₦airaland Forum

pleep:
In the 90s, the Infamous Book known as the Bell Curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life was released by Harvard Professors, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. In the Book the Authors tried to explain how Socioeconomic backgrounds determine Intelligence. The Book was immediately Slammed and Herrnstein and Murray were vilified.

Initially, i also slammed the Book as poorly done. I felt it didn't hold significant Scientific Influence. Recently, I've been thinking about this issue and I've come to a Conclusion. The Intelligent Blacks are being out bred by the non-intelligent ones at a rate greater than what the other Races are experiencing.


Before you Demonize me, think about it. In the US, an African American Woman that is on Welfare and is also on Drugs may have several Children, all for different Men. These Children Grow up in the hood and also breed in Large Numbers. I can understand why this happens in Africa, Most People with very Large families need the Manpower that a large family brings, but there are those that are not farmers and live in absolute penury, yet, they have several Children that they can't take care of.

In conclusion, i have my doubts about an IQ test being a Useful Indicator of Intelligence. I recently took a Paid Raven Matrices IQ test which is tailored specifically for Cultural differences, since it eliminates any form of Language. I got a high Score but i doubt an individual with little to no Formal Education would even know what to do. I might doubt the Efficiency of IQ tests but i'm almost certain that the Intelligent ones of our Race are being Bred of Existence.

sarmiie:
Eugenetics would be a very interesting topic to discuss

pkjag:
It is a failed theory that spewed hogwash in order to affirm white supremacy and justify slavery, it has no scientific grounding. It is Eugenics btw, there's no such thing as eugenetics.

sarmiie:
It is still an interesting concept to look at abstractly. And I called it eugenetics cos I wanted to look at it purely from a 'genetic' point of view.

pkjag:
It's a wrong, racist and dehumanizing way to look at a specific group of people.

pkjag:
Have you ever thought they breed more because they wanna maximize the chances of getting out of poverty i.e if one kid turns out bad, there's a possibility the others won't. This is of course because of few economic activities available for blacks both in africa and the west.

pleep:
Always victimhood isn't it? Have you ever thought that maybe there are "few economic activities available" because there are too many fcking people trying to share scarce resources?

You would rather blame outside forces instead of looking at your own moronic decisions. Typical black man.

pleep:
I might doubt the Efficiency of IQ tests but i'm almost certain that the Intelligent ones of our Race are being Bred of Existence.

kingston277:
Pleep, I hope you know Americans in the 1900s had an iq that by today's standards would be equal to 80. Also, explain how people with low iqs can build this?
[img]http://2.bp..com/-i2jLZKd7IU4/Tzki7ffWR1I/AAAAAAAAJ2k/SUwd8moGfGc/s640/Kumasi+house.png[/img]
www.nairaland.com/attachments/1718676_angolawheels_jpeg5c2198a9a78c672380280ca87fd608b6

Data dump 1 of 2

The intelligence "g" concept also has a number of limitations and claims of "declining" or "static" non-white intelligence are undermined by the Flynn effect.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Johnson, "Dome Improvement," WIRED MAGAZINE, MAY 2005 pp. 102-105
-------------------------------------------------

Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man or Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences or any critique of The Bell Curve is liable to dismiss 10 as merely phrenology updated, a pseudoscience fronting for a host of racist and elitist ideologies that dare not speak their names.

These critics attack IQ itself - or, more precisely, what intelligence scholar Arthur Jensen called g, a measure of underlying "general" intelligence. Psychometricians measure g by performing a factor analysis of multiple intelligence tests and extracting a pattern of correlation between the measurements. (IQ is just one yardstick.) Someone with greater general intelligence than average should perform better on a range of different tests.

Unlike some skeptics, James Flynn didn't just dismiss g as statistical tap dancing. He accepted that something real was being measured, but he came to believe that it should be viewed along another axis: time. You can't just take a snapshot of g at one moment and make sense of it, Flynn says.

You have to track its evolution. He did just that. Suddenly, g became much more than a measure of mental ability. It revealed the rising trend line in intelligence test scores. And that, in turn, suggested that something in the environment - some social or cultural force - was driving the trend.

Significant intellectual breakthroughs -to paraphrase the John Lennon song - are what happen when you're busy making other plans. So it was with Flynn and his effect. He left the US in the early 1960s to teach moral philosophy at the University of Otaga in New Zealand. In the late '70s, he began exploring the intellectual underpinnings of racist ideologies. "And I thought: Oh, I can do a bit about the 10 controversies," he says. "And then I saw that Arthur Jensen, a scholar of high repute, actually thought that blacks on average were genetically inferior - which was quite a shock. I should say that Jensen was beyond reproach - he's certainly not a racist. And so I thought I'd better look into this." This inquiry led to a 1980 book, Race, IQ, and Jensen, that posited an environmental -not genetic - explanation for the black-white 10 gap. After finishing the book, Flynn decided that he would look for evidence that blacks were gaining on whites as their access to education increased, and so he began studying US military records, since every incoming member of the armed forces takes an IQ test.


[b] Sure enough, he found that blacks were making modest gains on whites in intelligence tests, confirming his environmental explanation. But something else in the data caught his eye. Every decade or so, the testing companies would generate new tests and re-normalize them so that the average score was 100. To make sure that the new exams were in sync with previous ones, they'd have a batch of students take both tests. They were simply trying to confirm that someone who tested above average on the new version would perform above average on the old, and in fact the results confirmed that correlation. But the data also brought to light another pattern, one that the testing companies ignored. "Every time kids took the new and the old tests, they did better on the old ones," Flynn says. "I thought: That's weird."


The testing companies had published the comparative data almost as an afterthought. "It didn't seem to strike them as interesting that the kids were always doing better on the earlier test," he says. "But I was new to the area." He sent his data to the Harvard Educational Review, which dismissed the paper for its small sample size. And so Flynn dug up every study that had ever been done in the US where the same subjects took a new and an old version of an IQ test. "And lo and behold, when you examined that huge collection of data, it revealed a 14-point gain between 1932 and 1978." According to Flynn's numbers, if someone testing in the top 18 percent the year FDR was elected were to time-travel to the middle of the Carter administration, he would score at the 50th percentile.
[/b]
When Flynn finally published his work in 1984, Jensen objected that Flynn's numbers were drawing on tests that reflected educational background. He predicted that the Flynn effect would disappear if one were to look at tests - like the Raven Progressive Matrices - that give a closer approximation of gr, by measuring abstract reasoning and pattern recognition and eliminating language altogether. And so Flynn dutifully collected IQ data from all over the world. All of it showed dramatic increases. "The biggest of all were on Ravens," Flynn reports with a hint of glee still in his voice.

The trend Flynn discovered in the mid-'80s has been investigated extensively, and there's little doubt he's right. In fact, the Flynn effect is accelerating. US test takers gained 17 IQ points between 1947 and 2001. The annual gain from 1947 through 1972 was 0.3110 point, but by the '90s it had crept up to 0.36.

Though the Flynn effect is now widely accepted, its existence has in turn raised new questions. The most fundamental: Why are measures of intelligence going up? The phenomenon would seem to make no sense in light of the evidence that g is largely an inherited trait. We're certainly not evolving that quickly.

The classic heritability research paradigm is the twin adoption study: Look at IQ scores for thousands of individuals with various forms of shared genes and environments, and hunt for correlations. This is the sort of chart you get, with 100 being a perfect match and 0 pure randomness:
The same person tested twice 87
Identical twins raised together 86
Identical twins raised apart 76
Fraternal twins raised together 55
Biological siblings 47
Parents and children living together 40
Parents and children living apart 31
Adopted children living together 0
Unrelated people living apart 0

After analyzing these shifting ratios of shared genes and the environment for several decades, the consensus grew, in the '90s, that heritability for IQ was around 0.6 - or about 60 percent. The two most powerful indications of this are at the top and bottom of the chart: Identical twins raised in different environments have IQs almost as similar to each other as the same person tested twice, while adopted children living together - shared environment, but no shared genes - show no correlation. When you look at a chart like that, the evidence for significant heritability looks undeniable.

Four years ago, Flynn and William Dickens, a Brookings Institution economist, proposed another explanation, one made apparent to them by the Flynn effect. Imagine "somebody who starts out with a tiny little physiological advantage: He's just a bit taller than his friends," Dickens says. "That person is going to be just a bit better at basketball." Thanks to this minor height advantage, he tends to enjoy pickup basketball games. He goes on to play in high school, where he gets excellent coaching and accumulates more experience and skill. "And that sets up a cycle that could, say, take him all the way to the NBA," Dickens says.

Now imagine this person has an identical twin raised separately. He, too, will share the height advantage, and so be more likely to find his way into the same cycle. And when some imagined basketball geneticist surveys the data at the end of that cycle, he'll report that two identical twins raised apart share an off-the-charts ability at basketball. "If you did a genetic analysis, you'd say: Well, this guy had a gene that made him a better basketball player," Dickens says. "But the fact is, that gene is making him 1 percent better, and the other 99 percent is that because he's slightly taller, he got all this environmental support." And what goes for basketball goes for intelligence: Small genetic differences get picked up and magnified in the environment, resulting in dramatically enhanced skills. "The heritability studies weren't wrong," Flynn says. "We just misinterpreted them."

Dickens and Flynn showed that the environment could affect heritable traits like 10, but one mystery remained: What part of our allegedly dumbed-down environment is making us smarter? It's not schools, since the tests that measure education-driven skills haven't shown the same steady gains. It's not nutrition - general improvement in diet leveled off in most industrialized countries shortly after World War II, just as the Flynn effect was accelerating.

Most cognitive scholars remain genuinely perplexed. "I find it a puzzle and don't have a compelling explanation," wrote Harvard's Steven Pinker in an email exchange. "I suspect that it's either practice at taking tests or perhaps a large number of disparate factors that add up to the linear trend."

Flynn has his theories, though they're still speculative. "For a long time it bothered me that g was going up without an across-the-board increase in other tests," he says. If g measured general intelligence, then a long-term increase should trickle over into other subtests. "And then I realized that society has priorities. Let's say we're too cheap to hire good high school math teachers. So while we may want to improve arithmetical reasoning skills, we just don't. On the other hand, with smaller families, more leisure, and more energy to use leisure for cognitively demanding pursuits, we may improve - without realizing it -on-the-spot problem-solving, like you see with Ravens."

When you take the Ravens test, you're confronted with a series of visual grids, each containing a mix of shapes that seem vaguely related to one another. Each grid contains a missing shape; to answer the implicit question posed by the test, you need to pick the correct missing shape from a selection of eight possibilities. To "solve" these puzzles, in other words, you have to scrutinize a changing set of icons, looking for unusual patterns and correlations among them.
This is not the kind of thinking that happens when you read a book or have a conversation with someone or take a history exam. But it is precisely the kind of mental work you do when you, say, struggle to program a VCR or master the interface on your new cell phone.

Data dump 2 of 2

How Heritability Misleads about Race

Ned Block
Department of Philosophy
NYU

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html (Full article)

...Fundamental Principle: if a characteristic is largely genetic and there is an observed difference in that characteristic between two groups, then there is very likely a genetic difference between the two groups that goes in the same direction as the observed difference.

Applying this principle to the case of IQ: given the substantial heritability of IQ, if East Asians are superior in measured IQ, then, according to the Fundamental Principle, they are highly likely to be genetically superior; and if Blacks are inferior in measured IQ, then they are highly likely to be genetically inferior in IQ.

But while the Fundamental Principle seems intuitively plausible, it is either irrelevant to the Herrnstein-Murray argument, or simply false. To see the problem, we need first to understand that the term "genetic" has two senses. In the next section, I describe those senses in some detail: to put the point schematically for now, "genetic" can mean either genetically determined or heritable. Once that distinction is in place, the problems for the Principle follow. Again, to put the point schematically for now: if "genetic" is used to mean genetically determined, then IQ is not genetic, and the Principle is therefore irrelevant. If "genetic" is used to mean heritable, then IQ is genetic but the Principle is false. In neither case, however, does the Principle support the Bell Curve's claim about genetic differences in IQ.

Two Senses of "Genetic"

[b]To understand The Bell Curve's fallacy, we need to distinguish two concepts: the ordinary idea of genetic determination and the scientific concept of heritability, on which all Herrnstein's and Murray's data rely. Genetic determination is a matter of what causes a characteristic: number of toes is genetically determined because our genes cause us to have five toes. Heritability, by contrast, is a matter of what causes differences in a characteristic: heritability of number of toes is a matter of the extent to which genetic differences cause variation in number of toes (that some cats have five toes, and some have six). Heritability is, therefore, defined as a fraction: it is the ratio of genetically caused variation to total variation (including both environmental and genetic variation). Genetic determination, by contrast, is an informal and intuitive notion which lacks quantitative definition, and depends on the idea of a normal environment. A characteristic could be said to be genetically determined if it is coded in and caused by the genes and bound to develop in a normal environment. Consequently, whereas genetic determination in a single person makes sense - my brown hair color is genetically determined - heritability makes sense only relative to a population in which individuals differ from one another - you can't ask "What's the heritability of my IQ?"

For example, the number of fingers on a human hand or toes on a human foot is genetically determined: the genes code for five fingers and toes in almost everyone, and five fingers and toes develop in any normal environment. But the heritability of number of fingers and toes in humans is almost certainly very low. That's because most of the variation in numbers of toes is environmentally caused, often by problems in fetal development. For example, when pregnant women took thalidomide some years ago, many babies had fewer than five fingers and toes. And if we look at numbers of fingers and toes in adults, we find many missing digits as a result of accidents. But genetic coding for six toes is rare in humans (though apparently not in cats). So genetically caused variation appears to be small compared to environmentally caused variation. If someone asks, then, whether numbers of toes is genetic or not, the right answer is: "it depends what you mean by genetic." The number of toes is genetically determined, but heritability is low because genes are not responsible for much of the variation.

Conversely, a characteristic can be highly heritable even if it is not genetically determined. Some years ago when only women wore earrings, the heritability of having an earring was high because differences in whether a person had an earring were "due" to a genetic (chromosomal) difference. Now that earrings are less gender-specific, the heritability of having an earring has no doubt decreased. But neither then nor now was having earrings genetically determined in anything like the manner of having five fingers. The heritability literature is full of cases like this: high measured heritabilities for characteristics whose genetic determination is doubtful. For example, the same methodology that yields 60 percent heritability for IQ also yields 50 percent heritability of academic performance and 40 percent heritability of occupational status. Obviously, occupational status is not genetically determined: genes do not code for working in a printed circuit factory.

More significantly, a child's environment is often a heritable characteristic, strange as this may seem. If degree of musical talent is highly heritable and if variation in the number of the child's music lessons depends on variation in musical talent, then the number of music lessons that a child gets may be heritable, too, despite not being genetically determined. In fact, recent studies of heritabilities of various features of childrens' environments show substantial heritabilities for many environmental features - for example, the "warmth" of the parents' behavior toward the child. Even number of hours of TV watched and number and variety of a childs' toys shows some heritability. If this seems unintelligible, think of it this way: variation in these environmental properties is in part due to variation in heritable characteristics of the child, and so the environmental characteristics themselves are heritable. Readers of The Bell Curve often suppose that a heritable characteristic is one that is passed down in the genes, but this identification is importantly flawed. The number and variety of a child's toys is not passed down in the genes. Heritability is a matter of the causation of differences, not what is "passed down".
[/b]

The Case of IQ

I have given examples of traits that are genetically determined but not heritable and, conversely, traits that are heritable but not genetically determined. Do these weird examples have any relevance to the case of IQ? Maybe there is a range of normal cases, of which IQ is an example, for which the oddities that I've pointed to are just irrelevant.

Not so! In fact IQ is a great example of a trait that is highly heritable but not genetically determined. Recall that what makes toe number genetically determined is that having five toes is coded in and caused by the genes so as to develop in any normal environment. By contrast, IQ is enormously affected by normal environmental variation, and in ways that are not well understood. As Herrnstein and Murray concede, children from very low socio-economic status backgrounds who are adopted into high socio-economic status backgrounds have IQs dramatically higher than their parents. The point is underscored by what Herrnstein and Murray call the "Flynn Effect:" IQ has been rising about 3 points every 10 years worldwide. Since World War II, IQ in many countries has gone up 15 points, about the same as the gap separating Blacks and Whites in this country. And in some countries, the rise has been even more dramatic. For example, average IQ in Holland rose 21 points between 1952 and 1982. In a species in which toe number reacted in this way with environment (imagine a centipede-like creature which added toes as it ate more) I doubt that we would think of number of toes as genetically determined.

It is worth emphasizing the solidity of the data about the large IQ increases in Holland. The 21 point increase reported by Flynn is based on comprehensive testing of all Dutch 18 year olds who pass a medical exam (and there has been no change in the pass rate). The test used is Raven's Progressive Matrices, a widely respected "nonverbal test that is an especially good measure of g" (273). Even Richard Lynn, the arch-Jensenist who is the source of much of The Bell Curve's data on race concedes this point. He says "The magnitude of the increase has generally been found to be about three IQ points per decade, making fifteen points over a fifty year period. There have, however, been some larger gains among 18 year-old conscripts in The Netherlands and Belgium amounting to seven IQ points per decade." Lynn also mentions that similar results have been found in France. Herrnstein and Murray concede that "In some countries, the upward drift since World War II has been as much as a point a year for some spans of years" (308). In an area where the facts are often contested, it is notable that this set of facts seems to be accepted by both sides.

One very important conclusion from the Flynn data is that no one understands very much about how environmental variation differentially affects IQ. The cause of the large increases in Holland is simply unknown. Even Herrnstein and Murray concede that "relatively little [of the environmental variation in IQ] can be traced to the shared environments created by families. It is, rather, a set of environmental influences mostly unknown at present, that are experienced by individuals as individuals" (108; emphasis added). Indeed, the crucial factor that has enabled the research that Herrnstein and Murray report to exist at all is the fact that one can measure the heritability of a characteristic without having much of an idea of what the characteristic is. To calculate the heritability of IQ, we do not need to know what IQ tests measure; we need only be able to measure IQ - whatever it is - in various circumstances.

A few additional observations about heritability and IQ will underscore the need for great caution in drawing any inferences about the sources of differences in IQ. A common method for measuring heritability relies on comparisons of the correlations of IQ among one-egg twins raised by their biological parents compared with two-egg twins raised by their biological parents. Suppose your neighbor is one of triplets. One of them is your neighbor's one -egg twin, the other is his two egg (fraternal) twin. Suppose that you can predict the IQ of the one egg twin very reliably from the IQ of your neighbor, but your prediction of the IQ of the two egg twin will be much less reliable. This difference would be an indication of high heritability of IQ because one-egg twins share all their genes whereas two-egg twins normally share half their genes.

Heritability studies of IQ within White populations in the US and northern Europe have tended to yield moderately high heritabilities: Herrnstein's and Murray's 60 percent is a reasonable figure. But it is important to note that no one would do one of these heritability studies in a mixed Black/White population. The reason is straightforward: if you place a pair of Black one-egg twins in different environments "at random," you automatically fail to randomize environments. The Black twins will bring part of their environment with them; they are both Black and will be treated as Black.

Moreover, heritability - unlike genetic determination - can be very different in different populations. For example, the heritability of IQ could be decreased if half the population were chosen at random to receive IQ lowering brain damage: by damaging the brains of some people, you make the environmentally caused variation larger. Or suppose we could make a million clones of Newt Gingrich, raising them in very different environments so there would be some variation in IQ, all environmentally caused. Heritability in that population would be zero because the ratio of genetic variation to total variation is zero if the genetic variation is zero. To take a real example, the heritability of IQ increases throughout childhood into adulthood. One study gives heritability figures of under 20 percent in infancy, about 30 percent in childhood, 50 percent in adolescence, and a bit higher in adult life. Studies of older twins in Sweden report an 80 percent heritability figure for adults by age 50 as compared to a 50 percent heritability for children. One possible reason for the rise in heritability is that although the genetic variation remains the same, environmental variation decreases with age. Children have very different environments; some parents don't speak to their children, others are ever verbally probing and jousting. Adults in industrialized countries, by contrast, are to a greater degree immersed in the same culture (e.g., the same TV programs). With more uniform environments, the heritability goes up. I hope these points remove the temptation (exhibited in The Bell Curve) to think of the heritability of IQ as a constant (like the speed of light). Heritability is a population statistic just like birth rate or number of TVs and can be expected to change with changing circumstances. There is no reason to expect the heritability of IQ in India to be close to the heritability of IQ in Korea.

These issues are pathetically misunderstood by Charles Murray. In a CNN interview reported in The New Republic (January 2, 1995), Murray declared "When I - when we - say 60 percent heritability, it's not 60 percent of the variation. It is 60 percent of the IQ in any given person." Later, he repeated that for the average person, "60 percent of the intelligence comes from heredity" and added that this was true of the "human species," missing the point that heritability makes no sense for an individual and that heritability statistics are population-relative. In a letter to the editor in which Murray complains about being quoted out of context (January 30, 1995), Murray quotes more of what he had said: ". . . your IQ may have been determined overwhelmingly by genes or it may have been - yours personally - or overwhelmingly by environment. That can vary a lot from individual to individual. In the human species as a whole, you have a large genetic component." The Bell Curve itself does not make these embarrassing mistakes. Herrnstein, the late co-author, was a professional on these topics. But the upshot of part of this essay is that the book's main argument depends for some of its persuasive force on a more subtle conflation of heritability and genetic determination. And Murray's confusion serves to underscore just how difficult these concepts can be, even for someone so numerate as Murray.

What's the upshot of the distinction between genetic determination and heritability for the argument of The Bell Curve? Recall the sloth example: Toe number is genetic in sloths and in humans; there is a difference in toe number; so the toe-number difference is genetic. This is a good argument: it strains the imagination to suppose that the genetic toe difference between sloths and humans goes in the opposite direction from the observed toe difference. It is ludicrous to suppose that our genes code for two, despite the five we see at the beach. So in this sense the Herrnstein and Murray argument works for the concept of genetic determination. But the data on genes and IQ are about heritability, not genetic determination.

Is IQ genetically determined as well as heritable? No! As I already pointed out, IQ is very reactive to changes in environments in the normal range. Recall the example of the large rise in Holland. Further, the claim that IQ is genetically determined is not the kind of quantitative claim on which Herrnstein and Murray would want to base their claims about genes and race.

If "genetic" means genetically determined, then, IQ is not genetic in whites or anyone else (and in any case the issue is not quantitative), so the Fundamental Principle is irrelevant. If "genetic" means heritable, however, then IQ is largely genetic (among Whites in the US at least). But in next section I will show that in this sense of "genetic," the argument does not work because the Principle is false....

pleep:
In the 90s, the Infamous Book known as the Bell Curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life was released by Harvard Professors, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. In the Book the Authors tried to explain how Socioeconomic backgrounds determine Intelligence. The Book was immediately Slammed and Herrnstein and Murray were vilified.

Initially, i also slammed the Book as poorly done. I felt it didn't hold significant Scientific Influence. Recently, I've been thinking about this issue and I've come to a Conclusion. The Intelligent Blacks are being out bred by the non-intelligent ones at a rate greater than what the other Races are experiencing.


Before you Demonize me, think about it. In the US, an African American Woman that is on Welfare and is also on Drugs may have several Children, all for different Men. These Children Grow up in the hood and also breed in Large Numbers. I can understand why this happens in Africa, Most People with very Large families need the Manpower that a large family brings, but there are those that are not farmers and live in absolute penury, yet, they have several Children that they can't take care of.

In conclusion, i have my doubts about an IQ test being a Useful Indicator of Intelligence. I recently took a Paid Raven Matrices IQ test which is tailored specifically for Cultural differences, since it eliminates any form of Language. I got a high Score but i doubt an individual with little to no Formal Education would even know what to do. I might doubt the Efficiency of IQ tests but i'm almost certain that the Intelligent ones of our Race are being Bred of Existence.

i'm almost certain that the Intelligent ones of our Race are being Bred of Existence.

tpiander:
how?

It's important that we wade through the bullshit and agree on some common terms. The more we can understand opposing perspectives, the more we can collectively begin to form a more peaceful country.

One thing all people have in common is that we just want to enjoy a peaceful life with a decent standard of living.

The thing is, we can't discuss one side in isolation of another one. So here. I'll start with the white perspective first.

I'm black. Here's my attempt at understanding the white perspective:

Whites of today don't want to carry the burden of white guilt from slavery which was endorsed by their ancestors. That's understandable, and they shouldn't have to.

Negative experiences tend to mold our perspective more than positive ones. If you've ever been to a "ghetto" school that had a low budget and a predominantly black population, you'll know that it's usually a rough experience. Those kids are often delinquents who don't care about education. One thing is for sure, it's always a low-income neighborhood.

Then there's Hip Hop. It frequently refers to sex and violence. The connection with gang activity and crime doesn't help. The genre is morally controversial, so it further projects a negative stereotype onto blacks. Finding statistics that communicate the message of "black people are much more violent than other races" are rampant across the internet.

Then there's the riots. The most recent was in Baltimore. If you watched the news, pretty much all you saw was kids going around destroying stuff and looting businesses.

So if I were a white person looking for a reason to discriminate against blacks, I would have plenty of reasons...

---

Is there a problem with black people? Yes, with some. Some blacks are friendly, intelligent and productive citizens of society. And some aren't. Overall, I would say that there are some deeply routed dysfunctional mechanics in parts of the black population.

That being said, we have to go back in time to understand why things have turned out this way. Remember, the birth of the African American culture was not thousands of years ago in Africa. It was a few hundred years ago as the first slaves set foot in America.

From there, their previous culture was ripped away: language, family structure, and anything else that wasn't conducive to producing profit for slave owners. Blacks were psychologically and even physically engineered and optimized for profit, not to be normal citizens.

Education was off limits. Learning to read was a punishable offense. Black slaves were pretty much raised like pets, but more useful and less respected.

You can imagine that their diets weren't very healthy, as they ate the scraps passed down to them by their owners. That eventually paved the way for what we often call "soul food". (Ever wonder why the obese black nanny is so prevalent?)

So yada yada yada, slavery happened. Then blacks were legally emancipated, but slavery still happened for a while. The civil war happened. The north won and the south was pissed. Slaves were mostly freed.

Blacks were now free, but with no resources. No land, no money, no respect. Finding work was difficult. The church was always an important part of the black community, a place of solitude and support where you could meet friends and family. With segregation, the "good" schools, restaurants and other venues were off limits to blacks and inferior "separate but equal" facilities were the alternative.

The first historically black university was founded by a white Quaker in 1837, paving the way for blacks to become aware of the societal, political and financial infrastructures that operate in America. Aside from the church, the black university became another important sanctuary for blacks, and later functioned as an incubator for "the cause".

Fast forward to the 1960's and the civil rights movement saturates the world's attention. African Americans wanted to feel like African Americans, despite the heavy opposition of Jim Crow, KKK, etc. Once MLK was assassinated, white people generally got nicer.

The dense concentration of poor blacks in public housing facilities resulted in a new generation of blacks, raised in a sandbox with few opportunities to get out. Drugs slipped into the neighborhoods and became "the solution" as the lure of easy money was difficult to resist in that environment. The sellers made a profit and the buyers became dysfunctional addicts. This viscous cycle is sure to destroy any neighborhood, but especially a poor and marginalized one.

As the drug trade became more advanced and lucrative, gangs began to grow and gang-related violence ensued over territory control. Gangs were hierarchically structured like companies with the king at the top, the pawns on the bottom and management in the middle.

The (white) spectators on the outside feared that the violence would spread to the good neighborhoods, so law enforcement naturally became increasingly prevalent and heavy-handed. Sometimes bad guys got the treatment they deserved. And often times, innocent people got treated like bad guys because they matched the description.

Policeman were increasingly associated with police brutality and another viscous cycle began. A black person gets brutally beaten and blacks get angry. Blacks then further defy the cops, and cops become more brutal. Then a riot breaks out.

On the sidelines, there were drug-free black families who lived decent lives, but they garnered no attention from the media because it's not as interesting. At this point, blacks are nearly inevitably associated with violence by non-blacks.

The "good" blacks who try to seek employment are now prejudicely perceived as less competent than a non-black. In a store, they are associated with theft. Then that makes "good" blacks angry because of behavioral compensations that must take place to be accepted by others.

The African American community is sorta the "little monster" that America created, then tried to run away from, then had to come to terms with.

As a black person, I just want white people to understand that slavery cannot be separated from African American history- it IS our history. It is the very thing that has molded the black community into what is- for better or worse.

On one end of the stick, every individual, regardless of race, must take accountability for their own life. On the other end of the stick, we must acknowledge that walking with broken legs is not easy and when your very own government has historically broken the legs of your ancestors, those wounds can still be felt by the current generation.

Note: I'm no history expert. This is a crude summary of how I understand things and make connections. If anything I say is horribly inaccurate, let me know.

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So yes, there is a problem with some black people.

Is there a problem with some white people? Well historically, some whites have been kinda mean to blacks, to say the least. Today, racial relations are tremendously more peaceful than before.

What makes this a frustrating topic is that we're talking about groups of people, and there is no single group of people in which everyone has an identical opinion. My black family and friends don't really fit the negative stereotypes, but I know that some do.

To throw a curveball at this issue, we have to distinguish between different generations. The blacks and whites of today are starkly different than those that lived 200 years ago. Are we going to perpetually endorse their outdated way of thinking or are we going to look toward the future?

In the case of the South Carolina shooting, I acknowledge that it was only one white person and that person doesn't represent the whole white population. I'm not angry at white people in the least bit. I'm just sad. I'm sad that some innocent people died in a place we associate with solitude and protection.

But even though he was only one person, the location and context seems all too familiar with previous activities of the KKK. The fact that the shooter said "you're raping our women" is not some random blurb . I've seen that statement scattered throughout YouTube comments and posts on Stormfront, suggesting that that perspective was nurtured from an existing white supremacy community.

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As far as a solution... I'm not sure that there is a strong short-term solution that we can apply that won't adversely affect freedom of speech.

The most powerful thing we can do is understand the "other" perspective. Whites need to understand blacks. Blacks need to understand whites. And most importantly, we need to actually stop segmenting ourselves in terms of "white" and "black". It's fine for historical reference, but it's ridiculously outdated, especially considering that humanity is like a rainbow with many mixtures of genetics and personalities don't always correlate with genetics.

The ESTABLISHMENT sells the World a lie. They make it appear that if AAs work harder they would be more proseperous. Never admitting that hey hate us because we are the indigenous Americans, and that our African and Black Native American ancestors made this land.

They keep us down by implying that we are cowards, when they know that AAs through the slave rebellions and wars with the Black Native Americans i.e., Yamassee, Seminole and Pequot Wars they can not defeat us unless they had ,back then the help of the mongoloid Indians, and sell out Black Native Americans. They don't fear mongoloid Indians, because except for the Cherokee and Iroquois most mongoloid Indians were nomads and owned no land. Black Native Americans owned land, that's why they had to report on government documents they were colored Americans, so as to erase them from "legal existence".


Foreign Asian immigrants get capital from the U.S. Government. They give them money to make businesses so the U.S., can look good overseas. To the Establisment providing Koreans and South Indians cash is just supporting another group of "whites".

They do everything in their power to stop AAs from being independent. Blacks can save every penny they wish and open their own Banks--whites are still not going to let them get anywhere.They will pick and choose those destined for success, so they can make the ignorant who try to be successful and fail, believe they did not work hard enough, and blame themselves when the system is set up for failure.

Hard work has nothing to do with the success of AAs. God has made us the only former slaves to to reach levels of success comparable to those of our former slave masters,You overcome this racism through prayer. God is Great, and s/he will knock down any barriers placed in front of you.

In addition, there is plenty of capital in the Black community. Every time you see a NBA game you are looking at 14 millionaires, who mainly spend their money on drugs.

The problem is the wrong people have the capital.

Europeans /whites have always rode our backs to economic success and riches beginning with the Black Native American slave trade which made New Englanders rich, into the Atlantic African Slave trade and Eli Witney, who became a millionaire due to his slave's invention of the Cotton Gin.

And secondly, the establishment is not going to let Blacks get the cash to be independent.This began with Marcus Garvey, up to Elijah Muhammad and the Muslims, Black Stone Rangers and Black Panther Party.

They owe us money double for our African and Black Native American ancestors who were made slaves, and the land they stole from my Black Native American ancestors.Only a fool would believe that whites will give us anything without the intervention of God. They have spent the last 500 years killing AAs and stealing our property, so I don't expect this to end as long as they have power over us.

PhysicsQED:
Pleep, is there some actual evidence for this?

pleep:
This is simply conjecture


However, you may find this interesting https://www.nairaland.com/2500450/correlation-melanin-adrenaline-final-nail#36583351

pleep:
Always victimhood isn't it? Have you ever thought that maybe there are "few economic activities available" because there are too many fcking people trying to share scarce resources?

You would rather blame outside forces instead of looking at your own moronic decisions. Typical black man.

RandomAfricanAm:
@kingston277 Glad to see you have gotten some use out of that Angola picture, there is a second wheeled vehicle picture in either Angola or the Congo I just can't remember where I saw it.

RandomAfricanAm:
That said, sorry to leave the heavy lifting to you but I have little patience with pleep. Most people probably don't remember be he had this same topic going back before the big data wipe where him and @physicsPHD where going back and forth about Jews and IQ but it was essentially the same topic as this and other similar topics pleeps been throwing around for the past 2-3 years. Personally I marked him "lost cause" when he started espousing that "human biodiversity" talk.

...Below is a little ammo/provision pack for the cause.(I trust you to give a decent analysis)

tpiander:
and find someone to do this for you:

https://www.nairaland.com/2500341/photo-when-meet-right-woman