In the 1960s, a new and powerful fashion in black thought, inherited from the general countercultural mood, rejects championing assimilation to proposing that opposition to whiteness is the soul of blackness. Meanwhile, white leftists encourage as many poor black women as possible to go on welfare, hoping to bankrupt the government and inaugurate a fairer America. Soon, being on welfare in poor black communities is a new normal – hardly the usual, but so common that people grow up seeing not working for a living as ordinary. Then at this same time, a new War on Drugs gave poor black men a way of making half of a living by selling drugs on the black market, amidst a violent culture of gangland turf-policing. This feels more natural to them than it would have to their fathers because 1) the new mood sanctions dismissing traditional values as those of a “chump,” 2) it no longer feels alien to eschew legal employment, and 3) the Drug War helps make it that most boys in such neighborhoods grow up without fathers anyway.
I think McWhorter is being shockingly uncharitable* to progressives with the sentence that begins “Meanwhile, white leftists. . .” I don’t think anyone wanted to maximize the number of poor black women on welfare. But regardless of intent, one can argue that the consequences of the War on Poverty were that work and marriage were strongly discouraged. I think that to this day, in spite of the (temporary) “end welfare as we know it” turn under President Clinton, the implicit marginal tax rates on the poor of all races are very high. That is because benefits like Medicaid and food stamps fade out as income goes up. For a woman, the financial advantage of a husband who earns about $30,000 a year can be close to nil.
[*UPDATE: I am wrong about this. See Handle’s comment. McWhorter knows what he is talking about, apparently.]
The larger topic of McWhorter’s essay is Charles Murray’s latest book. McWhorter writes,
in the end, Murray avoids stating too directly what the obvious implication of his argument is. He thinks that we need to accept an America in which black people are rarely encountered in jobs requiring serious smarts. We need to accept an America in which almost no black people are physicists or other practitioners in STEM, have top-level jobs in government, or are admitted to top-level graduate programs at all. Black people will invent little, there will be many fewer black doctors and lawyers, and many fewer black experts in, well, anything considered really intellectually challenging.
I agree with the complaint that Murray is not being forthcoming. In yesterday’s post, I called it “ducking and dancing.”
To repeat my own views, I would like to see us treat people as individuals and not pay attention to group outcomes. That approach may not be perfect, but other approaches strike me was worse.
But suppose you told me that it was unrealistic to ignore group outcomes, and you insisted that I offer suggestions for improving outcomes among blacks. My thoughts would be along these lines:
1. I take the Null Hypothesis seriously. I would not put a lot of my chips on formal education as a solution.
2. I take incentives seriously. So I would get rid of Federal poverty programs and replace them with (a) a small UBI that lowers the heavy marginal tax rate on the working poor; and (b) community programs to identify and support families with special needs.
3. I take cultural forces seriously. Personality traits and social norms differ markedly across groups and over time. We don’t know a great deal about the process by which these factors change. For example, when marriage rates decline, we have great difficulty disentangling the many possible causes and effects. There are many arguments to be had about what is a good cultural trait and what is a bad one. And there is no policy dashboard sitting in front of us with buttons and dials that allow us to steer culture. But culture should be the focus for research and policy experiments.
I note that McWhorter’s ideas about violence in poor black communities fall within this framework.
1-3 are good suggestions, but will they address McWhorter’s main beef that there won’t be enough blacks in STEM?
Since they won’t it appears he’s staked out the position that this isn’t satisfying enough for him and thus Murray’s ideas must be suppressed in the general public.
—
https://www.medicaid.gov/state-overviews/scorecard/how-much-states-spend-per-medicaid-enrollee/index.html
Medicaid costs about $8k per person per year (in 2018 dollars) and is growing above inflation. A household comprised of four members, if we are to socialize the costs of those with disabilities, would therefore be $32k. Even if we somehow cut out the disabled, it’s still going to be getting close to $20k. That’s considerably more than any UBI I’ve ever seen.
I guess you could make health insurance more like a UBI by implementing universal healthcare that applied equally at all income levels, but I suspect you have your own problems with this. Anything that was uniform at all income levels would also have to have low enough cost sharing that the poorest wouldn’t get wiped out, so its first dollar coverage for all.
What is the world is being *done* for all those dollars? I’m 67 and the only time my immediate family used anywhere near to that amount was the year I had a heart attack, followed by kidney stones.
I always have the same issue with UBI – what do we do with people who irresponsibly spend it all and can no longer afford basic needs? Don’t we need a safety net underneath UBI?
To have a safety net under UBI defeats Kling’s purpose for UBI.
I think a better approach is Robin Hanson’s universal basic dorms. There doesn’t seem to be an angle from which it is deficient:
1) Only people who need it will self-select into it, as it will be low status, thereby keeping expenses down.
2) There’s no risk of people spending their benefit poorly – the spending decisions will be made for them.
3) The advantage of a husband earning $30,000 is huge: you won’t have to live in low status basic dorm.
4) Involuntary homelessness is no longer an issue.
5) Any non-violent person can live in the dorms for any length of time for any reason. Thus, people can work for a while and build savings to get on their feet. I’d have a higher security but not quite prison version of the dorms for people who have violent tendencies (or previous convictions for violence) but who otherwise haven’t done something meriting a prison term.
There are even other interesting possibilities which may or may not be realized. For example, disability insurance can be privatized. People can take care of their own disability needs, and those who can’t or won’t will always have the option of help from family members or the dorms.
The dorms will need to be staffed and maintained, with paid employees around to ensure security and to make sure that the place doesn’t fall into shambles. I’d also recommend smaller dorm buildings that aren’t aesthetic nightmares.
They’d be like clean workhouses without a work requirement, or perhaps little islands of mid-century communism for those who were down on their luck.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/universal-basic-dorms.html
Didn’t the USSR and pre-reform and opening PRC have something like universal basic dorms for workers? I am pretty sure that it is still the case that construction companies in China provide their workers with dorm housing and basic shared meals, and I think that many employees of other types of businesses sleep on the floor of their place of employment when it shuts down for the night.
Sure, but maybe we should give the guy a break on not being completely explicit about this, because (1) we know why Murray in particular has to walk on eggshells, and (2) like McWhorter says, it’s just logically *obvious* that without racial preferences, you will necessarily get fewer members of preferred races.
We all know the way this will be presented just like any opposition to affirmative action, in the form of a predictable smear: that racist Murray just hates blacks and *wants* to see them all get *excluded* from intellectually high-status professions.
“I say we should remove the thumb from the scale.” – “Terrible Murray hates greengrocers, wants to see their children suffer because he is a sadist who enjoys it.”
Show me someone who doesn’t get this, needs to be spoon-fed, and have this spelled out for them. “I originally agreed with Murray about ending affirmative action, but then McWhorter brought up the point about hiring fewer people for the sake of diversity meant fewer diversity-hires, and I was like, ‘Whoa, what? Wait a minute, is this a non-sequitur? What does one thing have to do with the other?’ But then McWhorter explained it to me, and I’m definitely not cool with that. That sneaky Murray!”
Consider the “we need to accept” phrasing in a different context. While there have been a handful of Jews in the NBA, in general this is an extremely rare occurrence, because height is critically important in professional basketball, and there are very few very tall Jews. So, do “we need to accept” a world in which there are very few Jews in the NBA? Yes. We *obviously* need to accept it. Accepting things you might wish were otherwise – you might say “facing reality” – is practically a sine qua non of being a serious, mature adult. How do we view someone who refuses to accept truths they don’t like? Childish, at best.
Well, ok, there aren’t that many Jews, but there are something like a billion Europeans and another three billion Asians and they are extremely under-represented in terms of being NFL cornerbacks or world champion sprinters or marathon runners. Do we “need to accept that”? Yes. That’s just how things are, it’s no one’s fault, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with it, and there’s no quick and easy ‘fix’. We. Need. To. Accept. That.
Actually, we could mandate that the NBA hire more Jews. Then:
1) Each team on the NBA would hire exactly the minimum number of Jews and play them exactly the minimum amount required.
1a) They would not be highly regarded by other players. They would correctly be seen as a liability. Exploiting their weaknesses would be a standard part of NBA play.
1b) They would be played in the least-critical roles allowable.
2) The few Jews who are great at basketball would become highly-sought, but the lives of average Jews would be unchanged.
3) The Jews of the NBA would be highly atypical of Jews in general. Many of them would have substantial black admixture.
All that seems correct to me, with the caveat that since I didn’t specify whether the Jewishness was purely religious or “within the historic ethnically-Jewish spectrum”, there is the possibility of a lot of conversions, like Stoudemire. To the extent any of these were even a little cynical or opportunistic, the NBA would probably look exactly the same, except a few more recently transitioned trans-confessional players would be wearing kipot or something in order to win the reserved spots, in a kind of bizarre reversal twist of the plot to “Soul Man” (talk about a movie which could not be made today).
Now, if McWhorter supported such a dumb scheme I would at least give him points for consistency. But it’s pretty obvious that McWhorter has no problem accepting the current state of affairs, or with expecting Jews to accept it too. I mean, ask McWhorter, “Why should Jews *need to accept* the fact that without special affirmative action Jew slots in the NBA, that there will be vanishingly few Jews in professional basketball?”
His answer, whatever it is, would be revealing.
Why no problem? I think it’s pretty obvious.
1. People who are Jewish in America are doing pretty well, generally with above average incomes. They don’t *need* it.
2. There are 480 players on NBA rosters. If there is Jewish “under-representation”, no big deal. There are many thousands, maybe millions of STEM jobs. If blacks are under-represented there, it makes a big difference.
The other difference is that it really doesn’t matter how good NBA players are at their jobs. It matters a great deal how good American doctors, engineers, etc. are at their jobs since they’ll be running the world when we’re old. If wokeness has the same effect on medicine and manufacturing that it had on academia, our quality of life is likely to decline.
What exactly do black people *need*?
We certainly aren’t talking about food, shelter, medicine, or fuel. Even when American blacks can’t provide these things for themselves, they are provided for them by whites.
We aren’t talking about a free education. Blacks are educated by white tax dollars at great expense. We can’t really control if they squander it.
We can’t really talk about safety. Whites pay for the military that has provided hundreds of years of protection from invasion, provides freedom of travel throughout the world to its citizens, and freed blacks from captivity at the expense of whites (the only example of blacks freeing themselves being Haiti, one of the worst places in the entire world).
Whites also pay a very large amount per black citizen in for police that mostly try to prevent blacks from shooting each other. And while they often can’t stop blacks from that impulse, it’s still safer for blacks in America that it would be in say Africa.
As far as I can tell this *need* boils down to the following:
1) The top 10-20% of blacks, mostly mixed race individuals and elite Africans, which would normally qualify for mediocre but decent middle class jobs should instead be given positions of immense importance, where competence really matters to the welfare of many people, even though they can’t do the jobs.
2) It’s not enough that these people get high paying sinecures where they don’t have to do anything. Everyone around them must say that they do in fact deserve to be there and do in fact perform well at their jobs, even though it isn’t true. Furthermore, any black underperformance in any area must be attributed to vile white racism.
I’d go further, its not even good enough that they lie about this. Increasingly, they need to literally believe it, even at the cost of breaking their internal sense of *truth* with all of the pain and consequences that entails, which is what all these humiliating struggle sessions are all about.
3) All of this must be done because the negative consequences of the above actions are worth less the potential ego hit to blacks of having to come to grips with reality. At least these negative are worth less to influential blacks in the immediate term because they heavily discount the welfare of other or the society they live in.
Is that sociopathic and evil? Yes. But, well, they are blacks…
Conventional wisdom says that all groups are inherently equal. Thus, there is a moral need for all groups to do equally well. Groups that are doing worse than average must be raised. As a matter of simple arithmetic, groups that are doing better than average must be lowered. Jewish Americans, watch out.
Wikipedia casts the target of that strategy as poor people generally, not specifically a race- or sex-based subgroup. However, Cloward and Piven pretty explicitly expected both the broader public and the political class to see it as race-oriented. I don’t know how much it would have been seen as sex-oriented as well.
Ever wonder why divorce rates and/or out of wedlock births went up so much for middle and upper class whites who were never a threat to be on welfare?
Broken families and more people on welfare have been much more an effect of changed sexual norms than an effect of the War on Poverty regardless of what “one can argue.” Not that the trope that it’s really the result of welfare will ever die. That trope is just too politically useful.
The possibility of birth control and changes in culture around the Sexual Revolution are the real reason so many kids live in broken homes now and all the other effects that follow from that.
Agreed. But there has been a stabilization and then decline in “divorce rates and/or out of wedlock births” among “middle and upper class whites”. Murray wrote a whole book about it, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.
One possible reaction to the availability of birth control is to actually use it, drastically lowering the number of out of wedlock births. Changes in culture have make non-marital sex not just acceptable but expected. However, nothing says that sex has to result in a baby. In fact, successful people let their kids know that they should very much not do that. Also, that they should not get married unless they really mean it, because divorce is not pretty, especially if there are kids.
Out of wedlock births (divorce isn’t very important IMO, especially since much of it happens after it will no longer affect the kids) increased much much more for poor black people than well-off white people, even though the latter had much better access to birth control and such. Changing sexual norms can’t explain why some groups changed started having illegitimate kids so much more than others.
The problem with McWhorter’s just-so story with its reliance on cultural factors is that it is far too Americanist, that is, overly focused on particular details and history of the American context and experience. He writes as if they alone are sufficient to make confident claims of causation, but without acknowledging that we now have lots and lots of data and experiences from very different countries, cultures, contexts, and historical pathways. Furthermore, it treats the American experience as monolithic, but as anyone who has lived or traveled around the US knows, there is still a lot of regional variation in cultural factors, and this was considerably more pronounced back in the 60s.
What that means is that we have a handy test for the validity of these cultural stories. If you have a lot of places and times, each with different ‘cultures’, histories, languages, sources of immigration, etc. then you would expect to see a lot of variation on these important racial ratios, reasonably well-correlated with the key elements of cultural environment of those times and places.
This is kind of how like Chetty looks for those magic dirt locations with above-average levels of social mobility, because we know things aren’t the same everywhere, and it’s at least plausible that some place has discovered the cultural secret sauce for success that other unsuccessful places can try and learn from and emulate.
And when we look at Chetty’s results and interpret them with common sense and apply some knowledge of idiosyncratic regional histories, we notice that he didn’t really find anything, and that, despite a lot of regional variation, the numbers keep coming out the same.
Likewise for McWhorter, when we look across the US in all kinds of places, the gaps keep coming out the same. When we look abroad to lots of other countries with diverse populations, despite all the different cultures and histories and timelines of diversification, the same patterns keep manifesting themselves.
This is not to say that people can’t make clever stories and excuses for all this, layering rationalizations upon just-so stories upon narrative interpretations of oppressive histories and so forth, but the kind of convoluted twisted knots they must tie to make it all work is pretty much the opposite of the Occam’s Razor approach to explaining what we observe.
And this is simply that people are different: groups of people differ from each other in lots of ways on average, and there has never been any good reason to believe that some metaphysically magic force held any particular feature or characteristic statistically constant for all those groups in the long course of the development of our species and it’s many sub-populations.
Let’s say genes are 50%-80%, we’ll just say 60% to make the math easy.
Alright, well of the remaining 40% let’s split the difference and say have is culture (black peoples fault) and half is racism (white peoples fault). Whether or not that the exact math the jist is “everyone has something to work on but we have to be realistic about what we can accomplish and not go overboard.”
McWhorter likes the idea of “everyone has something to work on and let’s not go crazy.”
The problem is that when you take that 60% out of the equation it stops working. Now all of a sudden you’ve got to distribute 100% of the blame to somebody. If you were already “blaming the victim” when you assigned blacks 20% of the blame for their blight, you sure as hell are a bigot racist if you go any higher than that.
So naturally you end up with the idea that racism must be like 80%+ of this huge and unjust problem. And since there is very little actual racism out there, and since all previous reform attempts failed, this racism must be super duper powerful, evil, and secret. Which sounds a lot like what they call systematic racism. And since all the moderate reform attempts have failed then we need revolutionary measures to fight this super evil secret racism that is systematic and everywhere.
Maybe people didn’t assign a majority of the gap to genetics 25 years ago, but I have a feeling they assigned it to “stuff we are going to fix in the next 25 years due to educational and other reforms.” That’s literally what Sandra Day O’Connor said would happen to the gap when she ruled on affirmative action in the mid-2000s, that it would go away on its own so we just need to temporarily suspend the obvious meaning of the constitution till it does. When that didn’t come though we got wokeness.
I don’t think you can defeat wokeness without Facing Reality, but John disagrees. I think that has more to do with his incentives and biases than it does with a straight read of the situation.
I think the word you mean is “systemic”, not “systematic”.
Meanwhile, white leftists encourage as many poor black women as possible to go on welfare, hoping to bankrupt the government and inaugurate a fairer America.
Was that the fever dream of some faction of ’60’s radicals, maybe? Revolution via financial crisis? I’d never heard this, but then plenty of nefarious stuff various fringe groups has been memory holed since then. Angela Davis and Bill Ayers are now respected academics, after all.
It may sound obscure now, because few people today remain well-versed in the intellectual history of that era. Though they should, since it eventually led to what is happening in our own era. But it really was a big deal at the time. The past is a foreign country, and the 60’s and 70’s were a lot more weird and radical than people tend to remember.
To the extent things might become like that again and soon, it should be setting off alarm bells. It may seem tempting to write things like this off as what must have been ‘fringe’ crazy leftism from some unknown wackos which normal intellectuals would dismiss out of hand, but actually, at the time, it was the totally mainstream version of crazy leftism, from some genuinely elite, high status activists who were prominent Ivy League professors whose ideas were given a serious airing.
McWhorter’s talking mostly about the Cloward-Piven Strategy, which he originally wrote about in his book Winning The Race (also the sequel, Losing The Race) in connection with the National Welfare Rights Organization. Ron Radosh and Stanley Kurtz have also written a lot about this whole episode and the influence of the husband-and-wife team’s 1966 article in The Nation:
The idea was indeed to get as many people – mostly urban black women – to sign up as possible, which would break the bank of local governments (under the way welfare worked at the time) and thus force the hand of the federal government into creating … UBI. No kidding, and remember, that was 55 years ago.
At any rate, it didn’t quite work out the way they had hoped. Which didn’t stop people from trying! For example, see Peter Dreier of the DSA and ACORN (Remember them? They were once a big deal too! Trivia: he was the opening speaker Obama heard in 1983 when he attended the Socialist Scholars Conference.)
Dreier wrote “The Case for Transitional Reform” four years prior to that in 1979, which was well known in the “community organizing scene”, and which built on Andre Gorz’s recommendations to gradually add time-bomb “reforms” and layer on additional burdens like ever-expanding entitlement programs, the weight of which would eventually cause the collapse of the capitalist system and a crisis one could leverage and exploit, thus opening the door to the eventual implementation of full bore Socialism.
McWhorter’s interpretation of the sum total of all these efforts and proposals is that they committed the Kantian sin of using poor black people as mere means to achieve other objectives, and that, whatever else you think about those efforts, they were successful in terms of boosting the numbers on the dole roles, and the fallout was to condemn the black community to the cultural normalization of being on welfare and the fatal undermining among that community of the bourgeois virtues of hard work, thrift, law-abidingness, and individual responsibility.
So this isn’t some crazy conspiracy theory or mere speculation on his part – this was a quite prominent episode. Nevertheless, his interpretation of this history as a major cause is simply incorrect. It would be more accurate to say it was just another drop of fuel being added to the fire which had already been burning hot for a while by then.
Wow. I stand corrected.
Speaking of the general public forgetting history, I would also would recommend the book Illiberal Reformers for a history of even earlier progressive movements that created several staple welfare programs in this country but which had explicitly racist motives.
reviewed here.
“I don’t think anyone wanted to maximize the number of poor black women on welfare.” This statement does not appear to be true. All governments recruit clients by giving those clients benefits. In return, the clients support them and keep them in power. In a dictatorship the government might recruit powerful organizations such as the military by giving them money or special privileges. In a democracy, all voting citizens are potential clients, and are recruited by giving out government jobs, contracts, and other benefits such as welfare. Many cities in the U.S. are ruled by single-party politics because the party in power has mastered the art of maximizing the number of voting citizens that are clients. This includes maximizing the number of people on welfare, including, among other groups, poor black women. A solution that recognizes that client recruiting by government is part of the problem, and addresses it, is more likely to succeed.
Note that the riots of 2020 were, in part, a recruitment of clients based on giving them special privileges, such as immunity to prosecution for certain crimes.
If there are poor black women, why shouldn’t they be on welfare?
“The more you pay people to be poor, the more poor people you will have.”
some cynic
“We need to accept an America in which almost no black people are physicists or other practitioners in STEM, have top-level jobs in government, or are admitted to top-level graduate programs at all.”
Sorry, that time has obviously already passed. We may perhaps still ask about productivity and related factors, but then again, how meritocratic are things already, even if blacks were somehow excluded?
Some sort of return to idealized imperial competitive examinations seem to be lurking in the background of the quoted statement. It will be a while before we get there, if ever.
I fully agree. However, this is often illegal. Specifically with disparate impact provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If companies enact race-blind policies, they often result in group differences and face severe legal consequences. Rolling back these excessive laws is important.
Is there any evidence — given the difficulty of promoting non-destructive educational reform — that anything you could do politically would overwhelm the cultural and social forces inside and outside the black community that would make them overcome their deficits in desire to take STEM, do well in STEM on objective, non-normed criteria, reform the average black families, and close the gap between blacks and whites (let alone Asians)? There is very little evidence even from people like Heckmann that education changes long term test scores for people after childhood. Given that there is no way to avoid the fact that in no other fields are math test scores in college so closely tied to performance as in STEM. Given that Asians in the bottom tiers of income produce vastly more high math scoring kids than the very richest blacks, how can you seriously NOT expect blacks to sustain a deficit even in the most optimistic scenarios? Further, given the current madness for equity and AA in spades it guarantees that blacks will end up managers of far more technically competent specialists, with all the resentments and inefficiency that will breed. Furthermore, most blacks competent in STEM will conclude they can make far more income, more easily in law, banking, or politics. This is virtually certain. What then?
What do you think of Kling’s thought of not paying attention to race? Work on improving outcomes in a race blind fashion. Most jobs don’t need STEM skills.
It’s clearly a very good answer, and completely unworkable — heck, not even attempable — for political reasons
There are some theoretical possibilities, but given the current situation, they are so far beyond the realm of what is currently possible that they aren’t much good except for thought experiments.
For example, there was a period in American history – mostly between the end of the Civil War and the end of WWI (but with some pockets surviving up until the Civil Rights Era), in which many American blacks lived in mostly black communities with economies which were highly internally self-sufficient on the local level, in which most professions and economic niches were filled by other blacks.
The Tulsa incident happened at the tail-end of this era, which is why it sometimes strikes modern students as odd that there was an apparently sizable and thriving black population of business owners and professionals, out there in the sticks, and in the bad old days. “How did that happen?” – “It was a special set of circumstances which didn’t last.”
Obviously trends in centralization, mechanization, automation, corporatism, economies of scale, and so forth have driven the “sole proprietorship” or “family business” models for many of these professions practically to extinction, but at some economic cost, the law can always distort the markets back. What happened to close the era and kick off the Great Migration (before which over 90% of blacks lived in the South) was what also contributed to the Great Depression, in that the old patterns of specialization and trade affecting a huge percentage of the population suddenly became obsolete.
But back then, it made sense to reserve a quota of slots in professional colleges such as law and medical schools, police academies, and so forth, in proportion to the black population, to restrict meritocracy to a system that only operates *within race* and to thus protect their talented 10% from the extra-racial competition that would apply in a colorblind system, and use them to produce the adequate number of black professionals to serve black clients.
Now, it may be that one is not holding quality, talent, performance, or marginal productivity constant across the different racial groups of these professionals, but the question is, does that matter to their customers? Would they be ok if they had to have black lawyers, black doctors, black cops, and to live in buildings designed by black architects and build by black engineers, and so forth?
If they are ok with that, regardless of quality, or believing the quality level to be equal, then besides the uncomfortable fact of racially segregated local economies, there is little cause to complain. Indeed, this system trades off a certain amount of economic efficiency for a lot of opportunities for high status positions in a widespread decentralization of social and economic activity that a lot of people say they want, and furthermore, it would be fairly straightforward to rejigger the redistribution system of transfer payments to ensure ‘equity’ and make sure average pay is more or less the same for each racial group in any profession.
On the other hand, if a client who has ‘faced reality’ complains *on the basic of lower quality* about being locked into these mono-racial economies, then they have no basis to complain about disproportional representation in the higher quality, racially-integrated economy. And perhaps it would be possible with subsidies to keep both systems as viable options, and to permit individuals to make their own choice, thus enabling other people to reply to complaints, “Well, this is what you chose, and you can always choose differently.”
I don’t offer this as a serious or desirable proposal, merely to demonstrate it as a theoretical possibility. That being said, this is not altogether unrelated to how we segregate the sexes and equally subsidize their parallel sports activities for women’s college athletics under Title IX. It is also kinda sorta how things work in Pakistan under their system of explicit ethnic quotas for everything.
When a black person becomes successful, they often move away from other black people. A hundred years ago, that was mostly not possible.
“How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm …?”
Thomas Sowell cites that culture matters. And since the 1960s, the black subculture is has been seriously shaped by white progressives, who are mostly benign racists in that they may not want more black women on welfare, they do believe that those women can’t get by without that crutch. That black children can’t get compete in schools if you set standards. As such, the white progressives are far more pernicious than the Jim Crow/overt racists of the prior eras. The latter provoked blacks to push back, the former wears away at initiative and the development of human capital in blacks.
Here is Thomas Sowell commenting on a finding from black and white children from American servicemembers and German women showing no difference in abilities.
https://youtu.be/JtyoNSmOYzo?t=187
The military has an IQ cutoff, so I am not sure how much that would prove. I also don’t know how frequently people above a certain IQ choose to enlist in the Armed Services. My suspicion is that the Armed Services have a compressed IQ distribution.
The optimal capital-to-labor ratio for world-class militaries has been rising for centuries and has lately been going to the moon. The era of marching masses of dudes into each other to take control of area is over. It was over a long time ago, but the usual suspects wouldn’t accept it. Yes, you need tons of dudes for an occupation, but we just don’t have the stomach or competence to do that well anymore – haven’t for a long time – so might as well forget it. And yes, you need a lot of dudes to do all the stuff we ask the military to do at home which the military ought not to be doing, but that issue is a whole other ball of wax.
For everything else, you need fewer and fewer people, and they need to be better and better kinds of people. They need to be able to work with super-expensive, highly complicated pieces of equipment and software without making typical “bone-headed employee” type mistakes, which could prove catastrophically disastrous in lots of ways, even in peacetime at home.
As a result, the military now needs a high IQ floor for even the dullest recruit, and sets the bar just as high as they can get away with given market conditions and, lately, politically-imposed racial quotas.
This McWhorter review of Murray’s book “Facing Reality” is one of McWhorter’s better short essays. We have to agree when McWhorter tells us that Murray’s final chapter is weak (Arnold Kling makes a similar point). On the other hand, what could Murray write at the end that McWhorter would approve?
McWhorter confesses to us that he desires something– an ample supply of highly-intelligent American blacks– which does not exist and which no one (not Murray, nor McWhorter, nor anyone else) knows how to bring into existence.
McWhorter is deeply dissatisfied with Murray’s suggestion that Americans black and white (and “other”) should “face reality” and let life go on (more peacefully and more productively) with just the relatively few American blacks who are actually qualified for intellectual jobs working in such. However, McWhorter offers no serious alternative; he just reiterates his exhortations to American blacks to “do better,” by which he seems to mean “adopt a more intellectual culture and study harder.”
McWhorter doesn’t say how we should all get along while we wait for that apotheosis, but McWhorter specifically rejects the notion of “approach[ing] each black person as an individual.” Well, if black Americans can’t be treated as individuals, what’s left? Treating them as a group, that’s what– a group which McWhorter explicitly concedes is not so bright when considered as a group. Murray’s plan may be weak tea, and may not satisfy McWhorter’s racial pride, but at least it allows for bright blacks to gain the same respect working as “physicists” or “doctors and lawyers” as bright whites (and others). Denying individuality to black Americans means condemning many of them either to undeserved obscurity (if all blacks are judged by “group” traits) or justified suspicion and disrespect (if additional unqualified blacks are hired by “affirmative action,” as is now the case).
McWhorter’s remarks on Murray’s other two final-chapter suggestions are more incisive. As McWhorter points out, Murray takes only a harmless stage-slap at affirmative action. The reader wonders whether Murray feared the backlash he would provoke by criticizing corrupt institutions and by implication their leaders. Writing about crime or IQ doesn’t really implicate specific high-status people, but going into details about affirmative action would. While dancing away from affirmative action, Murray suggests that society must avert white participation in (group) identity politics lest whites revive Jim Crow. Murray’s vague discussion of this hypothetical revanchism attracts McWhorter’s disdain and, interestingly, Jared Taylor’s as well. McWhorter says whites are too complacent to revolt against the anti-white regime (the one that promulgates the anti-white lies that Murray spends most of his book exposing). Jared Taylor (in a separate book review) says that Murray promotes the anti-white regime by calling for the suppression of white grievances even while he endorses color-blind policies which have already been rejected by both that regime and its black American clients. From either angle, Murray’s treatment of the “white identity politics” issue appears cowardly and both critics say so.
Oh, one other point:
McWhorter wrote a substantial book (“Winning the Race,” 2006) which considered white American leftists’ explicit program to put as many black women as possible on welfare (often called Cloward-Piven in honor of the Columbia professors who published the manifesto). You may think McWhorter “uncharitable” toward those leftists, but his antipathy toward them does not proceed from ignorance.
Going on memory, I think McWhorter has said he doesn’t support affirmative action, but I might be wrong on that. Let’s just say its true.
It seems like he’s willing to stake out a position against affirmative action only so long as he gets to hold on to the guilt and resentment that is at the basis of justifying affirmative action (yes, there is a constitutional work around rationalization nobody believes in, but brass tax its about whites thinking something must be wrong with their society if there are so few black elites).
Partly this is easy to do, because you can claim to be against something while fostering the cultural and social beliefs that make its continuation inevitable. AA got voted down nearly 60/40 in California, and in response many top institutions have simply dropped the SAT. Of course they would. The leaders of those institutions have a worldview of why blacks underperform, and they are going to do whatever it takes to satisfy their guilt over it regardless of what voters think.
But more importantly, the worst part about AA isn’t that it makes many of our institutions somewhat less meritocratic and productive. It’s specifically that it perpetuates and inflames the white guilt and black racial resentment that justifies it. The longer it goes on, the less temporary the obvious injustice of it all is, the more one has to put the peddle down on white guilt and black resentment to keep it all going.
Woke insanity comes from white guilt and black resentment, and white guilt and black resentment come from a worldview in which it is expected that blacks should have SES in line with the population % absent something holding them back.
So even if McWhorter took some academic position on affirmative action, what really matters is that he is absolutely not ready to give up that chip on his shoulder.
Because we are entering the age of genetic engineering, I think it is misguided to worry–as McWhorter, for example, does–about (presumably genetic) racial differences in intelligence (or other mental traits). Before long we will have a good understanding of the genetic contribution to intelligence (or whatever), and the means to introduce whatever germ-line genetic enhancements are desired. Parents will decide how much of their genomes to pass to their children, how much to replace with improvements. The racial concerns of the present time will thus fairly soon be completely superseded.
Is their any serious discussion or scholarship on how to close various gaps between White Americans and Asian Americans? I believe that if some of those differences are meliorable, than similar differences between whites and blacks should also be meliorable in similar ways.
I would be surprised if more money spent on policing, including on detectives and forensics, didn’t lead to higher solve rates for crime, a higher chance of conviction per crime, and hence less crime overall.
Interestingly enough, the case should be made that the white Asian gaps are more obviously cultural than IQ. IQ differences between NE Asians and NW Europeans are not large in absolute numbers but differences in outcomes in Math especially in the US are very large, past the point of all IQ measurement gaps. If White Americans were willing to push their children to work much harder in school, submit to parental authority, deemphasize sports and parties, and avoid alcohol in their teens, much of the gap would disappear I believe. But most white parents are too busy trying to be their kids’ buddies rather than their elders to reestablish parental authority.
Given how difficult it would be to get White parents to take up Tiger Mom style parenting, that makes me think that even if most of the important Black-White gaps are caused by culture, that isn’t reason to believe that the gaps will close anytime soon.