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[–] NowhereMan ago 

Okay, I'll bite. The proposition that black people are somehow less human the the rest of us must rest upon certain axioms.

Chiefly among those axioms must be that, once the ancestors of non-black people migrated out of Africa, they must have developed some universal increase in intellect, an increase that somehow remained despite all other genetic mutations that have since created the various colored subsets of mankind that we have today.

How do you support this axiom? And furthermore, why would it have occurred?

Also, if this axiom is to be supported by the lack of prominent black scholars and intellectuals, how can you also consider the Jewish people somehow lesser than the rest of us?

The Jewish people have been extremely successful, despite their historical persecution. Any suggestion that Black people are somehow intellectually inferior because of their lack of success must mean that Jews are intellectually superior because of their overwhelming success in a large number of fields.

Unless you suggest that the Jews have somehow rigged the game, but that suggestion opens up the possibility that we are not, perhaps, always on an equal playing field. To entertain this suggestion, one must entertain the idea that Black Americans may have had the game rigged against them, thereby confounding the overwhelming number of your conclusions.

Also: How many of you have taken a real IQ test administered by a lisenced psychologist? I have, and while they clearly corrolate with intellect, they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, a proper test of intellect. They are simply the best tool available. It is unwise to put too much weight into their findings.

In closing, I present an article by the famous economist Thomas Sowell discussing minority education: http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html

An Excerpt, with added emphasis:

St. Augustine high school in New Orleans was a particularly striking example of achieving academic success while going against the grain of prevailing opinion in educational circles. It was established back in 1951, during the era of racial segregation in the South, as a school for black boys, presided over by an all-white staff from the Josephite order. None of these young priests had ever taken a course in a department or school of education. To the horror of some outside members of the order, the school used corporal punishment. There was no unifying educational theory. The school simply kept doing things that worked and discarded things that didn't. The first black student from the South to win a National Merit Scholarship came from St. Augustine. So did the first Presidential Scholar of any race from the state of Louisiana. As of 1974, 20 percent of all Presidential Scholars in the history of the state had come from this school with about 600 black students. Test scores were never used as a rigid cutoff for admission to St. Augustine. There were students there with IQs in the 60s, as well as others with IQs more than twice that high. For individual students and for the school as a whole, the average IQ rose over the years-- being in the 80s and 90s in the 1950s and then reaching the national average of 100 in the 1960s. To put that in perspective, both blacks and whites in the South during this era tended to score below the national average on IQ and other standardized tests. Most of these children did not come from middle-class families. Those who parents were in professional or white-collar occupations were less than one-tenth as numerous as those whose parents worked in "unskilled and semi-skilled" occupations. What are the "secrets" of such successful schools? The biggest secret is that there are no secrets, unless work is a secret. Work seems to be the only four-letter word that cannot be used in public today.

When evidence shows us an undeniable fact that, if a population is given proper education, its measurable IQs can and do increase, how can we possibly accept the conclusion that a population is innately inferior? The conclusion simply does not follow from the evidence.