate out the impact of racism and history from innate ability. Read https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th... if you want a more complete accounting of that fact.
But you do not need to have an opinion on that question to identify many factors that are helping ensure that black kids don't get a fair shake at life. And it is obvious that affirmative action can be at best too little, too late, compared to the things most urgently in need of fixing.
That said, there are a lot of ways to throw money at a problem and produce very little in the way of results. The education establishment is very, very good at it.(That would be a rant for another day - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a flavor.)
And about crime, the issue of targeting by police is not necessarily the neighborhood, but the person. When police see someone "who doesn't look like they belong", that person gets targeted. As a result black people in affluent neighborhoods get stopped a lot more than white people in the same neighborhoods. So even if black and white kids are doing bad things in similar amounts, the blacks are going to get arrested for it at a far higher rate.
This is not just a random conspiracy theory. See https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/study-ra... for an example of research on racial disparities of how policing is done in Los Angeles. Many other cities have similar problems.
That the problem is not just limited to one bad police department is shown by a simple statistics. In surveys, blacks and whites do illegal drugs at similar rates. But blacks are arrested and charged for that at several times the rate that whites are. And so the arrest and jail statistics make it look like blacks are doing far more drugs than whites. But our best evidence is arrest records are a very severely racially biased sample of what is actually happening.
That said, I'm mostly in agreement with you on affirmative action. But there is one data point that shows a flaw in your argument. It is easy to argue that policies that helped a half-Kenyan kid get into Columbia for undergraduate and Harvard for law school won't help American blacks very much. But Barack Obama went on to become the first black US President. And the symbolism of that seems to be very important for inspiring US blacks in general. So even though it doesn't seem to me like it should matter, in practice it seems to have.
I agree with you that it’s not fair, I’m just acknowledging that the adjudication of fairness happens outside the reach of science. It’s a matter of values not evidence.
But the others contradict most of what you said. The pro-affirmative action position that you outlined requires willful blindness and stupidity to accept. It is very emphatically not equally valid to the alternatives.
There may be better arguments for accepting affirmative action as valid. But that one is terrible.
This argument is at least 40 years old and twice as tired. Richard Rodriguez was plying this in the late 80s, and the anti-affirmative action squad in Cali in the 90s.
It is not "too little too late", it is "better late than never". The disadvantages of background usually crop up as crippling impostor syndrome, which can be helped with the right reinforcement, but the idea that "fathers in jail" or "police brutality" in somebody's background invalidates their access to a higher education is a cop out at best.
The main thing this apologism hides is the inescapable fact that mediocrity + centrality wins every time. Look at any school and you will see the folks with "the right background" making it through. Meanwhile, you will also see those from the challenged backgrounds you describe often dropping out and _not_ because of grades but because the whole environment screams "you don't belong here".
Does all of world history count as data? What should we go by? Propose a test.
It is true that all of world history is data, but it is not necessarily data that can answer any particular question. The problem is the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Both genetics and environment are important to IQ. Both generally affect IQ through long, convoluted, and poorly understood reasons of cause and effect. Therefore we can establish evidence of differences, but can't necessarily distinguish between theories about the causes of those differences.
What would make a difference is a theory of mechanism. For example it is uncontroversial that people with ancestry from Nigeria are better at sprinting, and people with ancestry from Kenya are better at long distance running. For this we can identify specific facts about body type that help with sprinting versus long distance running, and we can identify strong evidence that these body type differences are due to genetics.
But we have no such theory of mechanism that can be applied to IQ. And therefore the mass of data we have about the existence of differences does not distinguish between potential causes of said differences.
I'm sorry but this is blatantly false. "Innately better" is a vague and inflammatory term, but if you define the measure, we can use straightforward statistical techniques to find correlations.
Simple example: East Africans outperform others in long-distance running. In sprinting, west Africans outperform.
We can separate confounders out because we have large data sets. You don't have to just try to compare populations as a mass. We can, for example, look at performance only of black people raised in white families. Or rich black people. Or white people raised in black families. Etc.
Taking the example of IQ, which is the most important statistical measure in these discussions, we can also look at poor populations with high IQ, like Jews (at certain historical times) or various groups of people from East Asia. Vietnamese boat people are a great comparison. It has to be explained how they were so successful despite facing the very similar or arguably worse challenges (e.g. holocaust) as other population groups.
Or look at subgroups of black people, like Nigerian immigrants to America, who have generally better social outcomes than average whites.
All this has been studied to death for decades and many conclusions are well-supported by statistics (at least as well-supported as lots of noncontroversial findings).
Likewise while you can look at historical Jews as a poor population with high IQ, you have the confounder that even then Jews placed a strong cultural value on education and intelligence. And therefore, even while they were poor, Jews were likely to work to improve themselves on both. Therefore this leaves open the question of how much of the difference is due to this cultural factor versus innate genetics.
In the case of Vietnamese boat people, we have families that literally risked their lives for a chance at a better future. This attitude taken to a new country suggests that we should expect them to make the most of any opportunity that they can find. How much of their subsequent success is due to this attitude?
On Nigerian immigrants, I'd need to see a source to believe your "generally better social outcomes" comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans puts the 2018 median household income for members of the Nigerian diaspora into the USA at $68,658. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26... the median household income for white non-Hispanic households at $70,642. At least on the easiest to check social outcome, whites are still doing better.
That said, Nigerians who arrive here tend to be motivated and well-educated. I'm not sure how you can distinguish that from genetics. Doubly so since the poster child for racist claims about IQ is the poor performance of US blacks. Blacks whose African ancestry includes a significant share of Nigerian.
So yes, we can cite volumes of statistics. And it is easy for find lots of books like The Bell Curve that actually do. But when you dig in you won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to genetics rather than some cultural factor.
It is, to put it mildly, not at all well established how SES and assessed intelligence interact.
I'm pretty sure there needs to be a 3) blacks are poorer as well.
It requires acknowledgement of an injustice, and a requirement that the perpetrator has to make good on it. In the case of blacks we have forcible capture, slavery, a variety of discriminatory laws and policies, lynchings, and so on. There is no shortage of historical wrongs done to blacks that were never meaningfully made up for.
So far, so good. However the logic runs into some major problems. First of all, what are the rights of current blacks to reparations due to the wrongs done to their ancestors? Second, how do we identify the perpetrators who need to owe repayment? Third, is it fair to punish those descendants now for the actions of ancestors that they do not know? And fourth, what reparation would be sufficient?
My personal position is as follows.
First, if we extend to one group reparations for wrong past, we have to extend this to all groups. That way lays insanity. I'm half Irish. My ancestors were targeted by the KKK for being Catholic, targeted by the English over centuries for being Irish, and escaped to the USA from an entirely preventable famine. Every ethnic group can rehearse its own story of victimhood, and the act of doing so primarily harms those groups again.
Second, identifying perpetrators is hard. For example American blacks are more likely to be descended from slaveholders than the average white American. I grew up in poverty and there were no slaveholders in my ancestors for at least the last 200 years. I don't think it is fair to ask me to pay for the crimes of other people's ancestors.
Third, holding people accountable for the actions of their ancestors crosses the line into collective punishment. Collective punishments of all kinds are considered human rights violations, no matter how strong the rationale. See https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v2/rule103 for a list.
Fourth, no one-time cash reparation can make up for the ongoing problems that we continue to inflict on black communities. Therefore rather than focusing on the justices or injustices of such reparations we should focus on fixing what we continue to do wrong in the present. Of which, unfortunately, there is no shortage.
Slavery was that long ago.
White's were sold as slaves in North Africa before black slaves where brought to America. Even white women were sold as sex slaves and they used to call them "White Gold". ( You can search for term "White Gold Slavery")
Do whites also get reparations?
Additionally nobody talks about modern day slavery, which are sex slaves. There are millions of women stuck in that trade who were forced in to it against their will and they cannot leave.
They're poor now because they were prevented from gaining wealth then, and wealth grows geometrically
