larbud
10-26-2017, 05:32 AM
The lack of evidence for the equality of blacks
Levin needs no elaboration or further comments on his forthright listing of the lack of evidence for the equality of blacks:
*. . . not one of the 1500 discoveries listed in Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery (1989) was made by a Negroid people.[119]
* It is often asserted that black schools are poorer than white schools, but, primarily because of special and remedial programs and the need for psychologists and social workers, public schools now spend more per capita on black children than on white.[127]
* As everyone knows but has become reluctant to say, the world as a whole would hardly have noticed had sub-Saharan Africa not existed or never been contacted by Europeans and Asians. No important discovery, invention, or world leader emerged from Africa. The art, music, architecture, literature, and political history of Eurasia owe virtually nothing to Africans. Trade with black Africa (as opposed to European exploitation of the mineral wealth of the African continent) has always been negligible. Afrocentrists point to or, as in Bernal (1991) exaggerate, the contributions of Egypt, but in any event Egyptians were not black (Baker 1974).[194]
* Of the formative works of American literature, only Huckleberry Finn is concerned significantly with race: the topic is scarcely mentioned by Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Dreiser, James, Wharton, Sinclair, Hemingway, Salinger, Heller, or Roth. Few blacks have achieved eminence in areas other than sports, entertainment, the demand for rights, or writing about race itself. Afrocentrists accuse conventional white authorities of inventing these facts. But white historians, who freely acknowledge the attainments of Asians, have no reason to lie about blacks. The truth is that, until recently, most whites gave blacks relatively little thought, and would not have cared enough about blacks one way or the other to invest energy in obscuring their achievements.[195]
* Indeed, evidence mentioned in chapters 3 and 4 suggests that feasible environmental interventions will not significantly raise intelligence, hence are unlikely to shrink the race gap. This failure of special stimulation to boost the lQs of black children further weakens the interaction argument: every new experiment that leaves the race gap intact reduces the likelihood that some gap-reducing environment waits over the horizon.[230]
* Retrospection is crucial when the topic is racial justice. Whether or not there are environments in which the attainments of the races would be equal, if in fact, in the environment(s) in which blacks and whites have actually functioned, the extant race difference in attainment was caused by genetic factors rather than white misdeeds, this difference is not an injury, hence not an injury for which whites are to blame, hence not a condition whites are obliged to remedy. Given that race differences express genetic variation in the environments that have actually existed, how these same genetic factors would respond to other environments is irrelevant to questions of fault, just as, given that I did not steal the sweater from you, it is absurd to argue that you deserve it because it might have been yours. It is absurd to accuse B of cheating A, and give A a share of the prize to make up for it, because A might have run faster. From this perspective, the significance of genetic race differences is what they disprove, namely, every claim denying race differences or attributing them to a racist environment. A genetic explanation of black failure refutes these accusations against whites and undermines the policies premised on them. That is why genetic race differences are anything but "politically neutral."[231]
* The gap in attainment between blacks and whites in Africa is wider than the American racial gap, yet blacks were not enslaved in Africa and colonialism, which began in the 19th century, ended after World War II. Extensive economic investment in black Africa has not been accompanied by economic growth, nor prevented Africa from reverting to pre-technological conditions. Occam's razor, paring away multiple explanations of the economic failure of similar populations, implies that oppression is not a significant cause of the attainment gap in the United States.[257]
* I mentioned earlier the $2 billion spent by the National Science Foundation and NIH since 1972 to stimulate the intellectual development of blacks. By now hundreds of billions have been spent on Head Start. Publications such as Directory of Financial Aid to Minorities and Directory of Special Programs for Minority Group Members list literally thousands of training programs, scholarships, fellowships, internships, and awards reserved for blacks (and, usually, non-European Hispanics, along with women).[258]
* Indeed, American blacks at the end of World War II may usefully be compared to the Germans and Japanese of that period, whose countries lay in ruins under the occupation of foreign powers. Japan had suffered two atomic attacks, a collective psychic trauma (if one believes in such things) as severe as any in black history. Contemporary black father absence is often traced to the disruption of families during slavery; by way of comparison, 25% of the adult male population of Germany had been killed in the war, and hundreds of thousands of German women raped by Russian soldiers. By any measure, Japanese and Germans were worse off than the American black population in 1945. Yet by 1950 Germany had attained its 1936 production level, and within three decades Germany and Japan had become world economic leaders. Family stability is not a problem in either country. It seems plausible to attribute the different trajectories of their three cultures to the traits of Germans, Japanese and blacks. The black/white income ratio stabilized at 57% in the early 1970's, as federal and state income taxes are progressive, blacks may be assumed to pay about 50% in taxes for every dollar whites do. So blacks, at 12% of the population, collectively pay about 6% of the cost of welfare, or roughly $13 billion, for a net annual white-to-black transfer of roughly $75 billion. This is in effect a Marshal Plan for the "inner cities" every three years.[259]
* Thomas argues that the bloodier wars waged by whites show that, far from being less criminal than blacks, whites are "worse." Judgments of value aside, it is pertinent to ask how can blacks be more innately prone to violence when, collectively, Europeans and Asians have been more destructive. The answer is probably the superior technology of Eurasians made possible by their greater intelligence, and a superior capacity to organize into large armies, also an effect of greater intelligence and ability to subordinate the self. Although tribal conflict is endemic to Africa, Africans have been unable to invent weapons of mass destruction or assemble themselves into million-man forces. Greater black criminality requires only that individual blacks be on average more aggressive than individual whites.[317]
* If the races are equally intelligent, it should be possible to find a task intuitively requiring intelligence that blacks perform as well as whites. To insist time after time that black ability is present but hidden by bias is like claiming that someone who apparently knows only English can also speak Pushtu, but never does so because circumstances are never propitious.[64]
* Take this sentence: "The country has watched passively for more than a generation as its urban cores have devoured the people who live there" (Deparle 1992). Its author is treating the place where blacks reside as an entity with causal powers (which, it is implied, whites have negligently failed to restrain). Yet, speaking literally, urban cores devour no-one. When different people lived in those places, there was no "devouring"; blacks there now are being victimized by other predatory blacks. Or consider the oft-heard remark that black children misbehave in school because they "bring the streets with them." Black children don't literally bring pavement into the schoolroom, nor the values taught by pavement. They bring the values of the children who live on those streets; which is to say, their own. The equally familiar diagnosis of black teenage crime and destructiveness as a product of "peer pressure" is also reification, disguising the very phenomenon that needs to be explained-the source of the malign peers, who are, after all, merely other black youths.[150]
* Scholars as well as journalists make similar mistakes. Fischer et al. (1996) propose the vacuous "community conditions" (18) as a way to explain poor black outcomes. Like a great many other writers, they assert that segregation "reduced living standards and housing quality" (180), without explaining how the sheer proportion of black people in a region can effect housing quality unless black people either individually or collectively tend to squalor. Most absurdly, they explain the educational difficulties experienced by blacks in all-black neighborhoods in terms of greater exposure to crime and lower levels of safety (see 196), as if crime were a force independent of blacks themselves.[151]
* "Jobs," "wealth," and "opportunities" are here treated as things that surge through neighborhoods, build roads, and magically produce luxury cars, and that unnamed (but easily identified) forces prevent blacks from "partaking of." This is a muddle. The occupational tasks characteristic of a group are determined by its members' abilities and preferences, and can no more exist apart from it, or be "left behind" when the group leaves, than can the social structure of a wolf pack stay in place when the wolves migrate. Certain abilities allow performance of certain highly valued tasks. When an ability is so widespread that a group comes to rely on its being exercised, and those with the ability come to rely on its exercise being rewarded, the resultant feedback creates an occupational role. The "job" of whittling darts presumably took hold among the Yekuana of South America because enough Yekuana could whittle darts for other Yekuana to hunt monkeys with blowguns, and for each generation of craftsmen to train the next. The Yekuana could "leave" this skill by teaching it to any group that replaces them, should their replacements have sufficiently many craftsmen and a taste for monkey meat. But dart-making does not exist in the jungle apart from the Yekuana, and is not, like a bar of gold, physically transferable. If the Yekuana are replaced by fishermen, they will not have "taken" anything they could have left. It would be absurd for a community of fishermen near the Yekuana to complain that hunting was "surging" through the Amazon Basin but bypassing them. White flight "takes" jobs in the sense that tasks characteristic of whites cease being performed in the absence of whites. There is no reason to expect these tasks to be performed, in light of the differences between black abilities, preferences, and levels of persistence and those of the group that created them. When colonial whites left Africa, the roads they built began to disintegrate in the absence of engineers to maintain them. Detroit fell into similar disrepair when whites left. The reified entity "'Detroit" ceased manufacturing automobiles because too few of the blacks who remained were able or inclined to manufacture cars on their own.[152]
Levin needs no elaboration or further comments on his forthright listing of the lack of evidence for the equality of blacks:
*. . . not one of the 1500 discoveries listed in Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery (1989) was made by a Negroid people.[119]
* It is often asserted that black schools are poorer than white schools, but, primarily because of special and remedial programs and the need for psychologists and social workers, public schools now spend more per capita on black children than on white.[127]
* As everyone knows but has become reluctant to say, the world as a whole would hardly have noticed had sub-Saharan Africa not existed or never been contacted by Europeans and Asians. No important discovery, invention, or world leader emerged from Africa. The art, music, architecture, literature, and political history of Eurasia owe virtually nothing to Africans. Trade with black Africa (as opposed to European exploitation of the mineral wealth of the African continent) has always been negligible. Afrocentrists point to or, as in Bernal (1991) exaggerate, the contributions of Egypt, but in any event Egyptians were not black (Baker 1974).[194]
* Of the formative works of American literature, only Huckleberry Finn is concerned significantly with race: the topic is scarcely mentioned by Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Dreiser, James, Wharton, Sinclair, Hemingway, Salinger, Heller, or Roth. Few blacks have achieved eminence in areas other than sports, entertainment, the demand for rights, or writing about race itself. Afrocentrists accuse conventional white authorities of inventing these facts. But white historians, who freely acknowledge the attainments of Asians, have no reason to lie about blacks. The truth is that, until recently, most whites gave blacks relatively little thought, and would not have cared enough about blacks one way or the other to invest energy in obscuring their achievements.[195]
* Indeed, evidence mentioned in chapters 3 and 4 suggests that feasible environmental interventions will not significantly raise intelligence, hence are unlikely to shrink the race gap. This failure of special stimulation to boost the lQs of black children further weakens the interaction argument: every new experiment that leaves the race gap intact reduces the likelihood that some gap-reducing environment waits over the horizon.[230]
* Retrospection is crucial when the topic is racial justice. Whether or not there are environments in which the attainments of the races would be equal, if in fact, in the environment(s) in which blacks and whites have actually functioned, the extant race difference in attainment was caused by genetic factors rather than white misdeeds, this difference is not an injury, hence not an injury for which whites are to blame, hence not a condition whites are obliged to remedy. Given that race differences express genetic variation in the environments that have actually existed, how these same genetic factors would respond to other environments is irrelevant to questions of fault, just as, given that I did not steal the sweater from you, it is absurd to argue that you deserve it because it might have been yours. It is absurd to accuse B of cheating A, and give A a share of the prize to make up for it, because A might have run faster. From this perspective, the significance of genetic race differences is what they disprove, namely, every claim denying race differences or attributing them to a racist environment. A genetic explanation of black failure refutes these accusations against whites and undermines the policies premised on them. That is why genetic race differences are anything but "politically neutral."[231]
* The gap in attainment between blacks and whites in Africa is wider than the American racial gap, yet blacks were not enslaved in Africa and colonialism, which began in the 19th century, ended after World War II. Extensive economic investment in black Africa has not been accompanied by economic growth, nor prevented Africa from reverting to pre-technological conditions. Occam's razor, paring away multiple explanations of the economic failure of similar populations, implies that oppression is not a significant cause of the attainment gap in the United States.[257]
* I mentioned earlier the $2 billion spent by the National Science Foundation and NIH since 1972 to stimulate the intellectual development of blacks. By now hundreds of billions have been spent on Head Start. Publications such as Directory of Financial Aid to Minorities and Directory of Special Programs for Minority Group Members list literally thousands of training programs, scholarships, fellowships, internships, and awards reserved for blacks (and, usually, non-European Hispanics, along with women).[258]
* Indeed, American blacks at the end of World War II may usefully be compared to the Germans and Japanese of that period, whose countries lay in ruins under the occupation of foreign powers. Japan had suffered two atomic attacks, a collective psychic trauma (if one believes in such things) as severe as any in black history. Contemporary black father absence is often traced to the disruption of families during slavery; by way of comparison, 25% of the adult male population of Germany had been killed in the war, and hundreds of thousands of German women raped by Russian soldiers. By any measure, Japanese and Germans were worse off than the American black population in 1945. Yet by 1950 Germany had attained its 1936 production level, and within three decades Germany and Japan had become world economic leaders. Family stability is not a problem in either country. It seems plausible to attribute the different trajectories of their three cultures to the traits of Germans, Japanese and blacks. The black/white income ratio stabilized at 57% in the early 1970's, as federal and state income taxes are progressive, blacks may be assumed to pay about 50% in taxes for every dollar whites do. So blacks, at 12% of the population, collectively pay about 6% of the cost of welfare, or roughly $13 billion, for a net annual white-to-black transfer of roughly $75 billion. This is in effect a Marshal Plan for the "inner cities" every three years.[259]
* Thomas argues that the bloodier wars waged by whites show that, far from being less criminal than blacks, whites are "worse." Judgments of value aside, it is pertinent to ask how can blacks be more innately prone to violence when, collectively, Europeans and Asians have been more destructive. The answer is probably the superior technology of Eurasians made possible by their greater intelligence, and a superior capacity to organize into large armies, also an effect of greater intelligence and ability to subordinate the self. Although tribal conflict is endemic to Africa, Africans have been unable to invent weapons of mass destruction or assemble themselves into million-man forces. Greater black criminality requires only that individual blacks be on average more aggressive than individual whites.[317]
* If the races are equally intelligent, it should be possible to find a task intuitively requiring intelligence that blacks perform as well as whites. To insist time after time that black ability is present but hidden by bias is like claiming that someone who apparently knows only English can also speak Pushtu, but never does so because circumstances are never propitious.[64]
* Take this sentence: "The country has watched passively for more than a generation as its urban cores have devoured the people who live there" (Deparle 1992). Its author is treating the place where blacks reside as an entity with causal powers (which, it is implied, whites have negligently failed to restrain). Yet, speaking literally, urban cores devour no-one. When different people lived in those places, there was no "devouring"; blacks there now are being victimized by other predatory blacks. Or consider the oft-heard remark that black children misbehave in school because they "bring the streets with them." Black children don't literally bring pavement into the schoolroom, nor the values taught by pavement. They bring the values of the children who live on those streets; which is to say, their own. The equally familiar diagnosis of black teenage crime and destructiveness as a product of "peer pressure" is also reification, disguising the very phenomenon that needs to be explained-the source of the malign peers, who are, after all, merely other black youths.[150]
* Scholars as well as journalists make similar mistakes. Fischer et al. (1996) propose the vacuous "community conditions" (18) as a way to explain poor black outcomes. Like a great many other writers, they assert that segregation "reduced living standards and housing quality" (180), without explaining how the sheer proportion of black people in a region can effect housing quality unless black people either individually or collectively tend to squalor. Most absurdly, they explain the educational difficulties experienced by blacks in all-black neighborhoods in terms of greater exposure to crime and lower levels of safety (see 196), as if crime were a force independent of blacks themselves.[151]
* "Jobs," "wealth," and "opportunities" are here treated as things that surge through neighborhoods, build roads, and magically produce luxury cars, and that unnamed (but easily identified) forces prevent blacks from "partaking of." This is a muddle. The occupational tasks characteristic of a group are determined by its members' abilities and preferences, and can no more exist apart from it, or be "left behind" when the group leaves, than can the social structure of a wolf pack stay in place when the wolves migrate. Certain abilities allow performance of certain highly valued tasks. When an ability is so widespread that a group comes to rely on its being exercised, and those with the ability come to rely on its exercise being rewarded, the resultant feedback creates an occupational role. The "job" of whittling darts presumably took hold among the Yekuana of South America because enough Yekuana could whittle darts for other Yekuana to hunt monkeys with blowguns, and for each generation of craftsmen to train the next. The Yekuana could "leave" this skill by teaching it to any group that replaces them, should their replacements have sufficiently many craftsmen and a taste for monkey meat. But dart-making does not exist in the jungle apart from the Yekuana, and is not, like a bar of gold, physically transferable. If the Yekuana are replaced by fishermen, they will not have "taken" anything they could have left. It would be absurd for a community of fishermen near the Yekuana to complain that hunting was "surging" through the Amazon Basin but bypassing them. White flight "takes" jobs in the sense that tasks characteristic of whites cease being performed in the absence of whites. There is no reason to expect these tasks to be performed, in light of the differences between black abilities, preferences, and levels of persistence and those of the group that created them. When colonial whites left Africa, the roads they built began to disintegrate in the absence of engineers to maintain them. Detroit fell into similar disrepair when whites left. The reified entity "'Detroit" ceased manufacturing automobiles because too few of the blacks who remained were able or inclined to manufacture cars on their own.[152]