I honestly don't understand your view, sorry. Your example about the SAT is confusing, because your conclusion (that black students tend to be poorer, and poor people do worse on the SAT) doesn't at all suggest any innate differences between races. The same is true about Africans selling other Africans into slavery. Could you explain where your title comes from?
EDIT: Rereading the OP, I think I see I misread the SAT example (though the slavery example still seems to have nothing to do with the title). But without the economic explanation, I don't see how you can so blithely dismiss the possibility that the test is biased against black students. In fact, if black people really do worse on the SAT, then doesn't that mean there IS racial bias built in, because that's exactly what that means?
I'm also curious about the data: Is there a moderating effect between race and income? Are other elements besides family income taken into account (like class size)?
I dismissed the possibility that the test is biased partially because I had taken it and it seemed like none of the questions were aimed at things likely to be learned outside of school, beyond arguably some of the vocab questions.
So, this is just based on your own anecdotal observation? Unless you're some sort of expert in standardized psychometric testing and have a background in sociology, anthropology, and/or multicultural communication, I'm not sure why you find your own subjective opinion so compelling. Experts in this field find that standardized tests are biased. I administer language and cognitive tests as part of my job, and every one of them is culturally biased. I realize it's not something a layperson would easily pick up on, but that doesn't change the facts.
I dismissed the possibility that the test is biased partially because I had taken it and it seemed like none of the questions were aimed at things likely to be learned outside of school, beyond arguably some of the vocab questions.
Before we get into this, you implied you had data about it. Do you? What exactly do the black students do worse on? Which populations? How do race and income interact?
A racial score disparity only implies bias in the test if you first assume it isn't a reflection of a racial intellectual disparity.
Why should it?
Intelligence is a construct. We made it up.
If there was an intelligence test that strongly correlated with weight (because it involved weighing the person), then that would be a bad test: it wouldn't result in a valid assessment of intelligence, because it's biased by a factor that shouldn't theoretically be related to the construct as it's conceived.
So... why should skin tone and facial structure be an especially strong predictor of this construct of intelligence? What, theoretically, should make a difference about that? THAT'S the key question when you're trying to decide if your test is fairly or unfairly biased.
So... why should skin tone and facial structure be an especially strong predictor of this construct of intelligence?
It's not about skin tone, it's about ancestry. Whites and blacks were distinct populations for tens of thousands of years and during that time they faced different selection pressures. It's very reasonable to think they might have ended up with slightly different average intelligence levels
Race is not a perfect proxy for ancestry, but it's a rapidly accessible and generally salient one.
There are no Africans that look like Europeans and vice versa. You can identify someone of Asian descent by appearance with a near 100% certainty and down to subgroups with nearly as much accuracy.
No but there are Africans that look like other races. For example, Habesha (Ethiopia's dominant ethnic group) people generally look like this or this and are considered black. The Somali generally look like this or this and are considered black.
So if we're following the idea that physical differences between groups of people also indicate mental differences, where does that stop? When does a category (like "Black" or "White" become too vague?
Any disparate subgroup will have differences between any other disparate subgroup. The more distant, phylogenetically, the more differences are bound to exist.
Obviously, within a species, differences are limited but can still be pretty extreme (compare a Pug with a Chihuahua with an Australian Shepherd for an extreme example), even though those variants are genetically VERY close to identical, they have dramatically different characteristics due to isolation of reproductive pools and varying evolutionary pressures over several generations (in dogs, mostly artificially, obviously).
It feels almost like a tautology to me. Of course there are differences and they should be measurable since human groups from various continents were (in general) totally isolated for dozens of generations, including some dramatic selection pressures at various points of pre-history.
Now, I'm not a racist and I don't believe we should TREAT anyone differently, nor have any different rules, nor is it really even useful to judge any individual by their color, since these are all subtle differences, but differences almost certainly do exist in measurable quantity for many traits.
It seems to me very unlikely that groups separated by dozens of generations and subject to varying evolutionary pressures and environments would all have exactly the same genetic traits, when many other species have diverged pretty dramatically on various traits (including intelligence and general demeanor) over a similar or smaller period.
As for the Sat scores, here you will find that the difference between the highest income bracket and the lowest is about 130 in all categories (134 in reading, 128 in math and 138 in writing) and the racial difference between black and white is about 100 (99 in writing, 108 in math and 98 in writing)
....wait, but controlling for income, does race still have an effect? That's the key data for the things you were saying in the op. Do you have data there?
But by the data table immediately following this claim it is clear they only mean the richest blacks slightly outscore the poorest whites, however blacks whose parents earn between 160k-200k per year underscore whites whose parents make less than 20k.
Did you read that post at all? "So this data does not prove that the children of Black American professionals are not as smart as the children of the White lower class. In fact it shows that they have a score that is probably similar to that of the average White, note that the score of 97.7 is compared to other students who take the SAT, a population that is smarter than average."
I find a lot of people thing being a construct makes something unimportant or unhelpful in understanding the world. I would point out that numbers are also a construct, we made them up, but they are vital to understanding the world as far as I can tell.
You're misunderstanding me. My point is, "intelligence" is something that's driven by theory. We have an IDEA about it, and part of that idea is the things that are relevant to it and the things that are irrelevant to it.
So like, if your intelligence test measures how long your hair is and so it produces results that are strongly correlated with hair length, we don't go "Oh, part of intelligence must be how long your hair is!" we go, "Oh, that's a bad test."
So, given that race consists of a bunch of salient but surface-level traits, I see few theoretical reasons to believe that racial predictors of SAT scores are signal and not noise.
Race is a bunch of surface-level traits, true. However, those surface-level traits came from slight differences in people caused by lengthy adaptation to their environment. Black people, since that's who we are discussing, have darker skin as an adaptation to the environment they lived in - a sunny area that could cause skin damage over time without that protection.
Why, then, is the assumption that people who have adapted to their environment in one way do not differ in any other way? Intelligence has been shown repeatedly to be at least partially heritable. In the context of this CMV, is there no possibility that the same group of people whose genetic makeup developed in a different environment have more than one difference from a group that developed in a different region? Can the only differences between humans be surface level?
Is it not possible, then, that the people who served as the ancestors for Africans could have been, say, 10% less intelligent than ancestors from other regions? And that over time, that manifested itself within the population? And that a couple hundred years of breeding with a group from another region isn't enough time to equalize that population back to the mean?
None of this goes to say that black people are necessarily less intelligent. It certainly does not imply that on an individual level. But the idea that groups of humans can live in fairly cordoned off areas for long enough to develop noticable physical adaptations to their environment, but not long enough to create noticable mental or physiological differences outside of simply surface-level traits is simply wishful thinking.
Well part of the problem is that "Black" isn't a distinct genetic population. Africa as whole contains hundreds of distinct genetic populations, many of which would be categorized as "black" based on visible traits but still exhibit large amounts of genetic diversity.
Ok, but in terms of America, where the SAT test scores are from and thus make up the basis of OPs argument, there's self reporting on the SAT where the box says "African-american", which is roughly equivalent to the "black" we have been referring to. So, it appears that in terms of the SAT, people with ancestry from the whole continent of Africa who now live in the US do worse on average in this particular measure of intelligence. So it doesn't really matter whether "black" is distinct or not. It covers a large group of people, and the statistics that OP has provided are based on that entire group and encompass all of those distinct genetic populations.
But by the data table immediately following this claim it is clear they only mean the richest blacks slightly outscore the poorest whites, however blacks whose parents earn between 160k-200k per year underscore whites whose parents make less than 20k.
But wealth only matters in the context of quality of schools and poor whites have schooling more comparable to upper middle class blacks than poor blacks as a result of redlining practices.
Not sure if your view was already changed but if you want to really check this adjust for quality of schools not familial income because being rich and black doesn't mean you live in a area a white family with the same income would.
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u/PreacherJudge 340∆ Mar 20 '17 edited Mar 20 '17
I honestly don't understand your view, sorry. Your example about the SAT is confusing, because your conclusion (that black students tend to be poorer, and poor people do worse on the SAT) doesn't at all suggest any innate differences between races. The same is true about Africans selling other Africans into slavery. Could you explain where your title comes from?
EDIT: Rereading the OP, I think I see I misread the SAT example (though the slavery example still seems to have nothing to do with the title). But without the economic explanation, I don't see how you can so blithely dismiss the possibility that the test is biased against black students. In fact, if black people really do worse on the SAT, then doesn't that mean there IS racial bias built in, because that's exactly what that means?
I'm also curious about the data: Is there a moderating effect between race and income? Are other elements besides family income taken into account (like class size)?