As a white person I have to come to terms with, that while I drew the white lottery ticket I am, based on demographic averages, one standard deviation below average Ashkenazi Jews in intelligence. While I may argue about the justice of that, its denial will not further my cause. Nonetheless, the ‘I’ of me is all about identity. My “lived experience”, as redundant as that terminology sounds, requires me to see the world in terms of myself as a white non-Jewish person. As such, and not being Asian my chances of having gone to Harvard would be slim to none. There was that thing about my grades in high school, and then the SAT, but looking at the demographics, its clear it was never a level playing field and should be addressed by Congress and the courts. Those numbers are created by government functionaries and they can do something about them. Justice demands no less.
I can only hope that my children will have greater opportunity. It begins with awareness and we are teaching them the power of identity in obtaining social justice. This is a transgenerational movement that will not rest until all are parodied.
The Noble laureates are actually space aliens pretending to be Jewish.
Racial disparities in a Eurocentric society are to be expected and accepted as givens, based on the premise of population differences due to contrasting cultural and environmental factors. Race is real but its defining aspects are impermanent within a mixed race breeding population. Between the genetic mixing of characteristics and cultural influences on their development, racial characteristics blur, become a matter of degree, loose utility as generalizations. People may find their places with less regard of other’s expectations. Integration is a process through time. People doing with each other what they do best—comingling. The law does not prohibit discrimination, but discrimination based on certain defined characteristics including that of race. That’s about as far as law can go without violating its mandate, without infringing on personal rights in general. Structural integration of the races will happen with time and proximity and the consequent weakening of what were formerly seen as useful generalizations.
Let everyone seek a place available to one of their talents. Talent would include measures of intelligence and their correlation with success in specific avenues of inquiry or practice. That blacks, on average, score lower than the overall mean on standardized measurements of intelligence, says nothing about the individual, but of the group, comparatively fewer qualified to become doctors or to run large corporations, and diminishingly small numbers advised to a theoretical physics path. Happiness begins with acceptance of the world as it is, which does not preclude the possibility of improvement, but improvement grounded in real possibility. IQ does not speak to the irreducible quality of being human.
The reason for disproportionate fewer numbers of blacks in positions correlating to higher levels of intelligence and socioeconomic status needs no further explanation than the double bell curve. Other factors may be at play but in themselves may reflect the fundamental logic of Richard Herrnstein’s famous syllogism from his Atlantic article of 1973:
· If differences in mental ability are inherited, and
· If success requires those abilities, and
· If earnings and prestige depend upon success,
· Then social standing (which reflects earnings and prestige) will be based to some extent on inherited differences among people.
‘g’, that which IQ tests attempt to measure, is an elusive concept, but that it correlates strongly to socioeconomic outcomes in a Eurocentric world is incontrovertible. Given the importance of mental ability, as measured by IQ (a measure dismissed out of hand by progressive orthodoxy, but well established among psychometricians and the great majority of biogenetic researchers), and its high correlation with socioeconomic success, the story of race in America may be graphically represented by two overlapping bell curves. The normal distribution of a given variable, taken from a sufficiently large sample, as illustrated in a bell curve graph, will be numerically greatest at its numerical mean (average). The same number of values will lie to the right and to the left of the mean in smoothly diminishing numbers. 68.3% of the sample will lie within one standard deviation (SD) to the right and one standard deviation to the left of the mean. 95% of the sample will lie within two standard deviations from the mean, and three standard deviations will capture 97.5% of the sample. The analytical strength of this statistical ratio is that it is constant through all normal distributions. The mean IQ score for white Americans is approximately 100, that of black Americans 85, or approximately one standard deviation below that mark. This statistical difference has several consequential effects. If one were to superimpose the graph of black IQ distribution onto a graph of white IQ distribution, the large area of overlap reemphasizes the necessity of seeing individuals specifically, rather than as members of a group defined by generalizations that may statistically apply to that group, but are of limited applicability to its individual members. The converse, however, precludes the assumption of group equality in terms of the chosen metric. At the point at which the graph lines intersect, those points to the left will be disproportionately, relative to population, represented by blacks, those to the right disproportionally by whites. Because of the rightward shift of the white population norm and the numerical minority (13.6% of the American population) of blacks, the availability of blacks to fill upper echelon jobs, or elite university admissions, corresponding to IQ requirements of, say one standard deviation above the general population norm and beyond, becomes diminishingly small. (Harvard, other considerations aside, is considering applicants from three standard deviations from the norm, or around the 97.5 percentile.) In the other direction the disproportionate concentration of blacks at one standard deviation below the norm of the white population may be expected to correlate with disproportionate representation in lower socioeconomic positions as well as to increasingly disproportionate representation by measurements of poverty and associated sociological maladies. Employers or institutions seeking to meet aggressive diversity goals in filling higher echelons may have trouble finding qualified black applicants. They certainly exist but will, in terms of the general population, be underrepresented. There are one eighth as many blacks as whites, but the degree that they are disproportionately underrepresented in the higher ranges of the IQ distribution makes the difference much greater in terms of individuals available to fill positions correlating to the right half of the scale. [1]
Underproportioned representation of backs in higher socioeconomic positions is consistently pointed to as de facto evidence of systematic or institutional racism. Racism cannot be dismissed as a partial or even significant part of the explanation, but it is not a complete or necessarily the most important factor in the creation of the data underlying the statistic. Nor can the outcome be taken as evidence of systemic or institutional racism. We know that America has a long history of racism, beginning with attitudes that permitted the ideology of slavery, and that elements of those attitudes have persisted to the present, but anecdotal and statistical evidence exits to argue that those attitudes have not remained constant, but rather have diminished over time, to the point that one may question the degree to which racism remains systematic or institutional, or how, or to what extent, that phenomenon might be quantified. However, the importance of racism’s historical inertia cannot be discounted when considering the black person’s inertial reality.
The recognition of population differences raises questions relating to policy. Is justice, or fairness, best served by the denial that meaningful differences exist between individuals, or better by policies supportive of individuals finding meaningful roles tailored to their potentials, especially as related to policy in the area of public education and occupational preparation. Presuming the absence of material want, i.e., a reasonable degree of economic security, meaning is perhaps a higher human goal, in terms of personal realization, than material gain or even comparative status. Above all, people seek a place within society in which they enjoy dignity and are respected for their roles as individual humans, as ends to themselves. Personal fulfillment entails doing meaningful work well. Accomplishment of that goal implies an alignment of the task to one’s talents. Relative status having been defined, one sets about feathering one’s nest. We all come to our own pons asinorum, that point at which our intellectual capacity does not measure up to the complexity of the problem at hand, beyond which we cannot progress. One may become imbittered by that fact, or look around to see what other work needs doing.
A string may be pushed from here to yonder without it getting longer.
The efforts of elite universities to be more inclusive might best focus on socioeconomic, rather than racial metrics and on the importance of insuring that admissions be based on merit, complex as that definition might be, and that the natural barriers to advancement and interclass cooperation not be artificially overburdened by adherence to fatuous concepts or maintained by misguided philanthropy.
Amplectere Excellentia--
As a white person I have to come to terms with, that while I drew the white lottery ticket I am, based on demographic averages, one standard deviation below average Ashkenazi Jews in intelligence. While I may argue about the justice of that, its denial will not further my cause. Nonetheless, the ‘I’ of me is all about identity. My “lived experience”, as redundant as that terminology sounds, requires me to see the world in terms of myself as a white non-Jewish person. As such, and not being Asian my chances of having gone to Harvard would be slim to none. There was that thing about my grades in high school, and then the SAT, but looking at the demographics, its clear it was never a level playing field and should be addressed by Congress and the courts. Those numbers are created by government functionaries and they can do something about them. Justice demands no less.
I can only hope that my children will have greater opportunity. It begins with awareness and we are teaching them the power of identity in obtaining social justice. This is a transgenerational movement that will not rest until all are parodied.
The Noble laureates are actually space aliens pretending to be Jewish.
Racial disparities in a Eurocentric society are to be expected and accepted as givens, based on the premise of population differences due to contrasting cultural and environmental factors. Race is real but its defining aspects are impermanent within a mixed race breeding population. Between the genetic mixing of characteristics and cultural influences on their development, racial characteristics blur, become a matter of degree, loose utility as generalizations. People may find their places with less regard of other’s expectations. Integration is a process through time. People doing with each other what they do best—comingling. The law does not prohibit discrimination, but discrimination based on certain defined characteristics including that of race. That’s about as far as law can go without violating its mandate, without infringing on personal rights in general. Structural integration of the races will happen with time and proximity and the consequent weakening of what were formerly seen as useful generalizations.
Let everyone seek a place available to one of their talents. Talent would include measures of intelligence and their correlation with success in specific avenues of inquiry or practice. That blacks, on average, score lower than the overall mean on standardized measurements of intelligence, says nothing about the individual, but of the group, comparatively fewer qualified to become doctors or to run large corporations, and diminishingly small numbers advised to a theoretical physics path. Happiness begins with acceptance of the world as it is, which does not preclude the possibility of improvement, but improvement grounded in real possibility. IQ does not speak to the irreducible quality of being human.
The reason for disproportionate fewer numbers of blacks in positions correlating to higher levels of intelligence and socioeconomic status needs no further explanation than the double bell curve. Other factors may be at play but in themselves may reflect the fundamental logic of Richard Herrnstein’s famous syllogism from his Atlantic article of 1973:
· If differences in mental ability are inherited, and
· If success requires those abilities, and
· If earnings and prestige depend upon success,
· Then social standing (which reflects earnings and prestige) will be based to some extent on inherited differences among people.
‘g’, that which IQ tests attempt to measure, is an elusive concept, but that it correlates strongly to socioeconomic outcomes in a Eurocentric world is incontrovertible. Given the importance of mental ability, as measured by IQ (a measure dismissed out of hand by progressive orthodoxy, but well established among psychometricians and the great majority of biogenetic researchers), and its high correlation with socioeconomic success, the story of race in America may be graphically represented by two overlapping bell curves. The normal distribution of a given variable, taken from a sufficiently large sample, as illustrated in a bell curve graph, will be numerically greatest at its numerical mean (average). The same number of values will lie to the right and to the left of the mean in smoothly diminishing numbers. 68.3% of the sample will lie within one standard deviation (SD) to the right and one standard deviation to the left of the mean. 95% of the sample will lie within two standard deviations from the mean, and three standard deviations will capture 97.5% of the sample. The analytical strength of this statistical ratio is that it is constant through all normal distributions. The mean IQ score for white Americans is approximately 100, that of black Americans 85, or approximately one standard deviation below that mark. This statistical difference has several consequential effects. If one were to superimpose the graph of black IQ distribution onto a graph of white IQ distribution, the large area of overlap reemphasizes the necessity of seeing individuals specifically, rather than as members of a group defined by generalizations that may statistically apply to that group, but are of limited applicability to its individual members. The converse, however, precludes the assumption of group equality in terms of the chosen metric. At the point at which the graph lines intersect, those points to the left will be disproportionately, relative to population, represented by blacks, those to the right disproportionally by whites. Because of the rightward shift of the white population norm and the numerical minority (13.6% of the American population) of blacks, the availability of blacks to fill upper echelon jobs, or elite university admissions, corresponding to IQ requirements of, say one standard deviation above the general population norm and beyond, becomes diminishingly small. (Harvard, other considerations aside, is considering applicants from three standard deviations from the norm, or around the 97.5 percentile.) In the other direction the disproportionate concentration of blacks at one standard deviation below the norm of the white population may be expected to correlate with disproportionate representation in lower socioeconomic positions as well as to increasingly disproportionate representation by measurements of poverty and associated sociological maladies. Employers or institutions seeking to meet aggressive diversity goals in filling higher echelons may have trouble finding qualified black applicants. They certainly exist but will, in terms of the general population, be underrepresented. There are one eighth as many blacks as whites, but the degree that they are disproportionately underrepresented in the higher ranges of the IQ distribution makes the difference much greater in terms of individuals available to fill positions correlating to the right half of the scale. [1]
Underproportioned representation of backs in higher socioeconomic positions is consistently pointed to as de facto evidence of systematic or institutional racism. Racism cannot be dismissed as a partial or even significant part of the explanation, but it is not a complete or necessarily the most important factor in the creation of the data underlying the statistic. Nor can the outcome be taken as evidence of systemic or institutional racism. We know that America has a long history of racism, beginning with attitudes that permitted the ideology of slavery, and that elements of those attitudes have persisted to the present, but anecdotal and statistical evidence exits to argue that those attitudes have not remained constant, but rather have diminished over time, to the point that one may question the degree to which racism remains systematic or institutional, or how, or to what extent, that phenomenon might be quantified. However, the importance of racism’s historical inertia cannot be discounted when considering the black person’s inertial reality.
The recognition of population differences raises questions relating to policy. Is justice, or fairness, best served by the denial that meaningful differences exist between individuals, or better by policies supportive of individuals finding meaningful roles tailored to their potentials, especially as related to policy in the area of public education and occupational preparation. Presuming the absence of material want, i.e., a reasonable degree of economic security, meaning is perhaps a higher human goal, in terms of personal realization, than material gain or even comparative status. Above all, people seek a place within society in which they enjoy dignity and are respected for their roles as individual humans, as ends to themselves. Personal fulfillment entails doing meaningful work well. Accomplishment of that goal implies an alignment of the task to one’s talents. Relative status having been defined, one sets about feathering one’s nest. We all come to our own pons asinorum, that point at which our intellectual capacity does not measure up to the complexity of the problem at hand, beyond which we cannot progress. One may become imbittered by that fact, or look around to see what other work needs doing.
A string may be pushed from here to yonder without it getting longer.
The efforts of elite universities to be more inclusive might best focus on socioeconomic, rather than racial metrics and on the importance of insuring that admissions be based on merit, complex as that definition might be, and that the natural barriers to advancement and interclass cooperation not be artificially overburdened by adherence to fatuous concepts or maintained by misguided philanthropy.