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Apparently, HBD offends black people. Who would have thought?
Well let me qualify the above statement. Black people are offended when you provide data suggesting blacks, on average, are less intelligent than whites. But if you tell them "white men can't jump", that's clearly not racist. Tell them about the dominance of blacks in sprinting events such as the 100 meters and they'll surely not accuse of insidious intentions.
But they get real pissed when you talk about intelligence. I think this speaks to the pervasive collectivism apparent in the black community. Now blacks were, at one point, excluded from most of the mainstream institutions. As a result, they were forced to create their own entirely black social structures, like black fraternities, churches, civil rights organizations, and the most communistic holiday ever: Kwanzaa. The problem is that while society's racial mores have progressed towards tolerance, blacks have been largely obdurate about integration. They stubbornly allow these exclusionary and "officially" black institutions to persist.
It's in this behavior that we see their holding onto racial collectivism. It's also the stimulus that causes their ire when confronted with racial intelligence differences. For many blacks, their self is strongly connected to their inclusion in a particular race, rather than their individual merit. Now I'm not discounting ethnic cohesiveness; it can provide a strong emotional base. But when that becomes an overriding theme to one's sense of self, that's a problem (see Obamas). They are actually personally insulted by statistics of a group.
I've witnessed this odd cognitive dissonance, but I still don't understand it. How can the average of a group insult you if it doesn't apply to you an an individual? Once again, we see how identity politics poisons.
Finally, I ask, Does Yao Ming feel slighted when Shaq comes up to him on the court and says: Ya know, Asians are, on average, shorter than blacks?
5 comments:
John Derbyshire discusses why it is so hard to discuss rationally:
And here is where you bump up against the fact that what makes human nature so hard to discuss coolly is human nature itself.
One component of human nature is a cluster of emotions associated with group membership. On the positive side there are loyalty and patriotism, selflessness and co-operation, leadership and followership, teamwork. On the negative: hostility to other groups, anger and sadness at exclusion from the group, eagerness to submit to authority, hero-worship, the Mob. Anyone who has seen real, effective leadership in action, admires and respects it, and acknowledges its necessity for any kind of group achievement. On the other hand, the German word for “leader” is Führer, and it takes some unusual measure of selflessness to fly a plane into a building.
(In the long shadow of WW2, Arthur Koestler wrote a book about this, concluding with the recommendation that late-20th-century pharmacologists bend their efforts to making a drug that would eliminate, or at least suppress, the groupish emotions — the source of too many human catastrophes, according to Koestler. Fortunately — according to me — nobody paid attention.)..
Like every other feature of human nature, the groupish emotions are unevenly distributed. Some individuals are richly endowed with them. They are plunged into despair when their baseball team loses; they bristle to hear their religion criticized; they are furious at insults to their nation; if of eccentric sexual preference, they may swear brotherhood with those similarly disposed; and yes, they are mad as hell to hear their race described as failed, even though they understand at some level that it’s an abstract statistical description that does not reflect on them personally, any more than their baseball team’s losing the World Series does...
If you are not that type — and most people, even most Americans, are not — it’s much more difficult for you to discuss human-group differences. Too much groupish emotion gets in the way. It was hard not to notice, in the recent kerfuffles about illegal immigration, how many people on the pro-illegals side had names like Rivera, Chavez, Sanchez,...
But see, as I’ve just pointed out, people strongly susceptible to group identification do better in the world — are more successful. It’s a social world, success-wise, and they’re social people. What is social success, but identifying with groups and securing high status within them? Having a set of good robust groupish emotions will do that for ya. Thus, race realists don’t get much of a hearing; and when they pipe up, their views sound strange and eccentric. They heat up the groupish emotions of the majority — of most normal human beings — and shouting breaks out."
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjMzYzlmMmQwZDQyMmIxNTk5ZmU2M2ZiZWUxMTZkMzk=
it takes some unusual measure of selflessness to fly a plane into a building....Depends on the context: If you believe that in flying that plane into a building you're pleasing God, and that that action is going to win you rewards in the afterlife that you'd never get on Earth in a "million years," it's not selflessness that's motivating you. Rather, it's exactly the opposite, and is in fact a "rational economic strategy," for your own good.
Blacks are offended when it is mentioned that on average blacks are less intelligent. The problem is in the statement. The less intelligent you are, the less rational you are. An intelligent member of the group can understand that he is not the average of his group. Someone closer to the average, well, knows you are talking about him.
I'm intrigued by the contrast between blacks and South Asians, another group whose average IQ is well below that of whites. While blacks are offended by the HBD people, South Asians to a disproportionate extent are the HBD people!
Any ideas on why that might be the case?
I think this is a facile argument, though I'm not actually sure whether the empirical evidence shows that blacks do care that they are considered less intelligent. Isn't the reason the HBD community is so forward and evangelic about the validity of IQ and intelligence (g) as legitimate constructs, is because they feel that they are ignored as tremendously important and explanatory social variables? There aren't exactly a plethora of high-status jobs requiring superior athletic ability out there, you know. I mean, one can easily admit that one isn't talented at a particular higher-level scholastic subject offhandedly in small talk, but can you imagine anyone frankly admitting in conversation that they are illiterate, as if that didn't matter to their prospects or status? It is because IQ is so fundamental to modern economic understanding that it is so controversial.
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