I appreciate the praise. One more idea related to your essay to think on: I just read it the other day, probably elsewhere in Substack Notes. Someone quoted this epigram:
""Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
I don’t hold with the concept of “Intelligence Quotient”—it’s a measure that I find simultaneously vague, rigid, reductive, and extravagantly ambitious in its conclusion. All the hallmarks of bogosity. Few people realize that even Spearman added caveats to his claim that his tests provided a measure of “g” aka General Intelligence (defined as the common substrate for all abilities related to intellectual functioning…I know, arguably a tautology.)
I score very high on IQ tests. Or at least I did until my first encounter with the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test around 10 years ago, with my performance likely hampered by sleeping poorly the previous night. I also scored high on my SAT tests. I think that IQ tests that include a lot of verbal material, like the Weschler, measure something similar to the SAT: the level of competency with the skill sets related to scholastic achievement. And I think it’s accurate, as far as that goes. RPM is a very different test: people with mild-to-moderate verbally capable ASD have been known to score as much as 35 points higher on RPM, com[pared to tests like the Weschler “inventories”. Whereas my reaction to having the RPM test sprung on me was dubious, skeptical, and unmotivated. What’s weird is that both tests are alleged to measure the same capability—that mystical quintessence, “Spearman’s ‘g’”. Does that strike anyone else as kind of funny?
RPM is said to be a superior test of “IQ”, because of an emphasis on abstract visual diagrams rather than verbal questions that supposedly makes it free of culture bias. The possibility of other induced biases has since emerged. RPM views “abstract reasoning” as the baseline of intelligence. But—paradox, again—only for those who follow the rules! “Thinking outside the box”, so to speak, is discouraged.
My other big problem with the IQ concept is that it presumes to measure the ability limit of each individual tested. But it’s practically impossible to measure un-activated potential with one written test. I get that some people are smarter than others, but getting an idea of how intelligent someone actually might be requires a lot more personal interaction. (I mean, doesn’t it? Isn’t that basic?) IQ tests basically measure the ability to do schoolwork—or, in the case of RPM, the ability to use logical reasoning to follow patterns*, and that’s about it. It heelps to be well-rested before the test. Critiques of IQ and educational testing are also increasingly noting the influence of factors like hunger, lack of sleep, and lack of motivation on variability of test performance.
[* ability to follow the logic of RPM may provide a reliable measure of competence with computer “languages”. But anyone who tries to apply the logical prompts of the RPM to learning how to write and spell the English language is destined to run into multiple trainwrecks, often within the first paragraph. English is an Exceptional language, get it. You don’t get good by understanding the logic of it. You just have to get used to it. ]
I know, I went off. IQ is one of several hobbyhorse topics of mine. others include my talking up ranked choice voting; the practical, facts-based argument for a higher marginal tax rate for the top 10% of households, and especially the top 1% and 0.1%; my skepticism of claims for AI and unpiloted motor vehicles; and the urgent need for an overhaul of the substance criminalization laws. All of which you can read about on my Iconoclasms home page (still free!) Including more detailed articles on the topic of IQ, with link support included. https://substack.com/@adwjeditor/p-148984101
Thank you for a spirited ride on your hobby horse! I hope I didn't fall off as I am plagued with anxiety at times/smile. I appreciate your deep knowledge and dive into the innards of intelligence. Just a couple of observations. Some people are smart. Some people are gifted. That is just a part of life. We see it every day. Some view history as a boring recital of facts. Others are seized with the underlying patterns and force of transcendental ideas. As I was questioned in the sixth grade, there was no cultural bias. Like what would cultural bias have looked like? I read and spoke English like everyone else in my class. I attended the same classes five days a week like my 96% white classmates. I studied for the same tests and quizzes. My questions were always answered in full by Mrs. Hunt. The library was my oyster, and I took advantage of the richness of the world in books. Could you define the cultural bias that prevented me from being identified as gifted? Just curious.
Even now, I use the word that captured Mrs. Hunt's attention. Curiosity. I didn't see the see the word "curiosity" in your great comment. Any reason why?
There is a difference between giftedness and smartness. Perhaps, 130 is an arbitrary benchmark but I am not complaining/smile. Reasonable people can disagree without being disagreeable. I for one have witnessed the impact of High IQ. It is not a game closer, however, for success in life. Other qualities like grit, foresight, resolution, drive and determination matter as well. But I can feel when I am in the presence of a High IQ. I know the feeling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Cgzgs0sug
That is a great comment. Why didn’t I mention curiosity? Maybe because I take its importance for granted. It’s vitally important to me, so I’m inclined to think that everyone has as much of it as I do, even though I know better on reflection. I’ve recurrently observed in my social interactions that learning is directly correlated with curiosity—that some people are more motivated to acquire knowledge than others. But I’ve also noticed that a lack of curiosity (it’s rarely absent completely) can be accounted for in several different ways. In my observation, it seems like quite often there’s a link between social class and the way laziness manifests: for the offspring*: incurious people who grew up comfortable, affluent, and wealthy, that deficiency is related to complacency and superficiality; by contrast, people who grew up precariously and in mean circumstances are often incurious because they’ve had it beat out of them, by someone or other—parents, peers, or social circumstance. The “crabs in a barrel” trope is overused, and sort of a sad analogy; the process isn’t that mechanistic. Trauma in humans arguably involves the unique level of self-aware sensitivity found in humans, and trauma conditioning is the source of at least some incuriosity in people. More generally, studied incuriosity is also a thing: individuals—sometimes even highly successful, accomplished, and obviously intelligent ones—develop or maintain blind spots, and simply refuse to seek out or review input that might tell them something they don’t want to hear, or information that might make them personally uncomfortable or upset. “Upset” is a good term as a description there, I think.
So, if an active sense of Curiosity is the key source of motivation and enthusiasm for humans to increase their knowledge and facility with juggling concepts, then what is the biggest impediment? I say it’s Personal Ego.
I don’t discount the practical reality that some people are sharper than others in terms of achieving competence or superior command of some aspect of intelligence than others, just as a baseline. But it’s rare to find someone whose intelligence is uniformly superior across the board; in my experience, it’s practically unheard of. It’s also the case that even the most wealthy, powerful, and accomplished famous people often get shown up as just plain ironheaded stupid, which I take as a telling indication that while human self-aware consciousness may be the crown of creation in this material realm, it sure ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
You’ve given me a lot to think about. I’ll stop here, and leave you with my opinion that Personal Ego is the most common obstacle to learning a new skill set or improving at a skill set that one already has; and that Personal Ego much more often shows up to impede someones intelligence than it acts to help someone elevate their intelligence.
[* I’ve learned to define “social class” as “the way an individual is raised.” Not their own level of income, wealth, social status, or formal education; the way they were brought up. ]
This comment ranks in the top 2% of my essay comments/ever. You gave me a lot to think about. It had never occurred to me how central Personal Ego might be to the analysis. Need to think about it. You and I have served my aim of increasing human knowledge well with our exchange.
If you accept the graph you have posted, which shows the bell curve centered at 80IQ, then the correct calculation would be to find the standard deviation difference between 130IQ and 80IQ, not the difference between 130IQ and 100IQ. So 130-80 = 50 = 3.333 standard deviations.
About 0.00043, or 0.043% of a population will be above 3.333 standard deviations. Multiplying this by 50 million (the population size of black americans) yields about 21,500 people.
So, Chat GPT-4 fails again? Just teasing. I do not know enough to know what I do not know/smile. But you know who would catch any computational errors on the fly? My late Aunt and my Son. Isn't great mathematical ability heritable? Didn't I read that somewhere? Thank you for this catch. I urge other readers to chime in. This is a worthy discussion.
80 versus 85 will make a small difference, but the mathematical error that chatgpt is doing is taking the number of all americans with an iq of 130 and multiplying this by the proportion of black americans in the total population which is about 15%. In other words, americans are 15% black, and about 1% of them have an IQ of 130, so chatgpt is saying that 1% x 15% = .0015 of people with IQ above 130 are black. The mathematical error though is that black americans are not equally as likely to have an IQ of 130 as a “typical” american.
The standard deviation is normally 15. Ask chatgpt what percentage of people in a population are above (130-80)/15 = 3.33 standard deviations or (130-85)/15=3.0 standard deviations, then multiply by the population size of all black americans, and it shohld give you the correct result.
After squinting two or three times at the chart, I can see your point about 80IQ. I have read in other sources the center point is 85IQ. The population size of black Americans according to the U.S. Census Bureau is 41.57 million. Fyi.
There is a lot here to mull over. Both commentators are capturing parts of the truth on the ground. I do not know the story of public schools failing black students. I know my story and shared it. My story made me. Was my story a black American story? Yes, it was which is why I always write, if there are over 40 million black Americans, there are over 40 million stories, experiences and perspectives. It is equally true that failures are best understood as individual failures, not group failures. Externalizing blame is dishonest.
If one views people as individuals, one will see over 40 million individuals. The second commentator is on the mark. I saw one or two police cars growing up on my all-black suburban street. It was so bizarre. It was like watching an elephant walking down the street. There were two black policemen on the county police force. I interviewed one of the two black cops (who lived two blocks from me) for a college paper and he was actually assigned to patrol Midlothian, an affluent part of the county. I guess there was not enough crime in the black part of the county/smile. My father-in-law was a NYPD undercover police officer. Several of his siblings and uncles wore the blue uniform. Think the Blue Bloods but a black American family of distinction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Bloods_(TV_series) For generations, my wife has belonged to an association that has zero toleration for crime.
In conclusion, the true discourse lies in the middle. Begin with the individual on the ground. Avoid needless generalizations. Fear not labels that are outdated. Think outside the box and question why "The Story" is not everyone's story. I thank both commentators for their time and contribution. My apologies for a tardy response. I am recovering from a very bad lung infection which is just dissipating.
To even raise issues related to race is to be immediately accused of racism. What the fuck, here goes anyway.
It’s far past time for society to quit pandering to the black community and to demand that it take the lead in correcting the problems it faces. Here are a few suggestions.
There is a systematic lack of respect for education within the community. Tolerance of disruptive students by black school administrators and lack of effective discipline hinders learning in many black majority schools, stifling students’ potential achievement. The simple answer is to expel repeat offenders so that those who desire to learn can learn.
There is a casual acceptance of criminal behavior within the black community that results in a failure to cooperate with police in solving crimes. Until this is reversed there will be zero economic development within areas where they live.
Finally, someone must find a way to make black fathers love and care for their children and especially their boy children. Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and commit about half of the nation’s homicides. A rate fifty times higher than the average American. The lack of a father’s involvement in raising their sons is at the heart of this problem yet no one acknowledges it and seeks answers to it.
Where the hell are the black men (and especially black politicians) who even publicly acknowledge this problem? What are they waiting for?
First of all, there is not a "casual acceptance of criminal behavior within the black community"! Unfortunately, there are too many so called Black leaders and pundits who do give an erroneous and frankly scandalous impression about my community having a fatalistic and counterproductive towards lawlessness. The overwhelming majority of African Americans are uncooperative with police, due to their justified fears of retaliation by hardcore criminals. Law abiding Black folks are bloody scared of vicious thugs, and they are not looked upon-and certainly not looked up to-as heroes fighting the system despite the impressions you get from vile and noxious rap videos!
The meritocracy sham includes the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the theft of land and its resources, the enslavement of African labor, colonization, apartheid, and Jim Crow discrimination. Wealth and power were unequally distributed generationally to whites.
The truth of the matter is a large percentage of black men resent their mothers and the black women around them for not having higher standards. They know when they come out in front of the world, especially around other men, they don’t measure up. They won’t say it, but many want to be a**rted. They know there’s something up. It’s why such small rifts become so huge to them. It’s also why their criminality rates go through the roof. They know their mothers should never have selected for the vast majority of black men. They think better choices in black women would look like a black woman not engaging with criminals. But in reality, it means selecting for someone more intelligent and with more agency. The reality of choosing the best black man would result in choosing not to mate with at least 85% of the black male population. It would mean at least 85% of black women choosing not to birth at all. It would mean they would have to collapse and that for the well being of their community, they cannot breed. Of the remaining 15%, as we can all see, black men as a whole do not possess the level of duty required to truly feel inclined to take care of their women. They were not bred to be that way. That more intelligent cohort of men oftentimes chooses to disperse and leave the community because they can.
This is what happens when a woman settles and makes compromises on important topics for her male peers. This is what happens when she takes male preferences at face value. This is what happens when she’s not in the right circumstance to have a child due to her own shortcomings along with her male counterparts. This is what happens when women give in to being breeded to satisfy men who don’t measure up. This is what happens when she accommodates them for generations upon generations.
The high IQ black population can’t find one another and oftentimes don’t care to find one another. They realize they’re outnumbered in their community. They either marry out with other groups, or don’t marry nor do they have children. Intelligent black women rarely marry a black man of equivalent stature. They either marry out or not at all. I believe they have the lowest fertility rate in the black community. With the less intelligent blacks not breeding, the intelligent black men giving up, and the intelligent black women marrying down or not at all, the future for blacks will not be good.
The implications that come with the vast majority of black women choosing not to birth black men are disastrous. 20 million men who have no real options for intercourse anymore and who are prone to violence will start attacking the black women and innocent bystanders down in the streets.
A hard hitting comment, Theo. Can't click the like button but you probably suspect why. I always resist stereotypes and caricatures. We reason wrong when we lead with avatars instead of individuals. I don't have the time to fully respond to every single point here. Perhaps, direct message me on Substack. However and out of respect, I will share with you my phrase by phrase, clause by clause analysis/smile.
1. I loved my Mom. I cried on the floor like a baby when she passed away of cancer. Too young and denied ever knowing her grandchild. A world in which black men resent their mothers is an unknown, alien world. It is just not my story. My Mom was my genesis.
2. "Black women around them for not having higher standards" -- The black women around my Mom were church attending, God-fearing women, family women. A healthy number were married to pastors. Your statement is not my story. It may be true for others but not for me.
3. "They don't measure up"-- I never had that feeling coming up in the world around other men. Most probably viewed me as a promising future. I did not have a psychological wound inside of me. It was not my story.
4. Maybe, small rifts are because the stakes are low. If one is living for the day, there is no planning or foresight. Wither goes impulse control? My story was devising long-range plans for Student Council dominance. Kept me out of trouble/smile.
5. Criminality is not part of my story. The essay was a telling of my story. Times have changed but, once upon a time, crime was not a thing in southern small-town neighborhoods. Nor was illegitimacy. Times have changed but my essay aimed to tell my story, not the customary narrative about people. I dislike caricatures and stereotypes as I suspect you do too.
Thank you for this rich comment. Feel free to direct message on Substack for more exchange.
You must be a card-carrying member of Jared Taylor's American Renaissance club – the champions of the ethnostate! Quite the exclusive gathering, isn't it?
Nope, just a small-town kid who was curious and dreamy and discovered the world had a name for these parts of me. Here's the funny thing -- years before Mrs. Hunt and the Sixth Grade, intelligence mattered in a good, profound way. "Unlike the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, I have been called the N-word due to racial prejudice in public school. The first time was at E.S.H. Greene Elementary School, a formerly all-white school in which I found myself as the only black student in my third-grade class. Abusive white classmates there repeatedly called me the N-word. One day, I simply sat down on the playground and thought about why these classmates were abusing me so. I knew from growing up on Twyman Road that there was no correlation between intelligence and skin color. The most important adults in my life -- Mom, Dad, Grandma, Uncle Robert Daniel Twyman, Aunt Juanita Twyman, Uncle William Womack -- were all black, and they came in a range of colors. It dawned on me that my classmates were dumb. They were not smart. And since I prized intelligence as a young kid, I concluded I would ignore and dismiss these tormentors. This realization armored me well for life ahead in the 1970s." Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America, p. 151
Intelligence and self-awareness cleared a pathway for me at the age of eight. I was fortunate. Best,
I’ve been living the dream for several years now, enjoying a nice chunk of passive income while blissfully ignoring the rat race! My great-grandmother was brutally raped by a “cracker” Scot-Irish scumbag with impunity. Many African women were raped by white men in the slave ships and after arriving. You're black with the one drop rule. Laughter!!!!
I appreciate the praise. One more idea related to your essay to think on: I just read it the other day, probably elsewhere in Substack Notes. Someone quoted this epigram:
""Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
*Arthur Schopenhauer. I just looked it up.
Thumbs up!
I don’t hold with the concept of “Intelligence Quotient”—it’s a measure that I find simultaneously vague, rigid, reductive, and extravagantly ambitious in its conclusion. All the hallmarks of bogosity. Few people realize that even Spearman added caveats to his claim that his tests provided a measure of “g” aka General Intelligence (defined as the common substrate for all abilities related to intellectual functioning…I know, arguably a tautology.)
I score very high on IQ tests. Or at least I did until my first encounter with the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test around 10 years ago, with my performance likely hampered by sleeping poorly the previous night. I also scored high on my SAT tests. I think that IQ tests that include a lot of verbal material, like the Weschler, measure something similar to the SAT: the level of competency with the skill sets related to scholastic achievement. And I think it’s accurate, as far as that goes. RPM is a very different test: people with mild-to-moderate verbally capable ASD have been known to score as much as 35 points higher on RPM, com[pared to tests like the Weschler “inventories”. Whereas my reaction to having the RPM test sprung on me was dubious, skeptical, and unmotivated. What’s weird is that both tests are alleged to measure the same capability—that mystical quintessence, “Spearman’s ‘g’”. Does that strike anyone else as kind of funny?
RPM is said to be a superior test of “IQ”, because of an emphasis on abstract visual diagrams rather than verbal questions that supposedly makes it free of culture bias. The possibility of other induced biases has since emerged. RPM views “abstract reasoning” as the baseline of intelligence. But—paradox, again—only for those who follow the rules! “Thinking outside the box”, so to speak, is discouraged.
My other big problem with the IQ concept is that it presumes to measure the ability limit of each individual tested. But it’s practically impossible to measure un-activated potential with one written test. I get that some people are smarter than others, but getting an idea of how intelligent someone actually might be requires a lot more personal interaction. (I mean, doesn’t it? Isn’t that basic?) IQ tests basically measure the ability to do schoolwork—or, in the case of RPM, the ability to use logical reasoning to follow patterns*, and that’s about it. It heelps to be well-rested before the test. Critiques of IQ and educational testing are also increasingly noting the influence of factors like hunger, lack of sleep, and lack of motivation on variability of test performance.
[* ability to follow the logic of RPM may provide a reliable measure of competence with computer “languages”. But anyone who tries to apply the logical prompts of the RPM to learning how to write and spell the English language is destined to run into multiple trainwrecks, often within the first paragraph. English is an Exceptional language, get it. You don’t get good by understanding the logic of it. You just have to get used to it. ]
I know, I went off. IQ is one of several hobbyhorse topics of mine. others include my talking up ranked choice voting; the practical, facts-based argument for a higher marginal tax rate for the top 10% of households, and especially the top 1% and 0.1%; my skepticism of claims for AI and unpiloted motor vehicles; and the urgent need for an overhaul of the substance criminalization laws. All of which you can read about on my Iconoclasms home page (still free!) Including more detailed articles on the topic of IQ, with link support included. https://substack.com/@adwjeditor/p-148984101
Thank you for a spirited ride on your hobby horse! I hope I didn't fall off as I am plagued with anxiety at times/smile. I appreciate your deep knowledge and dive into the innards of intelligence. Just a couple of observations. Some people are smart. Some people are gifted. That is just a part of life. We see it every day. Some view history as a boring recital of facts. Others are seized with the underlying patterns and force of transcendental ideas. As I was questioned in the sixth grade, there was no cultural bias. Like what would cultural bias have looked like? I read and spoke English like everyone else in my class. I attended the same classes five days a week like my 96% white classmates. I studied for the same tests and quizzes. My questions were always answered in full by Mrs. Hunt. The library was my oyster, and I took advantage of the richness of the world in books. Could you define the cultural bias that prevented me from being identified as gifted? Just curious.
Even now, I use the word that captured Mrs. Hunt's attention. Curiosity. I didn't see the see the word "curiosity" in your great comment. Any reason why?
There is a difference between giftedness and smartness. Perhaps, 130 is an arbitrary benchmark but I am not complaining/smile. Reasonable people can disagree without being disagreeable. I for one have witnessed the impact of High IQ. It is not a game closer, however, for success in life. Other qualities like grit, foresight, resolution, drive and determination matter as well. But I can feel when I am in the presence of a High IQ. I know the feeling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Cgzgs0sug
That is a great comment. Why didn’t I mention curiosity? Maybe because I take its importance for granted. It’s vitally important to me, so I’m inclined to think that everyone has as much of it as I do, even though I know better on reflection. I’ve recurrently observed in my social interactions that learning is directly correlated with curiosity—that some people are more motivated to acquire knowledge than others. But I’ve also noticed that a lack of curiosity (it’s rarely absent completely) can be accounted for in several different ways. In my observation, it seems like quite often there’s a link between social class and the way laziness manifests: for the offspring*: incurious people who grew up comfortable, affluent, and wealthy, that deficiency is related to complacency and superficiality; by contrast, people who grew up precariously and in mean circumstances are often incurious because they’ve had it beat out of them, by someone or other—parents, peers, or social circumstance. The “crabs in a barrel” trope is overused, and sort of a sad analogy; the process isn’t that mechanistic. Trauma in humans arguably involves the unique level of self-aware sensitivity found in humans, and trauma conditioning is the source of at least some incuriosity in people. More generally, studied incuriosity is also a thing: individuals—sometimes even highly successful, accomplished, and obviously intelligent ones—develop or maintain blind spots, and simply refuse to seek out or review input that might tell them something they don’t want to hear, or information that might make them personally uncomfortable or upset. “Upset” is a good term as a description there, I think.
So, if an active sense of Curiosity is the key source of motivation and enthusiasm for humans to increase their knowledge and facility with juggling concepts, then what is the biggest impediment? I say it’s Personal Ego.
I don’t discount the practical reality that some people are sharper than others in terms of achieving competence or superior command of some aspect of intelligence than others, just as a baseline. But it’s rare to find someone whose intelligence is uniformly superior across the board; in my experience, it’s practically unheard of. It’s also the case that even the most wealthy, powerful, and accomplished famous people often get shown up as just plain ironheaded stupid, which I take as a telling indication that while human self-aware consciousness may be the crown of creation in this material realm, it sure ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
You’ve given me a lot to think about. I’ll stop here, and leave you with my opinion that Personal Ego is the most common obstacle to learning a new skill set or improving at a skill set that one already has; and that Personal Ego much more often shows up to impede someones intelligence than it acts to help someone elevate their intelligence.
[* I’ve learned to define “social class” as “the way an individual is raised.” Not their own level of income, wealth, social status, or formal education; the way they were brought up. ]
This comment ranks in the top 2% of my essay comments/ever. You gave me a lot to think about. It had never occurred to me how central Personal Ego might be to the analysis. Need to think about it. You and I have served my aim of increasing human knowledge well with our exchange.
Best,
If you accept the graph you have posted, which shows the bell curve centered at 80IQ, then the correct calculation would be to find the standard deviation difference between 130IQ and 80IQ, not the difference between 130IQ and 100IQ. So 130-80 = 50 = 3.333 standard deviations.
About 0.00043, or 0.043% of a population will be above 3.333 standard deviations. Multiplying this by 50 million (the population size of black americans) yields about 21,500 people.
So, Chat GPT-4 fails again? Just teasing. I do not know enough to know what I do not know/smile. But you know who would catch any computational errors on the fly? My late Aunt and my Son. Isn't great mathematical ability heritable? Didn't I read that somewhere? Thank you for this catch. I urge other readers to chime in. This is a worthy discussion.
Upon second thought, I think the chart is centered at 85IQ. Could that be the issue? Notice my subtle bias/smile. Forgive me, oh great Chat-GPT 4.
80 versus 85 will make a small difference, but the mathematical error that chatgpt is doing is taking the number of all americans with an iq of 130 and multiplying this by the proportion of black americans in the total population which is about 15%. In other words, americans are 15% black, and about 1% of them have an IQ of 130, so chatgpt is saying that 1% x 15% = .0015 of people with IQ above 130 are black. The mathematical error though is that black americans are not equally as likely to have an IQ of 130 as a “typical” american.
The standard deviation is normally 15. Ask chatgpt what percentage of people in a population are above (130-80)/15 = 3.33 standard deviations or (130-85)/15=3.0 standard deviations, then multiply by the population size of all black americans, and it shohld give you the correct result.
After squinting two or three times at the chart, I can see your point about 80IQ. I have read in other sources the center point is 85IQ. The population size of black Americans according to the U.S. Census Bureau is 41.57 million. Fyi.
There is a lot here to mull over. Both commentators are capturing parts of the truth on the ground. I do not know the story of public schools failing black students. I know my story and shared it. My story made me. Was my story a black American story? Yes, it was which is why I always write, if there are over 40 million black Americans, there are over 40 million stories, experiences and perspectives. It is equally true that failures are best understood as individual failures, not group failures. Externalizing blame is dishonest.
Reactive labels of racism are not arguments. I define racism as state action. I knew education segregated by law. That world ended with the fall semester of 1969 for me. https://twyman.substack.com/p/the-strange-death-of-systemic-racism?utm_source=publication-search Ignore labels and slurs that are outdated.
If one views people as individuals, one will see over 40 million individuals. The second commentator is on the mark. I saw one or two police cars growing up on my all-black suburban street. It was so bizarre. It was like watching an elephant walking down the street. There were two black policemen on the county police force. I interviewed one of the two black cops (who lived two blocks from me) for a college paper and he was actually assigned to patrol Midlothian, an affluent part of the county. I guess there was not enough crime in the black part of the county/smile. My father-in-law was a NYPD undercover police officer. Several of his siblings and uncles wore the blue uniform. Think the Blue Bloods but a black American family of distinction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Bloods_(TV_series) For generations, my wife has belonged to an association that has zero toleration for crime.
In conclusion, the true discourse lies in the middle. Begin with the individual on the ground. Avoid needless generalizations. Fear not labels that are outdated. Think outside the box and question why "The Story" is not everyone's story. I thank both commentators for their time and contribution. My apologies for a tardy response. I am recovering from a very bad lung infection which is just dissipating.
To even raise issues related to race is to be immediately accused of racism. What the fuck, here goes anyway.
It’s far past time for society to quit pandering to the black community and to demand that it take the lead in correcting the problems it faces. Here are a few suggestions.
There is a systematic lack of respect for education within the community. Tolerance of disruptive students by black school administrators and lack of effective discipline hinders learning in many black majority schools, stifling students’ potential achievement. The simple answer is to expel repeat offenders so that those who desire to learn can learn.
There is a casual acceptance of criminal behavior within the black community that results in a failure to cooperate with police in solving crimes. Until this is reversed there will be zero economic development within areas where they live.
Finally, someone must find a way to make black fathers love and care for their children and especially their boy children. Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and commit about half of the nation’s homicides. A rate fifty times higher than the average American. The lack of a father’s involvement in raising their sons is at the heart of this problem yet no one acknowledges it and seeks answers to it.
Where the hell are the black men (and especially black politicians) who even publicly acknowledge this problem? What are they waiting for?
First of all, there is not a "casual acceptance of criminal behavior within the black community"! Unfortunately, there are too many so called Black leaders and pundits who do give an erroneous and frankly scandalous impression about my community having a fatalistic and counterproductive towards lawlessness. The overwhelming majority of African Americans are uncooperative with police, due to their justified fears of retaliation by hardcore criminals. Law abiding Black folks are bloody scared of vicious thugs, and they are not looked upon-and certainly not looked up to-as heroes fighting the system despite the impressions you get from vile and noxious rap videos!
The meritocracy sham includes the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the theft of land and its resources, the enslavement of African labor, colonization, apartheid, and Jim Crow discrimination. Wealth and power were unequally distributed generationally to whites.
The truth of the matter is a large percentage of black men resent their mothers and the black women around them for not having higher standards. They know when they come out in front of the world, especially around other men, they don’t measure up. They won’t say it, but many want to be a**rted. They know there’s something up. It’s why such small rifts become so huge to them. It’s also why their criminality rates go through the roof. They know their mothers should never have selected for the vast majority of black men. They think better choices in black women would look like a black woman not engaging with criminals. But in reality, it means selecting for someone more intelligent and with more agency. The reality of choosing the best black man would result in choosing not to mate with at least 85% of the black male population. It would mean at least 85% of black women choosing not to birth at all. It would mean they would have to collapse and that for the well being of their community, they cannot breed. Of the remaining 15%, as we can all see, black men as a whole do not possess the level of duty required to truly feel inclined to take care of their women. They were not bred to be that way. That more intelligent cohort of men oftentimes chooses to disperse and leave the community because they can.
This is what happens when a woman settles and makes compromises on important topics for her male peers. This is what happens when she takes male preferences at face value. This is what happens when she’s not in the right circumstance to have a child due to her own shortcomings along with her male counterparts. This is what happens when women give in to being breeded to satisfy men who don’t measure up. This is what happens when she accommodates them for generations upon generations.
The high IQ black population can’t find one another and oftentimes don’t care to find one another. They realize they’re outnumbered in their community. They either marry out with other groups, or don’t marry nor do they have children. Intelligent black women rarely marry a black man of equivalent stature. They either marry out or not at all. I believe they have the lowest fertility rate in the black community. With the less intelligent blacks not breeding, the intelligent black men giving up, and the intelligent black women marrying down or not at all, the future for blacks will not be good.
The implications that come with the vast majority of black women choosing not to birth black men are disastrous. 20 million men who have no real options for intercourse anymore and who are prone to violence will start attacking the black women and innocent bystanders down in the streets.
A hard hitting comment, Theo. Can't click the like button but you probably suspect why. I always resist stereotypes and caricatures. We reason wrong when we lead with avatars instead of individuals. I don't have the time to fully respond to every single point here. Perhaps, direct message me on Substack. However and out of respect, I will share with you my phrase by phrase, clause by clause analysis/smile.
1. I loved my Mom. I cried on the floor like a baby when she passed away of cancer. Too young and denied ever knowing her grandchild. A world in which black men resent their mothers is an unknown, alien world. It is just not my story. My Mom was my genesis.
2. "Black women around them for not having higher standards" -- The black women around my Mom were church attending, God-fearing women, family women. A healthy number were married to pastors. Your statement is not my story. It may be true for others but not for me.
3. "They don't measure up"-- I never had that feeling coming up in the world around other men. Most probably viewed me as a promising future. I did not have a psychological wound inside of me. It was not my story.
4. Maybe, small rifts are because the stakes are low. If one is living for the day, there is no planning or foresight. Wither goes impulse control? My story was devising long-range plans for Student Council dominance. Kept me out of trouble/smile.
5. Criminality is not part of my story. The essay was a telling of my story. Times have changed but, once upon a time, crime was not a thing in southern small-town neighborhoods. Nor was illegitimacy. Times have changed but my essay aimed to tell my story, not the customary narrative about people. I dislike caricatures and stereotypes as I suspect you do too.
Thank you for this rich comment. Feel free to direct message on Substack for more exchange.
You must be a card-carrying member of Jared Taylor's American Renaissance club – the champions of the ethnostate! Quite the exclusive gathering, isn't it?
Nope, just a small-town kid who was curious and dreamy and discovered the world had a name for these parts of me. Here's the funny thing -- years before Mrs. Hunt and the Sixth Grade, intelligence mattered in a good, profound way. "Unlike the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, I have been called the N-word due to racial prejudice in public school. The first time was at E.S.H. Greene Elementary School, a formerly all-white school in which I found myself as the only black student in my third-grade class. Abusive white classmates there repeatedly called me the N-word. One day, I simply sat down on the playground and thought about why these classmates were abusing me so. I knew from growing up on Twyman Road that there was no correlation between intelligence and skin color. The most important adults in my life -- Mom, Dad, Grandma, Uncle Robert Daniel Twyman, Aunt Juanita Twyman, Uncle William Womack -- were all black, and they came in a range of colors. It dawned on me that my classmates were dumb. They were not smart. And since I prized intelligence as a young kid, I concluded I would ignore and dismiss these tormentors. This realization armored me well for life ahead in the 1970s." Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America, p. 151
Intelligence and self-awareness cleared a pathway for me at the age of eight. I was fortunate. Best,
…or being an informant under pressure.
With your intelligence, can you operate an AR-15 or AK-47 for tactical defense? Basic survival skills: growing food, tending to a gunshot wound…?
I’ve been living the dream for several years now, enjoying a nice chunk of passive income while blissfully ignoring the rat race! My great-grandmother was brutally raped by a “cracker” Scot-Irish scumbag with impunity. Many African women were raped by white men in the slave ships and after arriving. You're black with the one drop rule. Laughter!!!!