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Tuesday, May 21. 2019Race and achievement
I wish that we in the US would just stop categorizing people by race and, if social "scientists" want to study things like achievement, they would apply their time to studying the cultures and subcultures in which individuals develop. It's an open secret that there are far more whites living in poverty in the US than blacks. That's culture too. Murray's Coming Apart portrays it well. Not everybody has either bourgeois values or conventional aspirations. Glenn Lowry has written a report: Why Does Racial Inequality Persist?Culture, Causation, and Responsibility
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A pervasive contempt for education is a crippling cultural belief.
As long as doing well in school is characterized as a betrayal to one's race, then it shouldn't be a surprise that a significant percentage of people will have no interest in being educated. It's not just an issue of poverty, either. I live in Atlanta and on football night the public school parking lots are filled with Lexuses, Audis, and the occasional Mercedes. Everybody goes to the games! On parent-teacher nights, however, the school parking lots are half empty; only the white parents show up. These are middle class neighborhoods. What gives? Priorities.
A lot of parents go "Well, the kids will be okay, the school will teach them what they need to know." The trouble is, their peers are teaching them also. That school isn't important, that street cred requires you to 'not act white', and that getting good grades is 'acting white'. That the teacher cannot discipline you. That you can act out with impunity, and likely get passed on to the next grade no matter how much you didn't learn. Then they get into colleges using set-asides and diversity quotas, only to find they've got no idea how to do the work. In the end - they screw themselves. The cultural beliefs and behaviors you described are a major factor in why people in high-performance professions fall all over themselves to hire the children of African and Caribbean immigrants.
So for this expert at the Manhattan Institute (I usually like them) genetics cannot even be considered as even a partial influence? Liberals want one answer and conservatives want another, and neither looks at the very simple and straightforward hard-number statistical evidence. African-Americans score 1SD lower in IQ in every school district in America, and have a violent crime rate 8x times higher in every county in America. As every school district cannot be exactly equal in racism, nor is black culture identical in every county, the two possible explanations he offers are in fact impossible.
*actually 4-16 times higher, which is largely rural vs urban, yet still clusters in the 6x-10x range. Very few jobs or careers require a 130 IQ.
In my experience, Jews are definitely smarter than us non-Jewish folks. But that is anecdotal. Also, statistical. True about the careers. Once beyond the threshold IQ required for a job, other qualities become more important - and sometimes the threshold isn't that high. Nonetheless, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, just as one example, shows how IQ does matter at the group level. Because we insist on measuring success at the group level, rather than as individuals, this disparity isn't going away.
For an individual person, resilience or determination or charm can be the determinative factor. At the group level, the liberal and conservative solutions fail equally. Conservatives would rather something other than the truth be true. I live in Boston and ride the T. The Asian mothers talk to their kids nonstop and the kids do the same. white parents spend more time bossing their kids around. black mothers stare out the window and ignore their kids. There is no mystery here
Coincidentally, I am in the process of reading John Ogbu's book,Black American Students in An Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement.
NYT review: Why Are Black Students Lagging? East Bay Express: Rich, Black, Flunking :Cal Professor John Ogbu thinks he knows why rich black kids are failing in school. Nobody wants to hear it. QUOTE: The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense. Two decades after Ogbu did his research in Shaker Heights, has there been any closing of the achievement gap? My guess is no.When these depressing statistics were published in a high school newspaper in mid-1997, black parents were troubled by the news and upset that the newspaper had exposed the problem in such a public way. Seeking guidance, one parent called a prominent authority on minority academic achievement..... Ogbu concluded that the average black student in Shaker Heights put little effort into schoolwork and was part of a peer culture that looked down on academic success as "acting white." Although he noted that other factors also play a role, and doesn't deny that there may be antiblack sentiment in the district, he concluded that discrimination alone could not explain the gap.... When Ogbu asked black students what it took to do well in the Shaker district, they had the right answers. They knew what to say about how to achieve academic success, but that knowledge wasn't enough. "In spite of the fact that the students knew and asserted that one had to work hard to succeed in Shaker schools, black students did not generally work hard," he wrote. "In fact, most appeared to be characterized by low-effort syndrome. The amount of time and effort they invested in academic pursuit was neither adequate nor impressive."... There was a lot of negative criticism of Ogbu's work/ QUOTE: Other scholars have since come forward to take a few more swipes at the professor's premise. "Ogbu is just flat-out wrong about the attitudes about learning by African Americans," explains Asa Hilliard, an education professor at Georgia State University and one of the authors of Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students. "Education is a very high value in the African-American community and in the African community." Undoubtedly there are a lot of blacks who value education, but my experience in the classroom informed me that there are a lot of black students who resent being in the classroom, which may or may not reflect what their elders tell them.If ever there was an abundance of data on a subject, it is here. Collection started in the 1960s with Affirmative Action. It is richly detailed, full of cohorts and categories, with definition to the last social and racial molecule.
But objective analysis of the data has been outlawed by mob fiat. It's still legal to study the data and formulate hypotheses; it's just understood that to do so honestly will gain you condemnation and social annihilation, public shaming and shunning, and systematic professional destruction. And maybe even personally-directed violence. Yes, we have learned so much about race, but even more about political power. It is absolutely the culture. It is likely that IQ also plays a part in this difference between Asians in America and blacks but mostly it is culture. It is probable that if beginning tomorrow all black families raised their children with the same care and responsibility that Asian parents do that within 20 years this problem would not exist.
A piece of data that supports Glenn's argument is the difference between black men and women. Black women are better dressed, speak more clearly, and have higher incomes on average than black men. I believe this is purely cultural. It is acceptable for women to dress nicely, and be well-behaved at work. But in black culture men are supposed to be gangstas, tough guys, against the "man", and are therefore harder to employ.Likewise, it is much more ok for black women to do their homework and thus (IIRC) twice as many black women as black men attend college. This cannot be genetic.
It is quite easy to avoid poverty. But to join the middle class you have to act white.
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2005/05/11/how-not-to-be-poor-n1002276 |