Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

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Yes. I get that.

And they are about half wrong when it comes to me. I actually have similar values. But I have very different beliefs about how to achieve those values. And as a result, I disagree with most of the agendas being pushed to try to address the problems left by the awful history.

Yes, I want equality. But I want it to be obtained with a hand up, not a handout. We cannot successfully mandate equal outcomes for populations with unequal abilities. We've done that for 60 years and it has not worked.

In California today, black kids score a standard deviation lower than whites, and graduate high school with reading skills matching the average white 8th grader. We can't even talk about that fact. But IQ is a better predictor of your future life trajectory than the color of your skin. And those test scores guarantee that decades from now, those white kids will be enjoying better lives than those black kids. Not because of something that someone in the past did, but because opportunity is available to all, and the benefits accrue to those who are capable of more.

This isn't actually a hopeless fact of nature. Thanks to the Flynn effect, the black-white IQ gap is roughly the same magnitude as the IQ gap between white kids today and their Boomer grandparents. If black parents could learn what white parents have learned in the last 50 years, and receive support to help actually raise their kids well, I believe that in one generation we could erase the IQ gap, and most of the wealth disparity afterwards.

But nobody is chanting, "We need parenting classes!" And suggesting anything like that will get you accused of victim blaming.

So we're going to double down on the same basic ideas that have failed to solve the problem for 60 years now. Is there any reason to believe that it will start working at any point in the next 60 years?

I think your "values" are leading you to believe blatant racist and victim-blaming tropes like "black people have disparate outcomes because... they're worse parents". How about we instead start by closing the 23 billion school funding gap. Or would you consider that to be a "handout". https://www.npr.org/2019/02/26/696794821/why-white-school-di...

I see. It is racist to say things like, "We should encourage black parents to not beat their kids so much." And yet as articles like https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2017/04... point out, that happens to be a very real problem. And so we refuse to even discuss the very interventions that are most likely to have the biggest impact.

On the school funding gap, I'm all for fixing it. That's one of the root causes behind why black boys are under half as likely to meet state reading standards in California as white ones. It isn't the only one - black kids are already substantially behind before they enter school - but it sure needs fixing.

But along with that, let's not lie to ourselves about the consequences of the current situation. A black high school graduate is half as likely to have actually learned what they were supposed to as a white. A business should be able to hire high school students but require a literacy test. The fact that blacks are half as likely to pass said test should be viewed as a judgment on our school system, and not blacks.

But in our legal system, businesses who try that are likely to be sued and are likely to lose the lawsuit. (Many have.) Because insisting that your employees can read and write is considered racial discrimination.

So businesses instead require a college degree and don't have a literacy test. The result is that businesses get literate employments, they hire fewer blacks than they otherwise would have, and now there is more demand for college degrees. Which helps cause tuition to go up, and saddles young people with debt. Which means that everyone loses.

In short I support creating results. Not mandating them. What it takes to create results sounds shocking because those ideas have been off the table for discussion for decades. And likewise discussing the failures of the current system is also off the table.

The two things you've suggested as solutions are "parenting classes" and "encourage black parents to not beat their kids so much".

You're doing the same thing here as you did above with your original post.

No anti-racist would look at the results of IQ tests and frame their conclusion as "don'tcha see, black people are stupid".

No anti-racist would look at the article you posted which acknowledges that "the use of corporal punishment in black communities today is a byproduct of centuries of slavery, the racial terrorism of the Jim Crow era, and exposure to racism that continues to chip away at the vitality of black life." and come to the conclusion that "black parents just need to learn what white parents have learned".

Everyone can hear the dog-whistles loud and clear.

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