The second part is environmental but at least in part derivative of the first. American blacks for a variety of complicated reasons have lower cultural capital than other groups. This may be partly due to lingering effects from the past, but whatever the underlying causes, the forms of cultural deficiency include things like out of wedlock births, higher crime rates, less engaged parenting styles, less emphasis on education, etc. Teasing out cause and effect is difficult but undoubtedly there is an environmental feedback loop that tends to reinforce the pathologies rather than eliminate them. It’s also true that g also bears on human behavior and modulates these same pathologies up or down depending on whether g is high or low.
However, no one is allowed to discuss this in polite society and social scientists strive to suppress these well-known and well-supported findings from the general population out of some misplaced sense of fear that the yokels will go all Margaret Sanger on black people.
But because no one is allowed to speak honestly about the reality, we as a society never consider appropriate solutions. Instead, the gentry class promotes and idolizes midwit mediocrities like Ibram Kendi, who claims that any disparities among racial groups are ipso facto proof of racism. Thus the elites promulgate theories condemning America and inventing fictitious concepts like systemic racism to explain away the disparities. If you force people to ignore the gap in group intelligence—which again explains nor predicts nothing about individuals: there are many black geniuses and (copious) white idiots (cf. capo Joe Biden)—then those earnestly struggling to make things better for black Americans must be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that society is structurally biased against blacks and arranged to retard their progress. For if all groups are equal in intelligence and cultural capital, then the persistent, stubborn refusal of various gaps in achievement between black and white to close can only be explained by racism in people and/or the system.
But think about it: the people that are suppressing the reality (roughly synonymous with Democrats) are doing a grave disservice to everyone: to blacks who are being primed to believe the deck is stacked against them and they can’t succeed (but any individual can succeed: just because marginally more whites have marginally more success due to differences in intelligence means nothing for the probability of success of individual blacks); to whites who are fingered as inveterate racists—many of whom, unaware of or not believing the science (Dems are the Party of Science with a capital S, didn’t you know?) of intelligence and psychometrics, actually and genuinely believe they must be racist and beat themselves, and fellow whites, and the country up over supposed racism that is holding blacks down; to the government which spends trillions and distorts society with divisive programs like affirmative action on the one hand while stating that every group is perfectly equal (thus the tension that at some point none should need special treatment); while the country’s reputation and honor are damaged severely in the eyes of the world, as they see a great many people in our country claim that it is racist and oppressing blacks. The reality though is that this one simple variable, g, explains essentially all of the disparities in modern America between blacks and whites.
Note also that these two slightly offset normal distributions (black population g vs white population g), at the low and high ends, will produce, relative to each other, a preponderance of exceptionally smart whites and a preponderance of lower than average intelligence blacks. This leads to a severe imbalance in the numbers of blacks in certain fields and who advance to certain levels in their careers, etc. Then we get hand-wringing condemnations of these companies and organizations for discriminating against blacks, when the reality is that they are bending over backward to identify and promote even minimally-qualified blacks from a too-small candidate pool.
This is a somewhat similar effect that accounts for more men at the upper echelons of mentally challenging fields like physics, math, chess, etc. relative to women. It’s speculated that the stubby little male Y chromosome, which causes men to have only one copy of the sex-linked (23rd chromosome -> XY vs XX) genes, yields a wider variation in corresponding traits in males, since there is no “averaging” of the two copies of these genes as happens in females, and this is evolutionarily adaptive for the expendable males versus precious females who are vital for the propagation of genes to the next generation: the natural variation of males produces, relative to women, significantly more exceptional specimens (including some with exceptional intelligence) but also many more dolts, dummies, and weaklings at the other end of the scale, but, due to female hypergamy and alpha male cock-of-the-walk swagger, the dolts—at least back in the mists of prehistory and human evolution—are afforded no chances to breed, thus their inferior genes do not dilute the gene pool. Whereas females have less variation which also makes sense evolutionarily because every female will breed (sorry for describing it like that) since each womb is so precious and needs to be maximized, thus it makes sense to minimize the chance of inferior genes coming from the female by trading on a lower probability of superior genes—the idea is to let the variation come from the male, who, through sexual competition, tends to be superior. Larry Summers got fired for treading near this topic (Nancy Hopkins, if you’re reading this: you make me want to throw up a little in my mouth—I can’t even!) because just as in the case of whites vs. blacks, the elites don’t trust Americans with the truth—and admittedly there are many Democrats who do their utmost to avert their eyes and perpetuate the fantasy world they live in where the white male cisheteropatriarchy is responsible for all ills.
It can’t be overstated how pernicious the hiding of the truth is: it leaves blacks (and similarly women) with no good explanation for their group’s “plight” other than that the country must be structurally biased against them, and that this is because whites / men are racist / sexist. What a horrible smear! And there is a simple explanation that proves it is bogus, but the elites won’t allow it to be discussed in polite society. Instead of calmly explaining the facts, the elites propagate racial strife and distrust.
Think about it: the Left would rather invent and live in a world in which there is this special invisible power that no one can see or perceive but in which we are enveloped, like fish not knowing they are breathing water—or like fin de siècle physicists—very smart people all—who nevertheless convinced themselves of the existence of “aether”, a pervasive, invisible field that was responsible for the physical measurements (speed of light) they could not explain otherwise—only there was another way to explain the measurements, special relativity. But even after Einstein proposed the theory, many people, whose careers and reputations were built on the aether would not admit that they were wrong: they were too personally and professionally and economically invested in their pet theory, whether they still believed in it or not. This is very similar to the “systemic racism” that is posited to exist even though no one can see it or measure it: there are no racist laws on the books; discrimination on the basis of immutable characteristics is banned; many programs in and out of government afford special dispensations for blacks and other groups; countless blacks are extremely successful: indeed the American black population is the freest, richest, best-educated, longest-lived group of African ancestry in history. Unfortunately for the would be crusaders of SJW shock troop brigades, there are no more dragons to slay. Despite their anthropocentric arrogance in believing—needing to believe—that this time in history must be special (because they are alive during it), all the civil rights battles have already been won. Thus the increasingly silly spectacle of SJW-confected categories of oppressed: out-woking the wokest, makes you the new wokest. Thus all the “hate crime” hoaxes, with the demand for juicy racist content among the grievance industry far, far exceeding the supply.
EDIT: I neglected to mention that one can find all this information laid out in careful detail on various websites, and the psychometric arguments are laid out in The Bell Curve from 1994(?), which is why the Left determined that its authors should have their reputations destroyed despite the fact that they were just unflinchingly going where the data took them, like real scientists, as opposed to the sheep-in-the-sheepfold-like behavior of the vast majority of social “scientists “, not out of animosity against blacks—far from it—but from a desire to comprehend the truth and help initiate the discussion of real solutions. Though I hasten to add that just because there is a perceived or real disparity between one group and another does not automatically imply that it must be “fixed”—who says there is something per se “wrong” with natural variation and differences? And thank God for differences or life would be quite boring! And anyway it is a fool’s project to strive for perfect balance among all groups in all things at all times because it is logically impossible to achieve (actually I built a little proof of this years ago so you’ll trust me when I tell you it simply can’t be done—there’s always another way to construct a new group (aka set)—sort of like when my buddy at work tried to convince me that he had some new method for compressing data to unimaginably small sizes and unheard of compression rates and copying data over a network channel, by using sequences of keys that indexed into a hash on either side that contained preset codebooks of blocks of different data patterns, and I regretfully had to disabuse him of his dream of a patent and untold riches by giving him a copy of A Mathematical Theory of Communication—hey, at least he got there 15 years before Silicon Valley—and pointing out that his keys themselves would have to grow to rival the size of the data blocks they were replacing, thus limiting the possible compression ratio—this is known as the Shannon limit—but I digress, badly). Nor does it imply that, even if we agree that something could reasonably be done, that the government, and only the government, must address the issue.
Also directly relevant is Murray’s recent book, Facing Reality, which I have not read but is advertised as dealing directly with the gap in average IQ and it’s effects. Of course, literally none of this information is new, but it is suppressed with such police state discipline and Nork-like fervor by certain sectors of the Left that very few people know about it and many of them are brainwashed (as Julius Caesar wrote, fere libenter homines, id quod volunt credunt) into thinking that it is somehow racist to have a frank acknowledgment of reality, and that the better course of action is to keep our heads in the sand, impugn our country as racist, vilify whites as racist, and perpetuate the situation of black Americans, feeding them the lie, for Democrat electoral gain, that the country is rigged against them and they shouldn’t bother trying to succeed, thus ensuring our national discourse stays locked in a stasis borne of an artificially limited range of discussion (a vice-like åsiktskorridor the walls of which all the best people aka Twitterati blue-checks can perceive like a sixth sense, like bats in a cave (who are then captured by the Chinese for a PLA bioweapons program, but I digress…)), in which no one will ever propose a solution that might help/work, because no one is even allowed to state the problem. Bravo, woke gentry class ignorati!
Like the Doors, I’m waiting for the sun, the light of knowlege, to illuminate this twilight debate heretofore conducted in hushed tones at the back of conference rooms and in snatches of candid admission and admonition, to cast its light and drive out the shadow and forced ignorance that has reigned for too long. Until we talk candidly about these uncomfortable facts—until we have those “courageous conversations” the diversicrats keep claiming to want, the American people will be pulled further and further apart by the strength of the lie of systemic racism.
Though, as much as I believe in its necessity I cannot in good conscience advise anyone to attempt a true conversation about this at work, or school, or government—too many people have been conditioned to short circuit when this topic is broached and you therefore may provoke a hysterical reaction. Sadly we are now operating in our society like Havel’s greengrocer, where the gap between public declaration and private sentiment continues to grow. The increasingly divergent public (propaganda) and private (truth) spheres a hallmark of totalitarian societies through time. Again, bravo American elites! But when, like Tiffany said, I think we’re alone now, and we two can talk honestly, face to face, without that pesky censorship bot Alexa to report us for unclean thoughts crimes, then we’ll work it out…
