The seriously insistent woke of mostly upper-caste activists among us now insist that black lives matter, and matter most of all. And why? They claim that those Americans of somewhat African descent are consistently and viciously targeted by the rest of us solely for the color of their skin. The content of the character of the inner-city urban element of that demographic gets rather less consideration on the part of the Professionally Woke. The conduct of those poor, misunderstood children of the inner city sink neighborhoods is, to say the least, somewhat questionable. Examples abound, the most recent example being the pair of feral teenagers who hijacked a delivery driver’s vehicle in Washington DC last weekend, and subsequently crashed the vehicle, killing the delivery driver in the wreck. For decades there have been depressingly violent crimes perpetuated by the urban thug elements of color on their neighbors, local retailers, and passing strangers of all colors and ethnic backgrounds occurring on a regular basis, without much comment by the Professionally Woke other than to blame white prejudice/systemic racism for Making Them Do The Crime.
It appears that currently, black lives only matter when circumstances can be construed so as to blame a white person for ending said life. The life of a non-black person damaged or ended by the act of a violent black thug is hardly worth comment at all. That the last half dozen black martyrs whose deaths are regularly lamented by the Professionally Woke were considerably less than sterling of character and irreproachably innocent in their relations with the law is a small detail which the Professionally Woke prefer to ignore.
In the eyes of the Professionally Woke, only that small handful of lives really matter; especially if some kind of Woke Protest event can be created from the loss of them. (Do the lives of the black unborn matter, for instance?) This is depressing to contemplate in considering contemporary inner-city black urban ghetto culture: aggressively ignorant, violent, crass, mired in generational welfare and crime. This in spite of half a century of affirmative action, of outlawing racial segregation, of spotting extra points to students of color when it comes to college admissions. The most well-known black leaders, both political and cultural have done practically nothing positive for the people they claim to lead, offering lip-service but little more when it comes to bettering lives.
Encouraging black youth to better themselves by achieving in school, working at legitimate jobs, eschewing substance abuse and sexual experimentation, and forming stable two-parent families is somehow not in their lane; so much easier, more immediately satisfying and rewarding when it comes to regular gigs in national news media, academia, or in the newly popular gravy train of corporate anti-racism training. At the bottom line of this all is the realization that the problems and pathologies afflicting the worse-off urban black communities can really only be fixed by the community itself. Blaming everyone else for those pathologies is a useless and potentially dangerous diversion. Discuss as you wish.
aggressively ignorant
For a moment there I thought you were talking about the media.
The BLM anti-white racist con is a leftoxenomorph trick forcing too many non-leftoxenomorphs to walk on eggshells, tip toeing around the matter of “blackness” like too many men tip toe around females damselling: too many people mistakenly panic about the risk of being called “ungentlemanly” or “racist” when females abuse their feminazism to be “strong” and “independent” and “equal to men” when it suits them and damselling like crazy when it doesn’t and something very similar goes on with “blackness”
Venezuerican “blacks” are the most privileged on Earth.
Not only are they Venezuerican and are today enjoying the declining remains of the late Constitutional Republic the United States of America (July 4th, 1776 – November 3rd, 2020) but too many of them exist on handouts from whites who do work for a living via subsidies that are actually alms but too many of them commit a disproportionate number of crimes and live a low life of drugs and vices with not end.
And an amazing number of black kids come from fatherless households, one of the worst things you can do to a kid, basically child abuse.
The BLM anti-white racist con is a leftoxenomorph trick to attack whites to destroy civilization with no benefit for blacks.
Blacks are being exploited by leftoxenomorphs for their worth as tools of their anti-white and anti-American PSYOPS.
BLM is the alleged response to the pretense that there’s a crisis of “blackness” and that blacks are being treated unfairly.
But we don’t see any of them trying to escape from Venezuerica. They stay and they mooch. Too many of them are nothing but gibs.
Normal and decent people consider a crisis as something undesirable.
People try to plan their lives so as to avoid crisis.
Many, probably most, go to great lengths to keep crisis away.
And for most of us, if we could have things so that we can live our lives without ANY crisis . . . we would be quite happy with that.
But leftoxenomorphs are another species.
A species at war with humanity.
A species at war with human normalcy and human decency.
And because they are sub-human parasites that live to prey on humanity and their objective is to enslave us and live from us while keeping us as slaves with them as our neo-feudal lords in an ant-hill with a one-hive mind, leftoxenomorph LOVE human crisis.
Every human crisis leftoxenomorphs can bring about is a glorious triumph for their species as it is a defeat for humanity.
That is why leftoxenomorphs spend their time making up crisis after crisis for humans to face.
Most if not all of those crisis are just pure leftoxenomorph bullshit and correspond to nothing in reality but their consequences are grim.
The whole death of the late Constitutional Republic the United States of America (July 4th, 1776 – November 3rd, 2020) is a leftoxenomorph caused crisis that only had a human responsibility component in the apathy, the indolence and the pusillanimousness of non-leftoxenomorphs that helped bring it about by defaulting on our responsibilities.
Granted, it’s not a small thing.
Leftoxenomorphs attacked us.
We let them win, hands down, we basically weren’t there to confront them and they won by our default.
We abandoned the ramparts and they marched into our shining city and paraded trampling on our Constitutional Republic and our flag as if they were taking a walk in the park.
Leftoxenomorphs won without firing a shot.
We didn’t fire at them, not even once.
But humans have to understand: leftoxenomorphs LOVE human crisis, each one is a triumph for leftoxenomorphism and they live to create crisis for humans to further destroy our already moribund civilization and push us farther along the downwards path to being their serfs / peasants / slave / ants in the neo-feudal ant-hill they crave.
Notice that every crisis brings us closer and closer in a ratcheting game to the leftoxenomorph objectives.
Never in the other direction.
Always in favor of leftoxenomorphism’s final triumph.
The Kung Flu, the chicomm virus, is an egregious example.
The panicdemic totally unnecessary.
The tyrannydemic a feast for leftoxenomorphs that are working feverishly to convince us there’s no going back to normal.
Why?
Because human normalcy is a defeat for leftoxenomorphs.
They need us running around like headless chickens.
They need us in panic.
They need us desperate.
They need us in fear of our own shadows.
And the BLM crisis is another egregious example.
Who benefits?
Leftoxenomorph and thugs.
“Burn, Loot and Murder” that’s what BLM is about.
Decent and often struggling blacks don’t benefit, at all.
Look at the utterly useless masks.
“Use them all the time!!!”
“Use two!!!”
“Use three!!!”
“We’ll have to use them forever!!!”
“We are NEVER going back to normal!!!”
“We Must Start Planning for a Permanent Pandemic!!!” Why? The European Black Death ended. And this is just another flu. WTF?!!
Look at the results of every BLM riot.
Where is the benefit?
Is any of this just stupidity? No.
Ridiculous? No.
These are weapons of war.
All these crisis are leftoxenomorph weapons of war.
A leftoxenomorph war against humanity.
They are at war with us.
Mostly pure PSYOPS, Psychological Operations.
And we are falling for each and every one of them.
And they are winning.
And the war is almost over.
And we are losing.
And while we are chocking on our stupid and useless masks and our stupid and useless fear of being seen as “waaaaaacists” and on all the rest of our stupid and useless fears they are egging us on with the cattle prod of “personal pronouns” and “white supremacy” and ‘white racism” and a thousand other bullshit leftoxenomorph notions and making us panic by inducing our toddlers to claim they want to change gender and trying to get the parents consent and opinion out of the equation and we live in a veritable hell of leftoxenomorph caused crisis running around panicky in search of any refuge like prairie dogs at the sight of a winged predator.
We have to give it to leftoxenomorphs: they excel at the task of making humans panic.
Perhaps the time has come . . . IF there is still time to save humanity from leftoxenomorph enslavement . . . to stop panicking, turn around, confront the leftoxenomorphs, bitch slap them until their teeth fall out and if they don’t get the message just kill them.
Because humanity’s future is on the line and it is time to grow a pair and face the problem.
And it is time to re-found our dead Constitutional Republic.
It appears that currently, black lives only matter when circumstances can be construed so as to blame a white person for ending said life. The life of a non-black person damaged or ended by the act of a violent black thug is hardly worth comment at all. That the last half dozen black martyrs whose deaths are regularly lamented by the Professionally Woke were considerably less than sterling of character and irreproachably innocent in their relations with the law is a small detail which the Professionally Woke prefer to ignore.
In A School– Navy job training– one of our guys showed this was false.
He used his first paycheck to buy his mom a gun, because he was a very big dude, and after he joined the Marines there wasn’t anybody to protect his mom.
So he bought her a gun.
She killed one of his classmates, coming in the window with a knife and rope.
The Marine and his mom were definitely “African,” as was the dead bastard.
They might notice the bastard. They wouldn’t notice my Marine’s mom being murdered in her home, because her son was gone to protect us after 9/11.
Exactly my point, Fox – only certain black lives matter. Definitely not the life of your friends’ mom. Just collateral damage, in the eyes of the Wokereti. Something to be swept under the racial carpet.
Sgt Mom-
I know it was your point, but… even now, I am bristling.
Because I’ve met folks who insist that the guy’s mom should have died. Because only those who can physically defend themselves naturally matter, or victims of black crime don’t matter, or…. heck if I know.
Thing is, I know it messed her up. The lady was a good lady– that’s part of why I’m proud to call her son one of MY Marines. If she could, she’d have saved the guy who was going to kill her.
I hate that she had to take that step.
And then there is this … three men convicted because the authorities were afraid of mob violence. And they were in the vicinity at the time of the crime. All dreadfully convenient.
Here is one reason – there are certainly more – for concluding that BLM s a scam. Opal Tometi, one of the co-founders of BLM, has palled around with Venezuelan dictator Maduro in NYC and also in Venezuela. Black Lives Matter Founder an Open Supporter of Socialist Venezuelan Dictator Maduro.
On a visit to Venezuela to observe their 2015 legislative elections, Opal Tometi gushed,or more accurately tweeted:
In a speech in Venezuela Tometi stated
It is rather ironic that Opal Tometi has aligned herself with the Chavista Maduro regime, whose record on police killing civilian dwarfs that of police in the United States. Police in Venezuela killed around 5,000 civilians in a recent year. As Venezuela’s population is about a tenth of the US, this would be the equivalent of US police killing ~50,000 civilians a year. US police kill about 1,000 civilians- armed or unarmed- a year, so Venezuela’s police kill civilians at a rate about 50 greater than US police. Yet Opal Tometi supports. Chavista Venezuela and Maduro.
One more reason for calling BLM a scam.
“three men convicted because the authorities were afraid of mob violence”
My guess is that just a few years earlier the Duke Lacrosse players would have been locked away for years. The internet probably saved them.
Based on on-line reports of the Floyd trial, I’d say everyone better be preparing for another catastrophic round of riots. The media has never told most of the facts, so when the cop gets acquitted of the most severe charges, and perhaps everything, it’s going to get ugly.
I do hope this does not turn into a race war. There are lots of people I know who are various shades of black. Some of my former students, some friends who are physicians. It is a very bad idea to make this about race but there are others whose livelihood is based on race hatred. Back in the 1920s, they used to call them klansmen, but every one has forgotten history. The grifters are trying very hard.
It is sensible to blame people for the government they elect. The Congressional Black Caucus, the result of gerrymandering, incumbency, and black voting blocks do not appear to have the best interests of the people they represent at heart – nor of anyone else nor of society as a whole. (Certainly the government’s practices on Indian reservations and the largesse that was traditionally sent home to West Virginia under some of their representatives representation indicate that what appears help is anything but and excusing and paroling the most violent of offenders (or not even bothering to note their crimes) is hardly securing life, liberty and property for the majority of the people they represent. African-Americans are hurt most (and perhaps purposely) by the policies of those like Che Boudin. Not that the rest of aren’t, too – it is just likely to be more down river. (And the purpose may be, in the end, anarchy – while BLM is a scam, I fear it may be more.)
The first time I saw “Black Lives Matter” as a slogan, it seemed actively evil – that some lives matter more contradicts our nation’s basic principles. And that seemed proven when a politician said “All lives matter” and even more sure when he apologized in the most abject manner for his “racist” statement.
On the other hand, it is also true that the people who have given megaphones to the worst race baiters in the country – Jessie Jackson, even worse Al Sharpton, etc. – are not just those of their race. I doubt it was only or probably even predominantly African Americans who made sure a lovely and affectionate documentary of Clarence Thomas’s life was taken off streaming television, that few people have heard of Sowell, that few read and even fewer read thoughtfully Frederick Douglass or know of 19th century African American millionaires, etc. The main stream media has decided a certain interpretation of African American history is the right one – and only that. But the fact that Douglass’s most famous speech – and the one that best emphasizes his core beliefs was of the self-made man is seldom mentioned I don’t think, actually, it is that different from wanting to ban the personal responsibility and self-respect of Laura Ingalls Wilder nor the complex vision of Ralph Ellison. I don’t think African Americans are at the mercy of patronizing, stupid, and delusional whites; but I’m not sure those whites are at their mercy either. They feed on mutual kinds of sickness – a sickness of self-loathing and irresponsibility, a sickness of virtue signaling and cowardice, an inability to examine one’s self or even to accept that the locus of control is within each of us, rather than our acts are someone else’s fault. When I taught at the prison, I asked which would you rather have – a neighbor who doesn’t molest your child because of the punishment, because of the peer pressure of your community, or because they honestly understood and felt that such an act was evil, was a violation of a vulnerable child, was impossible to even consider doing. Some of them thought only punishment (an ironic but telling position for prisoners). Punishment is always after the act, and sometimes iffy. I want to live in a society where people think the locus of control is within us and our habits are those of virtue. Oh, well. This may be off the subject, but not off where Sgt. Mom’s thoughts tend to take me in my memories.
Oh, and here’s a truly cynical point – that some of the people whose lost laptops have under age girls (apparently), or whose laptops show pictures of a politician in his underpants next to his child and communicating with another underage person, of politicians who take 26 trips (is it that much?) to Lolita island, . . and we can go on. . . might have different tendencies but the same principles as another student, discussing those choices: but what if we just don’t have a “taste” for young children? That is, that some evils don’t appeal to us and others do. Perhaps that’s a matter of virtuous habits on that student’s part though that was not the feeling I got.
Crystal ball says the Dems hope for Floyd acquittals and riots so they can force their election rigging bill through.
It is win-win for them. Acquittal and riots, white slap down and whatever it takes to get the voting destructo bill, GBLQPDQ rights bill and nationalization of infrastructure/everything including kitchen sink bill passed. Conviction and they get the precedent for criminally targeting the cops based on ginned up popular opinion, plus the same passage of those three bills as token guilt reparations. Financial and urban collapse are warming up back stage.
Death6
I think there is zero chance of acquittal by that jury when their lives are at stake. I could possibly see a reversal on appeal. Even there, the Biden ear piece DOJ will be right there with a double jeopardy civil rights case, just as in the Rodney King case and he was not even badly injured.
Minneapolis deserves what it gets from the mob. They elected these idiots like Ellison. So do LA and San Francisco.
“I think there is zero chance of acquittal by that jury when their lives are at stake”
They’re charging him with murder, which it seems impossible that they can win on. They might “get him” on a lesser charge, which they should have just started with, but the headline will say “Floyd killer found not guilty” and cities will burn.
The Rodney King LAPD cops were acquitted but he was not seriously injured. Clinton’s DOJ was right back with a “Civil Rights” case and moved the trial to downtown LA to get some blacks on the jury, just as the then DA moved the OJ trial to downtown LA for the same reason. The OJ DA was the father of the present Mayor of LA.
You could be right about a lesser charge but I still see little chance of justice.
Sgt Mom: What you put in parentheses and italics, “(Do the lives of the black unborn matter, for instance?)”, suffices as an indictment of BLM. Even absent the perspective the numbers give (something like 330K/yr, more than 1/3 of the total despite a population of about 1/10 the total; not kidding, easy data to look up). No evidence from science, from history, from culture that the baby is not a person. But a frenzied insistence to the point one can observe accurately that abortion is a bloody sacrament of human sacrifice. A sacrament that destroys the culture that supports it, tearing apart families, removing their future. Not only does BLM not resist this. It cheers for it. These folks are the religious fanatics. They happily use force to impose their faith on everyone else. Even tho the evidence of history repeatedly demonstrates what happens when some group insists another group is merely less human, not to mention what happens if that insistence morphs to non-human. (Yeh, I think a case can be made for understanding racism as a significant driver of WWII, or racism driving chaos in Africa, or racism underlying conflict in the mid-East.)
Ginny: If one insists there exist no absolutes, then might makes right. From that flows the prisoner conclusion you found telling: punishment rather than morality as restraint.
Brian Says:
April 1st, 2021 at 9:41 pm
Crystal ball says the Dems hope for Floyd acquittals and riots so they can force their election rigging bill through.
I’m not so sure about the effects of more riots and mayhem. I think the DNC turned off the BLM riots as the election got closer. There are still quite a few people, even Democrats, who view anarchy as a negative.
In the Derek Chauvin case, acquittal = riots. Conviction = also riots.
I do hope this does not turn into a race war
It won’t ever turn into a race-war, it will however continue on as an infinite purgatory of misery. The reason it won’t turn into a race-war is that the propaganda on racial comity is so effective that many Whites want to hold onto “diversity” as a lifestyle luxury good and simply block out of their thoughts the reality that their lives are degraded by having to make accommodations for diversity.
I recall an online conversation I had with a guy who was talking about secession, the need to get away from idiot leftists, to divide America into Red and Blue. I pointed out to him that his entire focus was on radical White Leftists and he was completely ignoring the “Devil’s Bargain” which was in plain sight – the vast voter army of minorities who aren’t quite as radical as the White wokesters but who ally with the wokesters because the wokesters send White wealth over to the minorities via government. So, what was his plan to send minorities over to “Woke America” – he was aghast, he wanted to go through all of the misery of a civil war, split America, and then in his “Red America” he wanted to create the identical racial fractures which plague present-day America.
As a physician you probably have the clearest understanding of “If you can’t properly diagnose the ailment, then you will never be able to effectively treat the ailment.” One can’t mix a population with mean IQ of 100 and a population with a mean IQ of 85 and expect “equality” in all outcomes.
The folks like me, who want to put human rights first, to restore freedom of association, who are sick of affirmative action, racial quotes, the destruction of meritocracy, who believe that White Heritage (a nation built by Whites for the benefit of their descendants should privilege those descendants before newcomers), who object to the operative model of immigration requiring America to provide benefits to immigrants and prefer the older model of immigrants “giving” instead of “taking” from America, being NET-POSITIVE additions to society, who object to racial voting blocs, who object to corruption of education standards in order to achieve racial parity, etc. well there simply are not enough folks who want the “good life” and who will incur the sacrifice of living without glorious diversity. There’s nothing consequential or so important about diversity that results in life being improved for me (ethnic cuisine is not so damn important that a nation should be destroyed in order to access it), it’d negatives as far as the eye can see. If I have a hankering for a dose of diversity, I can hop on a plane and vacation in a foreign country and experience their culture, appreciate it, respect it, and then come back to my culture, there’s no need to destroy my culture, erase it, in order to eat goat kababs for lunch.
Above is me.
Speaking of race war, the crazy guy who ran over two capital cops today, killing one of them, was a black Muslim. This talk will keep stirring up the crazies of both major races. Blacks tend to be more violent so they will probably make more noise.
Mike K:
It is interesting, and expected, that the Left immediately filled comment sections all over the Internet about how it was undoubtably a White,Christian,Conservative, Racist, Gun-owner. Up until the moment the real ID was made. Then suddenly, the topic died.
a) because the perp was Black and a “protected class”.
b) because he was part of the Nation of Islam, and therefore an ally of the Left.
c) and because coming out of a car with a knife and charging a bunch of armed cops devoted to protecting the less than legitimate regime does not argue for him being on the right hand side of the Bell Curve.
Subotai Bahadur
Yes, SB … it is fascinating to observe the speed with which that story will be shoveled under by the Mainstream Establishment Media. And the other one – the Orange County business park shooting, wherein it seems that the shooter was of Hispanic background, and there may have been some personal element in it. Pretty much goes to prove one of my points – that there are some mass killers whom the Mainstream Establishment Media just would rather ignore. Because to note them would really screw up the Narrative.
The first time I joined the NRA was because of a mass shooting in Atlanta circa 2000 that was looking to become another Columbine massacre. I remember getting home from work to find every channel covering it with the usual breathless hysteria. Then- like flipping a switch- it all stopped. It turned out that the killer had somehow evaded a murder wrap, and obviously the left knew that this hatefact wouldn’t help their agenda.
So this behavior isn’t new, not that I suspect anyone likely to read this thinks it is. Just another step on the way to civil war.
It won’t ever turn into a race-war, it will however continue on as an infinite purgatory of misery. The reason it won’t turn into a race-war is that the propaganda on racial comity is so effective that many Whites want to hold onto “diversity” as a lifestyle luxury good and simply block out of their thoughts the reality that their lives are degraded by having to make accommodations for diversity.
True enough, but “diversity” also gets a vote about when and where a civil war will begin. I recall years ago walking in on someone watching a youtube video of some sane black guy attempting to talk down other black guys who wanted to start shooting white people, right then and there. I didn’t watch all of it, but I did get to see the sane guy remind the crazies that white people had guns too.
So just because the goodwhites heart diversity doesn’t mean diversity hearts them.
One more reason for calling BLM a scam.
If only there was a political party that would point this out! Alas, we only have the gee ohh peee, which can simply be brushed aside by saying “racist.”
Bottom line- white lives don’t matter, victims of black crime don’t matter- race irrelevant- and no one’s life matters if it will harm the generations long campaign by the left to destroy America.
Reality itself doesn’t matter to these vermin. Mere human life certainly won’t.
An erstwhile FB acquaintance and I had an argument over one of his more brain-dead assertions. He’s one of the few people I’ve ever unfriended, because he chose to censor what I said regarding one topic (not the one subject to this discussion).
He was black, fairly intelligent, avoided the majority of the pitfalls that blacks are prone to — but just could not accept the fact that blacks were largely responsible for their own problems.
A major case in point, was an instance where the cops put a Nike truck in a black neighborhood, but left it unlocked. And once this fact was discovered, the “residents” of the neighborhood helped themselves to the contents of the truck… They were, of course, being tracked, which led to their arrest.
According to him, this was “entrapment”, because… I dunno. Leave the same truck — or change the contents to something you think white people would go gaga over — Nintendos, or Xboxes, or something — in a “white” neighborhood, and it’s probably mostly gonna be left alone. Yes, even a “poor white” neighborhood with financial demographics equivalent to the relevant “entrapped” neighborhood.
Not necessarily because they are “too good to steal”, but because they’re mostly never even gonna TRY and thus, never find out the truck is open.
But he just couldn’t let go of the notion that it isn’t “entrapment” if the cops make it possible, but don’t make any suggestions encouraging people to steal. It’s not like they put signs up, “Big unlocked truck full of NIKES!! Get yer Air Jordans for free!!”.
I was amazed it went on as long as it did. I kept kinda hoping he’d wake up, he wasn’t stupid. Just a fool.
“One can’t mix a population with mean IQ of 100 and a population with a mean IQ of 85 and expect “equality” in all outcomes.”
Bingo. Charles Murray was onto something with his Bell Curve book. We can’t have a rational discussion about race without somehow accounting for what Murray discussed. Challenge his data — prove him wrong — instead of just calling it racist and making the topic off-limits.
As Vox Day is fond of saying, “Diversity + Proximity = War.” America was pretty much a meritocracy, in which you had to contribute to society. BLM is tearing that down, because as a group, the general black population can’t keep up with the white population. Crabs in a bucket; if I can’t get ahead, neither can you.
Oh, and bell curves in general are a valid argument against college-for-all.
He was black, fairly intelligent, avoided the majority of the pitfalls that blacks are prone to ”” but just could not accept the fact that blacks were largely responsible for their own problems. . . .
I kept kinda hoping he’d wake up, he wasn’t stupid. Just a fool.
Take two countries, one 100% White and the other a mix of racial groups. Within that White country the population will be normally distributed on the IQ spectrum – smart people, average people, dumb people. Moreover, many families and extended families will have members who are smart, average and dumb. This kinship will give rise to a social system which tries to ease the burden on the dumb people. Going further, culture binds together the smart, the average and the dumb. The only sore point that the dumb people can latch onto is class resentment but for the most part the animosity is kept at a very manageable level – there is cultural buy-in from all groups.
In that diverse country though, each racial group will have it’s own IQ distribution, every group will have its smart people, its average people and its dumb people, but those distributions are not going to be identical and inevitably some folks in one racial group are going to notice that they are disproportionately at the bottom of society and that there are way too many folks from another racial group at the top of society. There is little kinship effect BETWEEN the groups, this country is simply CO-inhabited by different racial groups and the successful group hates seeing wealth extracted from them and given to the unsuccessful group.
You say your friend is not stupid, just a fool, but he’s probably not even a fool, he’s just prideful, it’s a damn bitter pill to swallow to accept that you belong to a racial group who can’t compete in a fair contest with other racial groups. This is why the Asian Model Minority dynamic is so explosive to the “narrative.” For your friend it’s simply easier on his ego to blame “institutional racism” and invisible oppression for Black social dysfunction than to accept that evolutionary forces are operative in humans.
People like your friend don’t really know what to say when presented with the following – the racial wage gap disappears when IQ is controlled – a Black man with an IQ of 80 earns, on average, about the same as a White man with an IQ of 80 and this has been the case since the early 1970s. There is no institutional racism, there is no White Privilege, there is no systemic racism, these are all just social phlogiston.
Tangoman @ 12:29AM: Another spot-on comment. A common culture is what’s supposed to bind a country together. I think America had a generally accepted culture prior to the mid-60s when LBJ launched his “war on poverty” and Great Society programs. This, coupled with the emotion released by the civil rights movement, derailed blacks in America.
Even though blacks were discriminated against, they generally bought into the nuclear family and the notion that you could advance through hard work and education. And they all had recognisable Anglo-Saxon names.
Under the impetus of the civil rights movement, “black pride” arose and black Americans began un-assimilating from the rest of the country. They even started assuming made-up, Afican-sounding names. Over time, the consequences have been clear: the more vocal black activists want no part of a common culture, especially if it might be perceived as “white.” I honestly don’t know what they think might replace that culture.
We need to to get back to basics and do away with the notion of hyphenated Americans. We are a modern, highly technical, energy intensive, First World nation that offers opportunity based on individual merit, not group merit. That culture is open to anybody, but you must leave your racial and cultural identity behind. Immigration by itself does not make America Great; assimilation makes America great. It shouldn’t be radical to say that.
The Left started the movement to un-assimilate blacks and fight assimilation of recent arrivals. The entire transgender thing is anther lever to divide us. It’s cynical as hell and downright evil. If America can be turned into a collection if factions wherein there is no single majority, then that demands a managerial caste to paper over differences and sort out the squabbles — the Democrats want that job.
Even though blacks were discriminated against, they generally bought into the nuclear family and the notion that you could advance through hard work and education. And they all had recognisable Anglo-Saxon names.
Under the impetus of the civil rights movement, “black pride” arose and black Americans began un-assimilating from the rest of the country. They even started assuming made-up, Afican-sounding names. Over time, the consequences have been clear: the more vocal black activists want no part of a common culture, especially if it might be perceived as “white.” I honestly don’t know what they think might replace that culture.
I agree with this. Remember, the left took up the black issue early. The “Symbionese Liberation Army” began with white women teaching literacy to black prison inmates. The MLK wing of the Civil Rights Movement was on the right track until leftists around King got him involved in the Vietnam War issue. I remember thinking at the time that this was a huge mistake for him. It ended up allying the civil rights movement with the political left. They chose anger and that segment took over and began to alienate the whites who supported him. That division continues to this day.
A common culture is what’s supposed to bind a country together . . . . . Even though blacks were discriminated against
Scene:” A woman sitting at a bar, a series of men approach her, try to seduce her, she DISCRIMINATES against most of them and then chooses one man to take her away for a night of romance.
Discrimination is the enforcement mechanism through which a common culture is maintained. Portland is the Whitest and most Leftist city in America. If some cockamamie gov’t program was created to relocate all, ALL, of Detroit’s Black citizens to Portland, then their presence and conduct would change the culture of Portland, to the displeasure of the Woke inhabitants of that Whiteopia. So, with all of the Wokesters escaping to Seattle, now with this experience under their belt, if the Feds tried next to move all of Chicago’s Black citizens to the Whiteopia of Seattle, I strongly suspect that there would be concerted moves by the citizens of Seattle to block that migration.
To discriminate is to signal “I don’t want to associate with you.” No one is OWED an association with you. Blacks were discriminated against and there’s nothing wrong with that, the discrimination was a signal that people thought that their lives would be better off by not associating with Blacks than what they would experience from having associations. Racial covenants used to be enforced on properties, take a look at what happened to home values in some of Chicago’s suburbs as those property covenants became uneforceable and Blacks started moving into once all-White neighborhoods. Those White homeowners, especially the last ones to move from the neighborhood, were NOT made better off by integration, they lost most of their home equity when they lost the human right to discriminate.
To your other point about Blacks subscribing to the dominant culture, yeah they did but not as thoroughly as Whites, and it did them a lot of good, just like it does good for Whites to have stable families and raise their children in a two-parent home.
I honestly don’t know what they think might replace that culture.
Wakandia. Wakandia is the Mary Sue of Black culture. It’s like Black History Month – if there were truly outstanding Black historical accomplishments, then they be recognized by the common culture, with Black History Month the organizers have to shake the historical tree to find mundane events and elevate them to importance and then we all have to pretend that the mundane is truly something significant. Wakandia is the perfect Black society that would have arisen had Whites not interfered with Black destiny. Sadly there is no hint of the precursor accomplishments necessary for a Wakandia rise anywhere in Black history.
These radicals are not striving for some end state, they’re striving to exercise power and extract wealth today, much like sharks who need to keep moving to stay alive, they need to grift in order to find meaning, a shark is not swimming the ocean with a migration goal driving it.
We need to to get back to basics and do away with the notion of hyphenated Americans.
While this would be a move in the right direction, it really won’t solve anything. Various European ethnicities can come together, experience friction in America as they live cheek to jowl, intermingle, hold onto old loyalties, but over time, with strict enforcement of common culture and intermarriage, the old loyalties and customs give way to adoption of a American common culture. This model doesn’t transfer when race is substituted for ethnicity. Asians are suing Harvard for not admitting enough Asians. You’re not seeing a lawsuit from Estonian-Americans about Harvard not admitting enough Estonian-Americans. That lawsuit against Harvard could not exist if Asians were part of the US of America, it can only exist if Asians see themselves as a distinct group, that’s race, it’s unavoidable and unerasable. Those Estonian-Americans, or German-Americans, have shifted their primary identity away from ethnic group and towards American (a proxy for White American) and now with Whites constituting 60% of America, the rise of White identity is slowly taking shape – that Harvard lawsuit is a zero-sum game – for Asians to gain more admissions another group has to have admissions reduced. It’s not going to be Blacks, Jews or Hispanics who get the shaft, it will be the, presently, most UNDER-represented group on campus, White Americans, who have to take the hit so that Asians can have even greater OVER-representation.
Even if you succeed in your goal of changing Black-Americans into Americans, they’re still Black and they can use their eyes to see natural schisms in society – they will see few Blacks admitted to the Ivy League on merit (only about 250 Blacks per year, in all of America, score high enough on the SATs to warrant admission on merit (about the size of Cornell’s yearly entering class of Black-Americans)).
Hereditary ethnic ties, even religious ties, can be changed over time, race can’t, it persists and is highly visible, and because race is highly visible it becomes a distinguishing group marker which is stronger than national identity.
We are a modern, highly technical, energy intensive, First World nation that offers opportunity based on individual merit, not group merit.
We ARE? That’s debateable. SHOULD we be that, sure, we should be, but with the EEOC, corporate board quotas coming for women’s representation, anti-discrimination laws, race quotas, affirmative action, etc, no we are not a merit-driven society.
That culture is open to anybody, but you must leave your racial and cultural identity behind.
And what are you prepared to do when they come here, establish themselves, and then refuse to leave that identity behind? Do you think that Rep. Ilhan Omar is concerned about the welfare of Joe Sixpack? Do you think that Black America would be OK with having zero Black Congressmen because we ungerrymander districts?
You sentence above makes a philosophical statement and then applies conditions to it, are you still prepared to stand by the “open to anybody” position if those conditions you prefer are removed? I’m not. I’m an empiricist at heart, I test philosophy against the real world and modify my views. Society is not working as you imagine is it working. America WAS NOT founded to be a global melting pot open to anybody. This “open to anybody” philosophy runs counter to millennia of hard won truth, it doesn’t work, never did and never will, because it you are open to anybody, then you can’t have a common culture.
assimilation makes America great. It shouldn’t be radical to say that.
It shouldn’t be radical to say that, it would just be wrong to say that, wrong as in making a false statement. America’s culture is primarily, at its core, British and German, refined by particular personality traits of the early settlers who left their own lands and came to a new one and flourished under the Colonial British culture which dominated America. This was helped along by the Anti-German movement in America in the WWI era which saw the German press shut down, saw German schools shut down, saw German names being anglicanized (Schmidt changed to Smith, etc.)
Your assimilation model is not a universal model, it was applied successfully to European immigrants, it’s CLEARLY not a functional model when different racial groups are substituted in place of different European ethnicities. Asian-Americans do well in America, yet they see themselves as a group distinct from American, hence the Harvard lawsuit.
It’s cynical as hell and downright evil. If America can be turned into a collection if factions wherein there is no single majority, then that demands a managerial caste to paper over differences and sort out the squabbles ”” the Democrats want that job.
Exactly right but don’t overlook the puppet masters – Capital interests are the prime beneficiaries because they’ve now forestalled a united front seeking a “more equitable” distribution of capital, there can be no such united front when there are a multitude of factions fighting each other.
I noticed, TangoMan, that you separated Jews from White race when talking about zero-sum admissions pie to Harvard. “Blacks, Jews or Hispanics* “, you said.
I have news for you: Jews are White (it’s simplification, but we are not in Israel, where there are certain percentage of Moroccan Jews).
At least we are White for the purpose of job application, where government and corporate HRs created abhoringly racist questionnaire requiring to reveal one’s race – and there is no “Jewish” race there, is it?
As to Asians: yes, they act on racist basis in their suit – because they have been discriminated on racist basis.
It has not been Indians, or Pakistani, or Vietnamese, or Chinese or Korean in particular who were slashed from admittance according to quotas – they were cut off because they are Asians.
I have to disagree with you about discrimination. “I discriminate against you” certainly doesn’t mean “I don’t want to associate with you”. The latter is neutral. The former – is actively denying equal right to the receiver.
American value is the equality of opportunity, not a discrimination of opportunity. It is that equality that brought here millions of immigrants who didn’t get the same equality in their old countries.
*BTW, Hispanics is not a race either. we should no follow perverted official racist groupings, just like we shouldn’t be using orwellian newspeak on any other topic.
“I discriminate against you” certainly doesn’t mean “I don’t want to associate with you”.
It most certainly does mean that. Anti-discrimination laws are compelled association. Every time a woman says “I prefer a female gynecologist” she is discriminating on the basis of sex. To enforce anti-discrimination laws against her would require her to be forced into a compelled association with a male gynecologist. The core of the issue is that for the male gynecologist to not suffer rejection from potential female patients, those potential female patients are threatened by law to engage his services when their own preference is to hire a female gynecologist.
Any civil right which requires that another person’s human rights be violated, is an illegitimate civil right. Your right to be free from discrimination cannot come at the expense of my right to free association. The civil right of the male gynecologist to not be discriminated against on the basis of his sex cannot come at the expense of women losing the right to pick and choose their associations and losing the right to choose a female gynecologist because they want a woman physician. Her human right trumps his civil right. This entire intellectual concept of discrimination being bad is illegitimate.
Discrimination is not some dirty word, it’s a synonym for liberty and freedom. To discriminate is to exercise one’s liberty over one’s personal space, to associate with those of your choosing. To allow government to dictate to you who you shall, must, associate with is tyranny.
is actively denying equal right to the receiver.
No person has some bogus “equal right” to force another person into an unwanted association.
At least we are White for the purpose of job application
If a business owner got it into his head to never hire a Swedish-American, no one would ever know, but if he decided to never hire Jews, he’d soon find himself investigated by the EEOC. Jews exist today because they’ve been able to maintain group cohesion for millennia, even in conditions of diaspora. Some Jews leave that identity and merge into the identity of their host population, if every Jewish person did that, then Jews wold be a forgotten group like the Phoenicians or the Hittites – these people didn’t vanish, their identity simply eroded away over time, their genetic lineage continues to exist in their descendants. Because Jews maintain this separate identity, they are as distinct as Asians – Asians maintain a separate identity because of race, Jews maintain separate identity through faith and family lineage (race). German-Americans, or Dutch-Americans, don’t have a viewpoint of “Is it good for the Dutch-Americans?” as a filter in their lives. Look at the hatred directed at Trump advisor Stephen Miller for being an immigration hawk – his family and his family’s rabbi went on the warpath against him for betraying Jews. Miller shifted his primary allegiance to America (Is it good for America?), de facto White America, and sought ways to slow down the 3rd worldifcation of America. This was offensive to his extended family and many of his faith. They see their interests as benefiting from the 3rd worldification of America.
“if he decided to never hire Jews, he’d soon find himself investigated by the EEOC.”
I call BS.
In the same comment you managed to advocate for free association as a right of any American, but if Jews do it as a group, you’re d portraying us as an evil collective mind bent on “3rd worldification of America.”
See, I am a Jew. Don’t spout this antisemitic nonsense on me. I know why Jews exist much better than you can ever imagine. You conflate ideology with faith, leftists with Jews. You’re part (or, rather, a reason)of the problem.
A research highlight from the invaluable Tyler Cowen, pointing out that neither black skin nor white racism seems to hold back Nigerian-Americans.
“Second-generation black Americans have been inadequately studied in prior quantitative research. The authors seek to ameliorate this research gap by using the Current Population Survey to investigate education and wages among second-generation black Americans with a focus on Nigerian Americans. The latter group has been identified in some qualitative studies as having particularly notable socioeconomic attainments.
The results indicate that the educational attainment of second-generation Nigerian Americans exceeds other second-generation black Americans, third- and higher generation African Americans, third- and higher generation whites, second-generation whites, and second-generation Asian Americans. Controlling for age, education, and disability, the wages of second-generation Nigerian Americans have reached parity with those of third- and higher generation whites. The educational attainment of other second-generation black Americans exceeds that of third- and higher generation African Americans but has reached parity with that of third- and higher generation whites only among women.
These results indicate significant socioeconomic variation within the African American/black category by gender, ethnicity, and generational status that merits further research.”
Dan, such a study needs to separate out the Igbo tribe. They were the Biafran secessionists in the Nigerian civil war 50 years ago. They are known for mathematical ability and many are “Quants” on Wall Street. When I was still examining military recruits, I met a Nigerian immigrant who was joining the Army Reserve. He had a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MS in Industrial Engineering. He was quite pleased when I asked him if he was an Ibo. (an older term for Igbo) He was indeed and agreed that he found math fairly easy.
to advocate for free association as a right of any American, but if Jews do it as a group, you’re d portraying us as an evil collective mind
This is why separate countries exist – this is why Greater India broke up, Hindus and Muslims diverged on religion and culture and association. If Jews, as a group, come to believe X, and the rest of society believes Y, then Jews are apart from the society. This applies to every group, not just Jews, if French Canadians believe that French must be the language of everyday life and the rest of Canada believes that English should be the primary language, then the Quebecois are the odd-man out, they’re distinct, they looking out for Quebecois interests, not Canadian interests. If BLM protestors believe that there must be racial quotas to hire Blacks and that the Academy Awards must always nominate a Black person in every category, and the rest of society disagrees, then these folks are not part of the culture, they’re a sub-culture, they’re looking out for their interests, interests which diverge from the host population.
The authors seek to ameliorate this research gap by using the Current Population Survey to investigate education and wages among second-generation black Americans with a focus on Nigerian Americans. The latter group has been identified in some qualitative studies as having particularly notable socioeconomic attainments.
The flaw in this study is the restriction of range, they’re studying a very small sample of Nigerians, self-selected via immigration and having to qualify to immigrate and then comparing to the entire US Black population. This is like comparing the folks of Greenwich, CT to the entire US population and ignoring some of the unique circumstances which boost income and educational attainment for those Greenwich citizens.
If you slice and dice the US Black population you will find American Blacks who match Nigerian-American performance. Present-day children, in careers, whose parents are physicians/lawyers, who grandparents were professors or successful businessmen. Just as those Nigerians are a small niche population within Black America, these “upper class” Blacks are also a niche population.
All that said though, those Nigerians are some of the prime beneficiaries of race quotas and affirmative action, programs and laws designed to aid America’s Blacks, not voluntary immigrants from Africa. This was the complaint of Lani Guiner and Henry Gates about AA at Harvard – 3/4 of the Blacks admitted were either bi-racial or immigrants/children of immigrants. Why did Barack Obama deserve AA boosts? Why was he hired to be a lecturer at UChicago Law School right after graduating? It wasn’t because he was best qualified, it was because he was Black, but he’s biracial and his father was Kenyan. Hiring him makes no statement about the uplifting project focused on America’s historical Black population.
Nigerian success in America is partly explained by selective immigration, boosts from race quota programs, their success though is no different than the success of other selective sub-populations in Black America. It’s not Nigerian culture, because Nigeria is a shithole, it wouldn’t be a shithole if the culture and human capital of all Nigerians was at the level of those who arrive in America. We can’t even conclude that American Black cultural pathologies are what is holding back success from Black America, no more than we can conclude that if Americans attended private schools in Greenwich and had parents who worked at Hedge Funds, that this would solve all of the social pathologies which plague the American population. Studying the citizens of Greenwich doesn’t tell us anything about America, and studying those Nigerians doesn’t tell us anything about Black America nor the relative success of Nigerians compared to the 2nd and 3rd generations of other demographic groups because those other demographic groups are not the beneficiaries of racial quota uplift programs.
A better study design would be to focus on 2nd Generation Nigerians and compare then to another African nationality present in America by selective immigration (So we can exclude Somalian refugees (no selection effect.) Now all of the groups studied are beneficiaries of racial quota programs, which excludes Whites and Asians. If they want a finer understanding, then take Mike K.’s suggestion and study those Nigerians by tribal affiliation.
I’m, obviously, missing the “this is news” angle on that research. I very much doubt that Dr. Ben Carson’s children are going to be academic or economic slouches. How would they compare to these 2nd generation Nigerians? Can we extract any lesson about Dr. Carson’s children and apply it to Black America? If you restrict range and study only those on the extreme right tail of a Bell Curve, you’re not going to get much useful insight about the rest of the population.
A more interesting study would be to compare those 2nd generation Nigerians to 2nd generation Somalians. Immigrants who come here by having to qualify for immigration versus though who come here as refugees. Perhaps such a study would lead us to reform refugee policy, to kick out refugees once their homeland is stabilized rather than burdening ourselves with another dysfunctional population group. Race quotas were designed to uplift OUR Blacks, not the world’s Blacks who manage to get to America.
It is absolutely correct that AA favors black immigrants. How many blacks, aside from a few professors, understand this ? Damn few or they don’t care.
My black medical students were mostly foreign born and did not understand American blacks. My two American born blacks, one flunked out and the other was weird. His parents were Black Panthers and he did not know how to talk to white people. One patient threw him out of her room. I thought at first he was schizophrenic.
How many blacks, aside from a few professors, understand this ? Damn few or they don’t care.
It’s still a problem for society though because America’s Black have a grievance and their outcomes are not improving. If the race quotas were restricted to Blacks whose ancestors were here in 1965, then Harvard and Law Schools and Corporations would have to uplift folks who were even less qualified than these immigrants, which means more work for universities and even less efficiency for corporations, but what we get in return is more “social peace.”
To create a program to uplift “our Blacks” and then allow voluntary immigrants from Africa to become the prime beneficiaries is freaking madness – all of the institutions are suffering inefficiency problems arising from these quota schemes, the intended beneficiary population continues to feel marginalized, and all that is gained is some misguided liberals believe that America is doing good because they see Blacks quotaed into positions of influence or authority.
If we have to endure all of the costs which come with these quotas then we should get something in return which is more substantive that “good feels” for idiot liberals.
Those immigrant Blacks should get no race benefits, they should claw their way up the socioeconomic ladder just like every other group, and in this day and age, we should not be admitting any immigrants who can’t immediately create net-positive benefits for America – the days of having a strong back and making it in America and long gone.
As to how many Blacks understand this, I think some do get it. Back when Obama was starting his run for the nomination, there was Black pushback about his being biracial and from Kenyan heritage – he wasn’t “really Black” in the American experience of being Black. He was seen as “the Other.” Rightly so. That perspective soon faded though – “He is Black” was enough of a calling card to get Blacks to back him.
“If Jews, as a group, come to believe X, and the rest of society believes Y, then Jews are apart from the society. ”
so what?
America is founded on freedom of religion, is it not?
Apparently, some are more equal than others – for tangoman.
And still, no understanding of difference between ideology and religion.
that’s how you continue to perpetuate the problem.
I see it not as an issue of “race”, per se, but as an issue of adaptation to environment. One that is unfortunately also often commingled with externally visible cosmetic identifiers…
Someone mentioned the Igbo. Most of the Nigerian immigrants I know hail from that ethnic group, and I’d say that they were well-adapted to the environment of “civilization”. Much of the rest of black Africa and America…? Not so much. Same with a lot of my Scots-Irish ancestors, whose inability to manage the necessary skills and attributes of this game we call “civilization” left them vulnerable to the Sassenach, and entirely destroyed when confronting them.
The thing is, what we have is a failure of adaptation mistaken for a failure of “virtue”. There is not a damn thing inherently virtuous about being adapted for civilization; these days, it mostly just means you do well on the tests. Black Americans who’re fallen to the vices aren’t any less human or less virtuous than anyone else, they’re just ill-adapted to the environment, and nobody is honest enough to admit that fact or to try to figure out how to help them better adapt.
It’s my contention that most blacks here in the US aren’t any less intelligent than the whites, it’s just that they’re not well-adapted to the needs of modern civilization than the whites are. All you have to do to make you wonder about the supposed “inferior intelligence” of blacks is to watch them actually navigate the system as they understand it; it’s not stupid, what they do: In some cases, it’s brilliance personified. The problem is that the “brilliance” is entirely inimical to the needs of the larger environment. Many blacks will exert more energy and effort in an attempt to “work the system” than they will to actually work within it, with predictable results. Some of the crap I observed in the military was sheer genius, although highly destructive to the group effort.
The real issue is we are trying to cram big square blocks into little round holes. That does not work in the playroom, and it does not work in real life. Most educational techniques that work for Ashkenazic Jews and Asians will not work for many American blacks; why this is an issue, I don’t understand. Adapt the teaching techniques to what does work, and who cares? Not everyone processes the world in the same way, or has the skills and attributes to do it the way that someone else does.
We badly need to give up the idea that everyone needs college. Or, for that matter, anything else. College is appropriate for some; not all. The fact that we’ve warped our environment to treat the attributes of the college-adapted as a marker for social virtue is a sign that we’re far off course; not only do we not need everyone to go to college, we need the “rest of us” to be able to function productively at what we are good at. That ain’t necessarily “intellectual achievement”, whatever the hell that is.
Take a look at the sophistication and intelligence many “urban gang youth” go about running their “businesses” supplying drugs; note the complexity, and the adaptability to the legal environment they demonstrate. There’s a reason the “smarties” and “brights” haven’t been able to suppress those enterprises, and that’s down to the fact that in some ways, those “urban youth” are smarter than the “geniuses” running the legal system.
It’s not a question of “intelligence as a proxy for virtue”, it’s a question of society failing to recognize that it is a question of adaptation to the environment and being able to understand the necessity to modify the environment to solve the problem. Gangs aren’t something antiethical to society; they’re actually an on the ground recognition that the general society that they parasitize isn’t answering some very basic needs for the members.
If you’re not getting the results you want from the rats you have running the maze, maybe, just maybe, it’s not the rats, but the maze itself… Change the maze, get better results.
Most educational techniques that work for Ashkenazic Jews and Asians will not work for many American blacks; why this is an issue, I don’t understand. Adapt the teaching techniques to what does work, and who cares? Not everyone processes the world in the same way, or has the skills and attributes to do it the way that someone else does.
“Educational techniques” do not include chaos in the classroom. There are black kids and black mothers of kids who want what “Whites” have and are willing to follow the rules. There is always a huge number of requests from black parents for charter schools and vouchers. My favorite example is Charles Payne on Fox News. I used to listen to his Saturday morning radio program before Glenn Beck “discovered him” for Fox. He wanted to be a businessman from his preteens. His mother gave him a briefcase for his 13th birthday. He went into the Air Force to qualify for GI Bill to go to college. Of course Clarence Thomas is another.
Get the gangsters out of the classroom, and that includes both sexes as we saw with the Uber Eats driver. The “teaching techniques” needed for the gangsters is reform school. Remember that ?
If you want an example of what “chaos” looks like. That came from a black web site.
@MikeK,
I dunno… I think you’ve missed the point I’m making. Completely.
“Chaos in the classroom” isn’t an example of making the environment conform to the needs of these student–If anything, it’s a failure to comprehend that they likely need to be taught differently and with a hell of a lot more discipline.
Not every kid is suited for the fussy little scrap-booky BS they push in most classrooms. Some kids need to be up and physically engaged with the material, learning on their feet. You try to take a kid like that, and sit them down for hours every day, doing precious little fussy exercises, and what do you suppose is going to happen?
Stop and consider the idea that what works for a genetic background honed over generations in an Eastern European shtetl, where the kids are poring over their Torahs for innumerable hours and working solely with their minds…? It ain’t likely to work well with a genetic and cultural inheritance that is largely still based in the old hunter-gatherer band, where the young went out with adults and were taught by doing constantly.
One size does not fit all. You don’t take the exact same animal training techniques that work well with dogs and try to apply them to fish. If you are not getting the results you want with your educational process, it’s time to examine the idea that perhaps instead of trying to force-fit the student into the process, it’s time to reconstruct the process from the ground up.
Obviously, what we are doing is not working. More of the same ain’t going to fix it, and I’d advocate for a totally different approach. Maybe set back and examine how the education/acculturation process works (or, worked…) in the original environment that this dysfunctional sub-element of our society stemmed from, and compare what we’re doing to what they did, back in the day. I am pretty sure you’re not going to find an awful lot of points of contiguity between that environment and what we’re trying to force-fit them into.
I am reluctant to consider that blacks as a race are not capable of using educational methods that have been successful for hundreds of years.
I do agree that there is a subset that cannot occupy a classroom with others who are capable of learning. That is why I referred to “Reform School.”
If you are not getting the results you want with your educational process, it’s time to examine the idea that perhaps instead of trying to force-fit the student into the process, it’s time to reconstruct the process from the ground up.
No, maybe you have two groups, one that is suited for standard education and one that is not. I don’t want to get into the education fads that we see. I am referring to the methods that the nuns used on me and a lot of kids of varying ability. I did not attend one of the Philips Exeter type prep schools. My high school, for example, did not offer calculus. That was noticed by Cal Tech when I was applying and accepted. I suspect I could have overcome that handicap.
The state of classrooms today with disruptive black students is chaos and no one, white or black, can learn in that setting. Trying to develop teaching methods to teach angry disruptive blacks is a fool’s errand in my opinion. Try to save those capable of learning. I have no solution for the other group; maybe prison.
It’s my contention that most blacks here in the US aren’t any less intelligent than the whites, it’s just that they’re not well-adapted to the needs of modern civilization than the whites are.
“adapted to the needs of modern civilization” = intelligence. There is strong positive correlation between IQ and income, health outcomes, impulse control, etc. Modern civilization ratchets upwards to better outcomes as a function of IQ. The lower the mean IQ of a nation, the more friction in the gears, see DMV operations or other dysfunctional government operations. You get more errors, more resources are needed to address the errors, etc.
Look, if we take intelligent people from the big city and drop them into the Australian Outback and have them look for water, the Aborigines are going to appear like geniuses to neutral observers because they are better adapted to that environment and know who to find water. Modern civilization rewards those with intelligence because modern civilization is built on intelligence, not built on how to find water in a desert.
Adapt the teaching techniques to what does work, and who cares?
Lots of people care. The KIPP schools have developed a technique to teach Blacks and deliver impressive results, gains in achievement which match the performance of White students. So what’s the problem? Seems that these new techniques require a DOUBLING of instructional time for the Black students, a LOT more time on task, a LOT more repetition of the material being taught, a LOT more hand-holding (the students can phone the teachers at home and get them to tutor the student through a homework problem.)
There is NO solution which delivers identical results between Whites and Blacks and which holds instructional time constant. To get the results requires going back to a “separate but equal” system and pouring way more resources per year per student into the Black school system than the White system. Already in NJ, the Abbott System has inner-city schools getting supplementary funding from the State which puts spending per student at a higher level than the schools in the rich suburbs, Princeton HS for example, but there is zero improvement in results for graduating seniors.
Who cares? There is a stigma, a shame, at work here, the woke allies of Blacks and Blacks don’t want to formalize a system which, at its core, requires Black students to attend school for 2x the amount of hours required of White students. Once this system is formalized, the mirage of equality between the races evaporates. That’s too bitter of a pill to swallow.
Kirk: “Not every kid is suited for the fussy little scrap-booky BS they push in most classrooms.”
That is the truth! This is not so much a Zulu/Irish issue as it is a male/female issue. Universities are now female-dominated, in large part because females do better at the “sit quietly and repeat what we tell you” mode of education. A frightening proportion of pre-teen and teenage males in schools are on drugs for Attention Deficit Disorder — and who can say what the long-term effects of those brain-altering drugs will be?
Most young males do not find sitting still in classrooms to be easy. We have an educational system which seems to be designed for the convenience of female administrators & teachers. It may work moderately well for girls, but it is a hugely wasteful system for boys — regardless of the heritage of those boys.
@MikeK and TangoMan,
Look… Both of you are framing this issue as some kind of proxy for nutso racial superiority or inferiority complexes. The fact is that there is no inherent virtue to being able to fit in well with a civilization that was designed by the same “civilized types” that do well in within it. That’s like taking a seeing person, telling them to design something to live in, and then being shocked, shocked I tell you, when that blind kid over there can’t do well within structure.
There’s no real virtue to being “civilized” or to be able to do well within a civilized framework–Adolf Hitler and similarly sociopathic types do really well inside civilizations, too, and all the inherent powers granted by being within them makes their destructive natures a lot more damaging. Adolf Hitler in some hunter-gatherer band somewhere on a Eurasian steppe ain’t nowhere near as damaging as Adolf Hitler coupled with 1930s Germany.
The question is one of adaptation to environment. You’re well-adapted to life in the US context? Great. Good for you–Life is easy and sweet in the situation your ancestors set up for you, based on their inherent attributes. What’s not so great? Everyone who isn’t well-adapted.
So, how to get them there? That’s the issue, and what we’re doing isn’t working. Instead of throwing up your hands and decrying the people who aren’t adapted and fitting in, how about trying to figure out how to overcome that problem?
As TangoMan himself admits, there are different techniques of teaching and acculturation that work better with those ill-adapted to the game of civilization–It’s not just black America that has this problem, either. The way to fix this issue is to be honest about it all, and find things that actually, y’know… Work. There’s no shame to it, no virtue; it is what it is. And, steadily trying to pound oversized square pegs into little round holes is not working very well at all.
@Gavin,
That’s another issue, entirely. Gender differences in learning and educational success are things that the wokerati don’t want to acknowledge, but they are there.
Personally, I think that the way they’ve pushed men out of the early education process has been far more inimical to our civilization than many other things that people would point to first.
I think about 90% of the problems we have stem from the fact that most children look at the world around them, see no way to leverage it for themselves, and are left in a state of frustrated rage because of it. If you don’t “do well on the tests”, then you’re doomed–Or, so the system has taught them. The reality is far different, but perception plays a role that many of these kids never overcome.
Everywhere I go, these days, there’s opportunity for skilled trades–And, nobody to do them. Locally, our last driveline shop is closing in June–Because the owner is retiring and can’t find a buyer, or even anyone interested in taking over the shop. So, he’s likely going to scrap the machinery and take all his hard-won skills with him to the grave. Meanwhile, there’s an entire region of the state that’s not going to have a flippin’ driveline repair facility, and we’re going to have to drive 150 miles to the nearest big city to find such a thing.
Same-same with radiator repair. The last local tradesman who could do the work retired and shut down his business two years ago, and instead of being able to repair radiators on anything like our telehandler, we now have to buy a new one or scrap the machine. Another opportunity for a tradesman lost–And, both these guys made decent middle-class lives for themselves and their kids, but there are no new guys coming along in the pipeline, and why?
Because the filthy felching morons in our “educational establishment” have denigrated hand labor and the trades so much that no kid or parent in their right mind would ever consider such a demeaning career for their child. Good luck, folks… This is how a civilization dies, when it can no longer do the things it once found routine. Once upon a time, there were no doubt Romans similarly decrying the lost skillsets of the roadbuilders and aqueduct builders…
If you are not getting the results you want with your educational process, it’s time to examine the idea that perhaps instead of trying to force-fit the student into the process, it’s time to reconstruct the process from the ground up
Just because you’re not getting the equality of results you expect doesn’t mean that concerned people haven’t been trying everything already. And let’s not even go into the entire “But liberals are the real racists” BS. Nothing that’s been tried works, other than what I wrote above. There is no magic solution which has eluded educators for 100 years.
That’s like taking a seeing person, telling them to design something to live in, and then being shocked, shocked I tell you, when that blind kid over there can’t do well within structure.
What you’re engaging in here is motivated reasoning, you already know that conclusion you want to achieve, so because society is not achieving that desired solution, then clearly the fault lies with the methods society is presently using to achieve that desired goal.
Your society designed for blind people won’t have cars, won’t have airplanes, won’t have surgery, etc. all activities which require sight won’t exist as activities.
So, how to get them there? That’s the issue, and what we’re doing isn’t working. Instead of throwing up your hands and decrying the people who aren’t adapted and fitting in, how about trying to figure out how to overcome that problem?
You have over a century of real-world experimental results from a multitude of failed social and educational policies and you’re still presuming that a magic solution exists but no one has yet tried that solution. Look, you can initiate all manner of social reforms but nothing is going to work to allow men to get pregnant, men don’t have the reproductive organs needed for impregnation. Presuming that the problem is solvable is a faulty presumption. Reformers have been trying everything to close the Racial Achievement Gap and nothing is working. We’ve moved from the obvious and intuitive factors, with little effect, down to arcane factors, again with little effect. So if you presume that “the answer” is “out there” and we simply have to find it, you need to think about how non-obvious and how unintuitive that “answer” is going to be. It’s not family income, it’s not father-presence in the home, it’s not reading to the kids, it’s not parental education, it’s not school funding, it’s not teacher education, it’s not teacher commitment, it’s not school discipline, it’s not neighborhood, it’s not children’s peers, it’s not strict discipline, it’s not loose discipline, it’s not parental culture or parental child raising philosophy. Nothing closes the gap and even when you add up all of the effects from all of these reforms, you’re not not closing the gap but a smidgen.
The way to fix this issue is to be honest about it all, and find things that actually, y’know”¦ Work. There’s no shame to it, no virtue; it is what it is.
You started off your comment with a reference to kooky “racial superiority” frames, well if you implement a policy which sees the majority of Black kids having to enroll for TWICE the instructional hours of most White kids, then you’re tacitly acknowledging racial superiority at work. The solution which actually does deliver good results is not an acceptable solution to most people, woke and non-woke, Black or non-Black. This “hard truth” runs counter to a century of intense propaganda about racial equality, propaganda which would make creationists proud.
I have to disagree with you guys. I agree about boys and girls and the differences but I went to school for 8 years with nuns teaching both sexes. After that, high school with Irish Christian Brothers teaching boys only. My jaw still pops from being punched by a brother.
However, that will not deal with the psychopaths like that NFL ex-player who killed a doctor, his wife, two grandchildren and a yard worker. Six teams in six years means he was a behavior problem, not CTE as his father has alleged.
There are thousands of black kids who have done well in the educational system that worked for several centuries. There is another population that I see little hope for. Maybe it is cultural but the NFL mass murderer is from an intact, middle class family. Maybe it is “The Warrior Gene” but it is something genetic. There is a subpopulation which is breeding and consists of males and females who seem to be not suited for civilization. I don’t know where these people were before 1950; I suspect there are more of them now.
Maybe it is “The Warrior Gene” but it is something genetic. There is a subpopulation which is breeding and consists of males and females who seem to be not suited for civilization. I don’t know where these people were before 1950; I suspect there are more of them now.
52x over-represented in Blacks compared to Whites.
Where were these people before 1950? Probably dead. Here’s what I see going on. Form a group of 10 year olds, give them two tests. First test has them write their name. 100% pass rate. The second test asks them to solve a differential equation. 100% failure rate. My point is that there is a mechanism which sorts people into groups, if you change the sorting mechanism then the composition of the two groups will also change. Now devise a third test in order to test skills that you expect a 10 year old to have mastery of. Now you’re going to be a pass rate greater than zero and less than 100%.
Back before the “Black uplift project” was devised, Blacks had a segregated parallel society to Whites. The marriage rate was high, boys grew up with fathers, discipline was implemented, families went to church, morals were taught, fear of God was instilled, Black teachers taught Black students, Black-owned stores catered to Black shoppers, etc. The upshot here is that it was an ordered society and the guys who couldn’t fit in fell into crime and ended up in prison or dead. White society didn’t see the full picture of what was going on, kind of like how daily Chicago murders in the present day are not really newsworthy. That society parsed the good from the bad, and the bad were really bad and they mostly rotted in prison or died from violence, so they’re not a persistent problem.
After the launch of the “Black Uplift Project” society was conducting a different form of test and the parsing changed. Now instead of that Black shopkeeper being a “big fish in a small pond” he was a “small fish in a larger pond” – he wasn’t competing against other Black-owned businesses, now he was competing against more efficient and larger White owned businesses, and failing to keep up. Integration in society erased the Black societal microcosm, the parallel, segregated, Black society. As welfare dollars started to roll in, the role of the man was diminished, as Black kids were integrated into White schools, they had to compete against White students and couldn’t, many kids coming to feel that if they can’t do well that they should give up trying, this is by no means a strictly Black behavioral response, we see it everywhere, but this new “test” is creating a parsing which is sending more kids down to the dysfunctional class of criminals. Some of these kids, in an earlier era, could have been saved, the boys would go for a few more years of schooling before dropping out and getting manual labor jobs, they’d get married, be fathers and stick around to raise their kids, leading productive lives in that parallel society, insulated from competition from White America.
Today there is less need for manual laborers, there is more welfare, less father presence in the home, the schools are afraid to enforce discipline because of disparate racial outcomes being a de facto proof of “racism”, the students get discouraged because they can’t perform to expectations, and then of course there is medicine which is more effective today as saving victims of trauma, then there is prison reform putting criminals back on the street, then there is juvenile diversion programs putting rough kids back on the street.
What used to be out of sight for White America is no longer out of sight and there are all manner of social programs and policies which exacerbate the creation of dysfunctional behavior. The conservative critiques on welfare’s effect on behavior are right on the mark. Integration is propagandized as an unalloyed good, it’s clearly created lots of these problems. There is something to be said, in terms of quality of life, for being a big fish in a small pond; it sucks being a small fish in a big pond, hence the requirement for racial quotas in hiring and education, merit alone can’t produce the “desired” results.
That parsing mechanism, that test, is putting some good Black kids into the wrong category all because they can’t do well in an integrated society competing against kids from other races, their counterparts from earlier eras though did OK-enough when competing solely against other Black kids.
TangoMan: “… there are all manner of social programs and policies which exacerbate the creation of dysfunctional behavior.”
There you have finally put your finger on the heart of the problem, TM. We get what we subsidize. We define deviancy down, and we get more deviancy.
It is not about race. It is about the policies implemented by the Political Class, often over the opposition of the majority of the citizens. Many of those policies sound good and are well intentioned, but the consequences are awful.
Just look at the explosion in (native population) single mothers in European countries since most countries decided to subsidize single mothers — and tax married mothers to pay for it.
The good news is that we could fix most of the problems over time simply by stopping subsidizing the behaviors which are damaging to general society. The bad news is that would take some leaders prepared to be condemned as hard-hearted. And the transition would be tough.
A rich society can afford to give a murderer room & board for the rest of his life by taxing the law-abiding. A poor society has no choice but to hang him immediately. Once we were a rich society. As the Political Class transforms us into a poor society again, things will change. And some of those changes will actually be beneficial.
It is not about race. It is about the policies implemented by the Political Class, often over the opposition of the majority of the citizens. Many of those policies sound good and are well intentioned, but the consequences are awful.
Of course it’s about race. Don’t let woke idiots do your thinking for you. There’s no need to erase race from the explanation. Most of what you wrote is correct, except for your desperate need to conform to the propaganda that you’ve ingested your whole life which makes you think that you’re a bad person for accepting that evolution applies to humans too.
A White student with no father in the home, and with a mother who is a HS drop-out, performs in school at about the same level as a Black student with a father in the home and a mother who is a college graduate. The racial effect size here is much larger than the social effects you’re wanting to focus on.
https://i.imgur.com/OGLjOjr.jpg
Look at the data, father presence in the home makes a difference in almost all racial groups and maternal education levels. Father presence matters but it doesn’t matter all that much in terms of educational outcomes. Race matters much more.
Stop ignoring race because Leftists indoctrinated you into believing that it is irrelevant. They lied to you.
TangoMan: “There’s no need to erase race from the explanation. Most of what you wrote is correct, except for your desperate need to conform to the propaganda that you’ve ingested your whole life …”
TM, indeed race is a factor. But it is not the ONLY factor, which is what you seem to be saying.
My views are heavily influenced not by “propaganda” but by my own experiences throughout life. I have dealt with good English people — and absolutely vile English people; Chinese people I would trust with my life — and Chinese people with whom I would be sure to keep my hand on my wallet; great Africans — and Africans I would make a point of avoiding.
What statistics show is consistent with what I have seen with my own lying eyes — the range within any group is much larger than the differences between the averages of groups. The content of each individual’s character matters.
But let’s assume you are right and it is all about race. What can we do about it? I respectfully suggest the practical option is the same thing we can do about problems which are not driven by a miscreant’s race: that is, we should stop subsidizing and facilitating anti-social behavior.
Possibly my opinion is influenced by the number of black doctors I have known. The Bell Curve tells us that there is a large group to the right of the mean. They do just fine in traditional society and the educational system.
The present effort by race pimps to profit from black anger is weakening this structure. I worked for a while with a black orthopedic surgeon and gave him a copy of “The 10,000 year explosion,” joking that Farrakhan was right about whites being “Ice People.” Evolution caused the development of white skin as humans moved out of Africa and into colder regions with less sunshine and the requirement for clothing. He read it and bought copies for his two daughters who were in their 40s.
I fear that such casual contact between races might be reduced in those younger who are being subjected to the CRT propaganda.
TM, indeed race is a factor. But it is not the ONLY factor, which is what you seem to be saying.
You’re coming across much like Cathy Newman interviewing Jordon Peterson. :)
Let’s understand an important point here – I’m the moderate in these debates, the extremists are those who argue a culture-only view and deny that evolution applies to humans, my moderate position is that both culture and biology matter and that biology is the most important factor because biology actually helps shape culture. Even in my response to you I was pointing out that culture matters, in that example I used father presence, so clearly I am not arguing that culture has zero effect.
Your point about variation within group is trivial, it’s simply a rehash of Lewontin’s propaganda. There are Black billionaires and Black homeless people, that doesn’t mean that Blacks look at that variation WITHIN race and conclude that the variation between Blacks and Whites is meaningless. They’re still bothered by how mean Black income is drastically less than mean White income. The social friction between racial groups is derived from that BETWEEN group variance, not the WITHIN group variance. In homogeneous societies, WITHIN group variance is the only game in town, so CLASS struggles and conflict become the name of the game, but in heterogeneous societies, the BETWEEN group variances are major sore points and put class issues far down the list of grievances.
we should stop subsidizing and facilitating anti-social behavior.
A good start but you have to have the political muscle to enforce this policy change. The demographic tidal wave is working against you – look at polling data on issues like gun control, small government, welfare policies and you see a marked difference, a continually growing gap in opinion between Whites and 3rd worlders in America.
Fences make for good neighbors. Conflict, social conflict, arises from interaction and compelled interaction is even more problematic. Reduce stress points, out of sight, out of mind. Start restoring human rights, like freedom of association, and gut anti-discrimination laws. Start honoring contracts and property rights and bring back racial property covenants. Even here though, the problem I pointed out is a stumbling block, there is not enough “voting power” to bring about these reforms, and so they won’t happen, instead the country will grow increasingly dysfunctional and inter-group conflict will rise and government will become more totalitarian in order to create some semblance of a civil society. Free markets, Democracy & Diversity. Pick any two, it’s impossible to have all three.
Possibly my opinion is influenced by the number of black doctors I have known. The Bell Curve tells us that there is a large group to the right of the mean. They do just fine in traditional society and the educational system.
When we look at the qualification of Blacks admitted to medical schools, and use that cut-off for admitting ALL applicants who pass that minimum bar, we’d have to, possibly, quadruple the number of medical schools in the country to accommodate the mass of new medical students. Lots of folks, LOTS, could be working as physicians and doing well if they were held to the same lowered standards as Black medical students and physicians.
So yes, when we look at 36 million African Americans, there are millions of them who do well in society, some even extraordinarily well even when judged on skill and merit. Your argument though is similar in form to people who know Ivy League graduates and socially mix with those people. They see these graduates everywhere, but the average person doesn’t usually know any Ivy League graduates.
So let’s talk about the means, the right side of the Bell Curve. In America, one of every six Blacks is more intelligent than half of Whites, put another way, 1 of 6 Blacks has an IQ greater than 100, while half of Whites have an IQ of 100 or less. So, in America there are about 6 million Blacks with IQs greater than 100. The ratio of 1 in 6 grows as we move up the IQ ladder. If the Ivy League admitted solely on merit, the ratio between Whites and Blacks would be 60:1. The number of Black physicians who earned their place in medical school by qualifying on merit, without needing to resort to Affirmative Action boosts, is vanishingly small. The reason you know so many Black physicians is because they were coddled and admitted under diminished standards.
I fear that such casual contact between races might be reduced in those younger who are being subjected to the CRT propaganda.
I completely agree. For me, I identified the core dynamic back when I was in university. Some Black dude was upset with my viewpoint and I replied “If you continually blame Whites for “doing you wrong” then I’m going to push back and point out these impolite truths – I don’t like being blamed for something I’m not doing, being blamed for harming Blacks when I’m not doing anything of the sort. If you don’t want to deal with these impolite truths I’m bringing up, then stop blaming me and people like me for things we’re not doing. You can have social peace, I’ll keep these impolite truths to myself because I’m not interested in stirring up a hornet’s nest, of being on the offense, but you need to deal with your people’s problems on your own and not shift blame onto innocents.
The more vocal and in your face minorities become about inter-race social disparity, the more Whites will start to push back. Think about when you were a child and your parents blamed you for something your little brother did and you were actually punished for your brother’s misdeed, oh the injustice.
This current social strife is characterized by two factors – 1.) insecurity, it’s easier to blame “institutional racism” and “White Privilege” than face their own shortcomings; and 2.) A blatant power grab because they benefit from more quotas and more wealth/opportunity transfer. Notice that neither of these factors is a REACTION to wrongdoing inflicted upon them, but growing White resentment arises from REACTION to wrongdoing being done to Whites. No one likes being painted as a villain when they are innocent.
The reason you know so many Black physicians is because they were coddled and admitted under diminished standards.
No, the ones I am referring to are the older ones like me. I taught medical students for 15 years, many of whom were black. Most of those were immigrants from Africa and the West Indies. American blacks, in my experience, did not do well in medical school. The kids who were African were quite sharp, as were the West Indian. I admit I did not see their grades from academic courses but I was teaching clinical skills.
I did have one black girl who failed her practical exam that was required to progress to the clinical years. It was not so much intelligence but she was obsessive about such things as wearing gloves and she had complicated physical diagnosis tools. I discouraged students from buying very expensive complicated equipment like complex ophthalmoscopes. My argument was that, in practice, unless they went into that specialty, they would be using office equipment shared by others.
She failed because she ran out of time with all her gear to complete the exams.
One American born black student failed the first year twice. He got very depressed and was living at home in Los Angeles, probably a mistake. Several other black students tried to help him.
The kids who were African were quite sharp, as were the West Indian.
I don’t think you’re actually refuting my point about lowered standards. A lot is made about how foreign Blacks out-perform American Blacks, nevertheless the standardized testing data shows that their mean scores are still below Whites.
We both know that a whole lot of people who aren’t physicians could be physicians. It’s the same process at work which selected the Mercury 7 astronauts, a lot of guys who didn’t make the first cut, like Borman, made it into the Next Nine and they did a fine job. The same issue is playing out with military physical fitness standards – you don’t need to be able to dead-lift your fallen comrade in order to push a button to launch a missile. The lardass soldier can be just as effective at pushing a button as the Greek God soldier.
Those high standards only kick in when situations arise which require the desired feature, an infantryman needs that upper body strength in order to march fully loaded and to pull his fallen comrade to safety, that Mercury 7 astronaut needs extraordinary ability to remain conscious under high-g when his capsule is spinning uncontrollably and creating higher g-forces than experienced during launch. The physician needs high intelligence to deal with some novel situation which challenges the limits of his training. The reason that physician’s assistants have developed into a new class of professionals is that they can take care of some of the more mundane work that physicians used to do.
Are there some domestic and foreign-born Black physicians who can compete in a fair contest with White physicians? Sure there are. Not many though. And not all foreign-born Blacks meet the same standards as White physicians. Were the foreign-born Black students you dealt with some of the few who could stand toe to toe with White students? Maybe. What the aggregate data tells us is that there are not that many foreign-born Blacks who qualify for admission on merit and merit alone, without need of an affirmative action boost.
Looking at my MCAT data I see the following for 2007-2009:
57.1% of Black applicants, with GPAs between 3.00-3.19 and MCATs between 24-26 were admitted to medical school compared to only 8.8% of White students.
If a medical student can do reasonably well in medical school and then working as a physician with those qualifications, then all of those rejected White students could also have done just as well. The standards for admission are thus too high, just like physical fitness standards for soldiers are too high for people destined to be desk-jockeys and button pushers. Who though wants their nation to be defended by an army of lardasses? We want the very most capable and fit men out there defending us, able to rise to meet the challenges of the day, the unknown challenges. Outfitting a military to the lowest common denominator and not allowing more fit applicants to enlist is a problematic policy.
Physician’s assistants now do some of the work that used to be done by physicians. Lesser academically qualified people admitted into medical school can master many of the aspects of medical knowledge and practice, but when faced with a situation where patient outcome is a function of intelligence, some novel situation which requires the physician to do more than just rote practice, then the medical equivalent of “lardasses” are simply not cut out for the job.
From a 1995 study which looked at medical students in the 10 year period following admission to medical school, 6.7% of Black medical students dropped out for academic reasons compared to 0.7% of White students. This shouldn’t be surprising, this plays out with Affirmative Action everywhere, in schools and the workforce. The fact that 93.3% of Black students did NOT fail out of medical school strongly suggests that the material taught can be taught to people who are much dumber than most physicians. Lots of people can thus qualify to be “lardass physicians” doing routine work, but they will be dangerous to be around when some novel situation arises. The classic case here also involves Bakke, the student who sued Univ. of California for discriminating against him in favor of admitting of lesser qualified Black applicant. That Black applicant was graduated, licensed and went on to kill a number of patients through his practice of the medical arts.
Were the foreign-born Black students you dealt with some of the few who could stand toe to toe with White students? Maybe. What the aggregate data tells us is that there are not that many foreign-born Blacks who qualify for admission on merit and merit alone, without need of an affirmative action boost.
You could also make the argument that those are a select group who made it to the US. One of my black students was Kenyan and both her parents were physicians in Kenya who had retired to their coffee farm because of the level of government corruption.
One of my African students was Eritrean who, with her parents, fled the civil war there to South Africa, then to Guadeloupe in the West Indies, then to LA. She was very light skinned and very bright, although quite poor. Lived with her grandmother.
Quite a few Indian students one of whom was probably the brightest student I have met. She was beautiful but very dark skinned. A computer whiz. Also tall and very athletic. She could put her leg against her ear on each side. (Not what you are thinking.) She said her parents, both US citizens, had met through an Indian dating web site. Her mother chose her father because he nwas then onklyn one to post a color photo of himself.
You could also make the argument that those are a select group who made it to the US.
If you read between the lines of what I wrote you can infer that I understand that such students do exist, maybe you ran into some of these students. Selective immigration is something I wrote about already, I also wrote about how there exists an “upper class” of Blacks within Black society, children are smart because parents are smart because grandparents are smart, all professionally employed and these folks could hold their own in academic contests with foreign-born Blacks. Of course the same dynamic works in Kenya, the child of two Kenyan physicians inherited their smarts.
I’m at a disadvantage here if we’re arguing about particular students you knew and taught, I don’t know them, I just have reams of data about population groups and that doesn’t tell me anything useful about a particular student of yours.
Keep in mind that every year, across the breadth of America, there are only about 250 Black HS students who earn SAT scores high enough to be admitted to the Ivy League solely on the basis of merit, and this includes foreign-born Blacks and bi-racial students who identify as Black. Medical schools are pretty selective, like the Ivies, so I would venture that the odds of you meeting many Black students admitted to medical school without need of Affirmative Action boosts is quite low. There simply are not that many such qualified Black students around and of those who are at that level, many head over to law and finance instead of medicine.
TangoMan — It is time for a “moderate” such as yourself to step back and look at the Big Picture. Let’s just say the unsayable — while you are getting exercised about race, the real beneficiaries of Affirmative Action have been mostly white upper middle class daughters of privilege. Race is the banner under which outright gender discrimination has advanced.
The original “outreach to qualified applicants” concept of Affirmative Action was great. The twisted version of discriminatory quotas which liberal judges have imposed is damaging to the country — but beneficial to women and to a lesser extent to those of African heritage.
The ideal is obvious — base selection on merit & performance, regardless of any other factor. It is unfortunate we cannot get there from here.
Gavin:
illustration to your point
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/liberal-boston-hospital-set-preferential-treatment-based-race-whites-last-want-make-national-policy/
I guess these idiots think they correct the historic injustice…
I would venture that the odds of you meeting many Black students admitted to medical school without need of Affirmative Action boosts is quite low. There simply are not that many such qualified Black students around and of those who are at that level, many head over to law and finance instead of medicine.
I think the odds of that get greater every year we see the virtue signaling grow. Most of the black physicians I know are graduates in the 60s when affirmative action was still a novelty. My medical students are all now physicians graduated ten years ago.
From my recent experience with physicians, I am not optimistic about the future. My experience was in an era when doctors were small business owners, for the most part. Mostly men and able to make a nice living with a less intrusive bureaucracy. Obamacare has made most physicians into employees with many of the psychological aspects of employees.
Interestingly, my wife’s internist (black Jamaican) has just announced he is going to a “concierge” practice, which means $200/month and he does not take Medicare or insurance. I told her to sign up but she waited too long and he was booked up to his panel of 400 total patients. He now has a long waiting list, as well. Before, as an employee of a big group, his patient panel was 4,000.
This will give him a gross income of $80,000 a month. Not bad. Obviously rent and employees will come out of that but he will probably need fewer employees. No insurance billing. The group probably handled that but he still would need someone to fill out all the forms.
Without disagreeing with much that is above, there is exactly one things that the schools teach that differentiates the winners from the thugs of all sexes. That is reading and writing. This is what separates those capable of learning any but the most menial jobs from those that can be taught. ALL the rest is irrelevant and mostly just an enforced opportunity to practice literacy.
The only way to learn to read is through prolonged, diligent effort until a threshold of competence is reached, thereafter the student is able to advance on his own, with, or often enough, in spite of whatever school he may find himself in. In the absence of literacy, the student is simply serving time in school to be followed, most likely, by a penal institution.
MCS, I agree and would only add arithmetic to your two essential skills. In an age when supposedly serious people can discuss whether 2+2=4 is racist, it seems essential.
Algebra seems less essential when cashiers in Kentucky Fred Chicken cannot make change and ask you to use a debit or credit card.
Let’s just say the unsayable ”” while you are getting exercised about race, the real beneficiaries of Affirmative Action have been mostly white upper middle class daughters of privilege.
I was blogging about that 15 years ago at my old blog. It’s quite sayable, but it’s not as disruptive to the social fabric. While I may be harmed by preferences given to women, my wife would be a beneficiary of such preferences and bring into the household the wealth that is extracted, or denied, to me. When wealth, income and opportunity are stripped from Whites and redistributed to Blacks, most of those who are harmed don’t have that wealth, income or opportunity coming back into their family through another family member.
The original “outreach to qualified applicants” concept of Affirmative Action was great.
It wasn’t even great, it was misguided from the get-go. Here’s why I hold my position. If my local school district wants to build a new high school for the kids and wants to borrow the money, it will put the issue to a civic vote. Those who vote in favor understand that their taxes will increase and that they are purposely making themselves a bit poorer in exchange for the community getting a better, or newer, high school. Put another way, those voting in the affirmative are willingly investing in their community. At the end of the voting, the community approves the borrowing and construction plan. How do you think the vote would change if the school district said “Hey folks, just so there is no misunderstanding here, we’re actually planning to build this school in Somalia, not here in the community.” The voting on that proposal would result in the issue not being passed. Nothing changes if 500 Somalians are sent into the community as a resettlement effort. Now the school that you wanted built for your kids and your community’s kids is dominated by “The Other.” At this point people start selling their homes and moving away or staying but withdrawing their children from that public school.
People build institutions for themselves and their descendants, not for “The Other.” This compulsory association destroys the social fabric. If diversity and integration was so great, then Ike wouldn’t have had to send the 101st to march behind White kids, with weapons drawn, as they made their way to school, diversity and integration would have sold themselves as being something fab-u-lous!
The ideal is obvious ”” base selection on merit & performance, regardless of any other factor. It is unfortunate we cannot get there from here.
If we absolutely had to go down their AA road, then it should have been implemented under a state of emergency, or martial law, instead of tinkering with Constitutional Rights. If compulsory segregation is a bad thing, then compulsory integration is just as bad. The gov’t really has no business in forcing people into unwanted associations. We could have set a 25 year or 50 year period for AA to be in effect, in order to create a “catching-up” and “leapfrogging” effect for Blacks, then martial law would have ended and no damage would have been done to legal precedents.
Put that aside though, what’s done is done, so the time to have ended this was when the power of the beneficiaries was low and powered through the objection of “It’s not right to end this program because the beneficiaries are so powerless, this is punching down.” We didn’t muster the resolve to end it and now we’re faced with this problem – “We can’t end AA now, the beneficiaries are too powerful of a political coalition.”
I think MCS gets it mostly right, but I agree with Mike – basic literacy and numeracy. Back to MCS, the rest is, indeed, mostly irrelevant and an opportunity to practice literacy skills.
There is, however, another factor at work with schooling – socialization and expanding the world of that child beyond his family and immediate neighbors. A coach can turn around the life of a kid, a good teacher can inspire a kid to look beyond his own interests and impulses, trusting the recommendation of the teacher to read a certain book. Another factor is the enforced discipline of learning. Educators have long known that eager students who sign up for correspondence courses mostly never complete the work – they have the desire and ambition but they lack the self-discipline to sit down and study on their own. When that school bell rings, it doesn’t matter if the kid has self-discipline, the entire school is set-up to insure his butt is in a seat in a classroom and that teacher is engaging the students in some exercise to get them engaged with learning.
Yeah, agree completely, that once literate, a kid COULD be an independent learner, but most kids WON’T be independent learners.
Even on this literacy training, the woke educators are screwing the damn pooch. Boys are disengaging from reading, it’s like pulling teeth to get boys to read the assigned material. What is the assigned material? Novels about dysfunctional families, discrimination, racism, sexism, family violence, sexual assault, divorce, death of parents, death of siblings, etc. Girls seem to be happy enough reading anything, boys want to engage with the story, so boys actually need role models, heroes, adventure stories, not “socially relevant youth literature.” Educators know this about boys and they also know that girls will just as happily read adventure stories, war stories, stories with male heroes and male role models, but these woke educators care more about pushing their ideological agendas than actually getting boys engaged with reading.
While I may be harmed by preferences given to women, my wife would be a beneficiary of such preferences and bring into the household the wealth that is extracted, or denied, to me.
Another phenomenon I have observed in recent years is the male doctors no longer marry nurses; they marry female doctors. Medical students are now 60% female so availability has changed. My class had no females but the class before me (actually my first class until my reserve unit was called up) had three females.
I have also observed that female doctors are more likely to marry “down” (Doesn’t seem to be a term, like hypergamy), often to marry men who do shift work like firemen or policemen. One of my female students married her high school boyfriend,an auto mechanic. She was very pretty and quite bright. I was invited to several of the weddings.
I agree about boys reading. My grandson seems uninterested in the books and classical games (like electrical wiring toys) I have given him. He is heavily into sports and is now a teen approaching 6-5. I was much more of a reader and had chemistry sets, etc. Times have changed with kid’s activities. My son and DIL are pushing sports, which is fine.
I didn’t say literacy was the only thing to teach, it is the essential thing. With literacy, learning everything from partial differential equations to the significance of the Battle of Hastings is possible. Without literacy, even one of those miserable jobs at Amazon, stuffing little boxes into bigger ones until the robots can do that too, is beyond reach.
About the doctor married to the auto mechanic. I wonder which one gets solicited for more free diagnosis and advice? In “Tales of the South Pacific”, there’s a passage about the supposed social gulf between doctors and nurses that makes marriages between them unsuitable. Probably one of Michener’s bigger boners.
The medical student who married her auto mechanic boyfriend has taken care of her car needs and, depending on where he works, he could be making $100k at a Mercedes dealer.
The women doctors marrying cops and firemen are probably thinking about child care. My younger son is a fireman and his wife runs a successful business from home. Her business has suffered under the Covidiocy and he has worked a lot of overtime, probably to compensate. Their kids are teens now.
He has a couple of years before retirement and she could work from anywhere. They are planning their escape from CA now. Oldest daughter starts U of Alabama in the fall.
Speaking of Amazon. How long before that box from Amazon carries the same odious cachet as a package labeled “Proudly built by P.R.C. Labor Camp 18765”? Of course, it’s quite likely that both labels would be appropriate. But Amazon seems to be on a mission.
I wouldn’t mind a little wokisim if it had some basis in the real world.
I call them zombie because they are just brainless ravagers, calling them woke fits their delusions.