[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '
')Tell me if you will, how two runners in a race can ever be equal as long as one has a 300 year head start.

[KaiserJeep]

I understand what you are saying, and I understand why you wish to believe what you believe. But LOOK at the first chart I published. The net impact of everything we have talked about, is still that Whites are accumulating wealth far faster than Blacks. Also, Blacks who want to live in toney suburbs are being denied real estate services, by agents who are acting as their White wealthy clients want them to act, and are being denied affordable loans by bank officers, because they live in places where Blacks live - but not by choice.

I understand affirmative action, and I even understand - and have felt - other forms of the reverse racism that the US Government imposes. I'm not disputing any of the things you said, in fact, other than your apparent belief that you live in a country that is largely past discrimination. All the evidence says that we don't. If Blacks had equal access to good neighborhoods where homes appreciate, and prime mortgage loans that they could afford, there would not be a wealth disparity by race, nor would that disparity be growing at an increasing rate.

The facts may be inconvenient, but they demonstrate that your beliefs and opinions are wrong. If you want to understand more, watch that 16 minute NetFlix video. In it, you will see Black US Senator Cory Booker relate how his family got into a White neighborhood, a sorry tale involving lawyers and a sting operation by the FHA, and having a White couple make an offer on their prospective home. When his Black parents showed up at closing, the real estate agent was incensed, and attacked their lawyer with his fists, while siccing a large dog on Booker Sr. In the ensuing scuffle, a window was broken and then subsequently the Bookers leveraged their good neighborhood into another even better, and Cory got a good education and even gained Federal Office. But the family's success dated from that sting - an act of courage few could manage, and an opportunity that existed with LBJ in office, or even Barack Obama, but something very unlikely today.

Because the country you live in oppresses minorities, by the actions of biggoted individuals and not by policy, and things are not improving. In fact your very belief that no problem still exists today in spite of evidence to the contrary, is an act of oppression by YOU against minorities.

Believe me, there is no insult intended. But when you study the facts and discard your prejudices, you discover uncomfortable things that arise from your convictions, as did I.

[Ibon]

Very noble attempts KJ in reasoning with Plantagent who may not acknowledge what you are saying but that does not mean it wont act on him silently the way climate change did years ago. Otherwise he is the Trump loving bigot that he appears to be.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Looking at various posts above, it's complex. It's not a monolithic issue wrapped around money.

If you only look at wealth disparity between whites and blacks, then that has persisted. Between cultural differences like family differences, a large wealth gap, and a large educational gap, that wealth disparity isn't going to be made up quickly.

However, if you look at opportunity, including policies in place to ensure minorities get a fair chance, I believe things are getting better. Equal opportunity for housing and jobs. Protected groups. Preferential hiring and admissions policies. How are policies like that "oppressing minorities"?

I also still think that generally, especially for younger people, that in the US, there is a far better attitude about accepting minorities who are US citizens.

When I moved into the "bad" neighborhood in '81, which was 98% black because it had cheap rent and was 5 to 10 minutes from work, virtually all my relatives and friends thought I was insane. They thought it was too dangerous. They thought too many black people would want to hurt me or rob me or beat me up. They thought I'd be shot due to all the gang turf wars. They thought I'd have problems from all the drug trafficking. And on and on. And they just couldn't get that part of the reason I did it was a matter of principle. I figured some white people needed to walk the walk and live in such a way that demonstrated some white people really aren't racist (or are trying hard not to be, even if political correctness says that anyone white is a racist by definition).

Racial jokes and slurs used to be common. I noticed because I hated that crap, even in the 70's while I was growing up. Now, among most circles, that is seriously frowned upon by almost everyone. Even if there are still idiot white supremacists, that's an exception to the general rule.

I remember a meeting at work when I was about 30, when the various "protected groups" were discussed by our manager. So as an under 40 white guy, I was virtually the only person in the 15 strong department who wasn't in a protected group. We had quite a few folks in 2 or 3 protected groups. I accepted that less qualified people would get promotions over me as part of the helping out in the race KJ describes. I had no problem with that unless the people were TERRIBLY incompetent and just got promoted (multiple times and quickly) for showing up and being in multiple protected groups.

...

So it's a mixed bag and there are still racist a-holes. But that doesn't mean it's not getting better in a variety of ways, over time.

[KaiserJeep]

It's not improving economically in the USA for Blacks. The result is an upsurge of violence, crime, and drugs in Black neighborhoods. Which only serves to perpetuate the things such as unfair housing practices.

The Civil Rights era came and went. Genuine Black leaders such as Martin Luther King came and went. What remains now in Black communities are demagogues such as Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakahn, and Al Sharpton, who increase the level of strife and violence and call it leadership. Barack Obama did some of that himself.

There are also a boatload of White people who apparently really do care about the Blacks and do everything they can to make the situation better. These include Jimmy Carter and wealthy individuals such as Bill and Melinda Gates. Then there is Barack Obama, who simply does not display leadership, and who was a "switch hitter" while in office, on the one hand promoting Peace, and on the other, Black Activism including disruptions to a functioning society.

It's simply not clear to me if things are getting better or worse - for the Blacks. I acknowledge that virtually every other racial minority group is being absorbed into mainstream US society, over the span of a few generations. But every time a Black person looks in the mirror, he sees a Black face, and that has not changed in 300 years. For those with Black faces, life in the USA is not improving, they are falling further behind instead.

The worst problem that the Blacks have is smug White people who simply deny that a problem exists, or who are oh-so-insistent that life is improving for the Blacks living in the USA. As I mentioned before, those who ignore the continued deteriorating conditions in Black neighborhoods are perpetuating the prevailing situation, and at the same time, making it harder to ever provide relief.

Yet as I say these words, I look around my Silicon Valley neighborhood, and we have every skin tone there is, and dozens of nationalities, and you will typically hear a half dozen languages when you venture out. The Catholic Church down on the corner now has Mass in Spanish and Portuguese, but not English.

There is only one local Black family that I even remember, and when IBM sold the hard disk manufactuing to Hitachi, he didn't have a job anymore, and they moved to Oakland. He told me once he was the token at the hard disk factory. I also ran into a Black instructor I knew from HP at one of the local stores. He admitted to living nearby, but I never found out where, he had an unlisted telephone number, and quite simply he was one of the most prejudiced men I ever met, and hated all White people, and taught his kids to be the same way.

Please, don't any of you deny that a problem still exists.

[Cog]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'V')ery noble attempts KJ in reasoning with Plantagent who may not acknowledge what you are saying but that does not mean it wont act on him silently the way climate change did years ago. Otherwise he is the Trump loving bigot that he appears to be.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '
')
For 262 years, Black slaves built America, and the White people kept the wealth generated by them.

[KaiserJeep]

Plant, this has nothing to do with where I live or want to live. I am talking about the country I was born in and love, where White people are oppressing Blacks. I understand and accept something that you are maintaining a state of denial about. That would be that Black people are still being oppressed, in this day and age, and in spite of the laws you mention, and even with many people - such as you - attempting to heal the breach.

As long as the mean Black family income is one tenth the mean White family income, injustice exists. A similar disparity exists win individual wages. The accumulated wealth gap is even worse. Furthermore, since those gaps are increasing with time, the injustice is worsening and their suffering is increasing. You obviously don't want to believe this, but it's true.

Like I said before, 2/3rds of the wealth of the Middle Class is housing and land. What the chart above indicates is that the main form of oppression - even though it is illegal - is discrimination in housing. My present middle class neighborhood is integrated, but there are places in the SF Bay area that are not, and there are places where minority gangs clash over territories with guns and knives.

I also explained how I found that the most popular real estate search application was being used to perpetuate a modern version of (now illegal) redlining. I will add that most home listings are not coded by color, but enough were that I was able to figure out what it meant.

Yet you still want to deny my words, don't you? You would prefer to not believe these uncomfortable ideas, correct?

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'P')lant, this has nothing to do with where I live or want to live. I am talking about the country I was born in and love, where White people are oppressing Blacks. I understand and accept something that you are maintaining a state of denial about. That would be that Black people are still being oppressed, in this day and age, and in spite of the laws you mention, and even with many people - such as you - attempting to heal the breach.

[Cog]

The moment you claim victim status and try to use it as a reason you can't make your way in life, your battle is already lost. The destruction of the black family by liberal policies is at the root of all this not racism. Does racism force blacks to have 75% of their children out of wedlock? Does racism force 13% of the population to commit 50% of violent crimes? I could adopt any black infant and raise him with values of hard work and education and he would turn out to be a productive citizen. The real racism in play here is being committed for political purposes to make a whole group of people wholly dependent to capture their vote.

Kj can broadcast his white guilt liberalism here of course but it's just a repackaged way of saying blacks are inferior to whites and must be cared for like you would a retarded cat.

I've worked with and for too many successful black people to buy this bullshit Kj is spreading. But they shared a common work and moral ethic with me, and didn't waste time sitting on their ass and crying about being a victim.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'T')he moment you claim victim status and try to use it as a reason you can't make your way in life, your battle is already lost. The destruction of the black family by liberal policies is at the root of all this not racism. Does racism force blacks to have 75% of their children out of wedlock? Does racism force 13% of the population to commit 50% of violent crimes? I could adopt any black infant and raise him with values of hard work and education and he would turn out to be a productive citizen. The real racism in play here is being committed for political purposes to make a whole group of people wholly dependent to capture their vote.

Kj can broadcast his white guilt liberalism here of course but it's just a repackaged way of saying blacks are inferior to whites and must be cared for like you would a retarded cat.

I've worked with and for too many successful black people to buy this bullshit Kj is spreading. But they shared a common work and moral ethic with me, and didn't waste time sitting on their ass and crying about being a victim.

[KaiserJeep]

First, I have to make one thing clear. What we are about to discuss will very likely get censored. At some point, somebody is going to contact the forum administrator and ask that what I am about to post be taken down, for whatever reason. Because, even though the US Government paid for the Human Genome Project, they are repressing the results by policy. These things were originally published by the US Government's Bureau of Labor Statistics during Bill Clinton's second term, then the policy changed. You can still find the information online outside of the US web sites in other countries they do not control. Whenever possible, I will use US charts from the BLS National Longitudinal Surveys, the last of which was NLSY97 in 1997, because they also didn't like what they got there and they quit doing those as well.

Second of all, Plant, I made mistakes in my messages, repeatedly talking about family income when I should have been specific and discussed accumulated family wealth. That is what has a 10:1 disparity exists, due to housing discrimination against minorities. Here's another version of that:

...a third chart since my original post on the topic. The second chart above was "per capita", which is why the numbers differ, the first and third are by family.

I'm tempted to say that all we have to do is bulldoze the inner cities, and then give each white family a minority family as involuntary permanent guests. But I suspect that would not work either, because they would still LOOK different, with their Black or Brown skins, from their lighter skinned hosts. I suspect the whole problem originates in another of those primate instincts, the same one that underlies warfare between nations.

If somebody looks different, sounds different (a different language), or smells different (because they eat curried veggies or deep-fried corn pone "hush puppies" or tofu) then they are obviously not a member of YOUR ape troop, so it's OK to kill them, discriminate against them, or do whatever else, because only the members of YOUR OWN ape troop matter in the primate world. It just might be that something deep down in your genes is telling you those things.

Then there is the embarassing fact that Anthopology and the Behavioral Sciences have been measuring racial differences all along. The Human Genome Project even quantified this by relating the differing intelligence centroids of racial groups to gene clusters:

...and the eye-opening chart that sums it all up:


This chart is about intelligence, because that is the most controversial topic. US Blacks average an IQ of 82 which increases to 87 when you include the somewhat larger group with 25% or more White parentage. The figures were "normalized" so that US Whites averaged 100 on the IQ scale. US Jews average 110, but that includes both the Ashkenazi Jews (average IQ 127) and those speaking the "low tongue" (Yiddish).

The HGP did not just measure intelligence, either. They published charts on muscular strength, agility, running ability, everything. If you ever wanted to know why Blacks dominate the NBA, the NFL, and certain other sports, the answers are in the (now repressed) findings of the HGP, and are related to your genes.

I will say this. I don't know whether the censorship policy is correct or not. Certainly bigotry could result from this information. My only complaint is that the US Government decided that YOU CAN'T HANDLE THIS, and as a result, my words are most likely going away. Try printing this message while it still exists, if you don't believe me. Then "Right Click" on the pictures and save the URLs.

[KaiserJeep]

On re-reading the above message string, I realized I must have pushed one of Cog's hot buttons. He accused me of "white guilt liberalism" and IIRC nobody has ever done that to me before.

OK, folks, this is your opportunity to post before the thread goes away. What are your thoughts?

What I think: We are going to have this same spectrum of racial issues for another few thousands of years, ending only when everybody is more or less the same skin color as the merry mixing of genes continues.

[KaiserJeep]

Well, it has now been over four hours since I posted, and no replies yet. Look, we have touched upon this topic before and I have already been labelled as a Racist and a Nazi by Left-leaning members in those prior threads, and by Cog as a White Liberal "with guilt" in this one. But what I am actually seeking is open discourse on a sensitive topic, by one and all.

Is this just something that the rest of you are afraid to touch? Do you think THE GOVERNMENT might include your names in the secret database of Permanent Records? Or are you still reacting to the information that (gasp) people of different races have different capabilities for many things, and the government measured these things and kept the information from you?

Hint: The actual definitions of "race" via the HGP disclose that humanity has at least SEVEN and possibly as many as TWENTY-THREE races, depending on where you set the bar for the number of distinct genes that define a "race" of humans. These distinctions were largely the result of isolated populations of humans, seperated by geographic barriers while mutations accumulated in that isolated population. But there were always travellers and always new genes being added to most such populations, so the HGP did a lot of statistical analysis via computers.

It's difficult to even have this discussion, because the prior and classic definition of "race" allowed for THREE, which we called the White man, The Black man, and the Yellow man, based on skin color. That is certainly obsolete, but we don't have agreed-upon terminology for the 7-23 racial groups of the HGP. So we are going to use the old labels to talk about the new races, there isn't any other option. It's inconvenient, but it can be done, by anybody not afraid to touch the topic.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', ' ')there is the embarassing fact that Anthopology and the Behavioral Sciences have been measuring racial differences all along. The Human Genome Project even quantified this by relating the differing intelligence centroids of racial groups to gene clusters:

...and the eye-opening chart that sums it all up:


This chart is about intelligence, because that is the most controversial topic. US Blacks average an IQ of 82 which increases to 87 when you include the somewhat larger group with 25% or more White parentage. The figures were "normalized" so that US Whites averaged 100 on the IQ scale. US Jews average 110, but that includes both the Ashkenazi Jews (average IQ 127) and those speaking the "low tongue" (Yiddish).

[KaiserJeep]

The reason this stuff was repressed and removed from US Web pages was because Bubba Clinton insisted on it (and GWB didn't change his decision, to be fair). This Internet censorship was highly controversial here in Silly Valley, and those controversies were not covered by lamestream media because they were not PC. The reason that the censorship didn't work was that the HGP was not funded exclusively by the USA, it was an International project with International funding and researchers.

Here in the USA the HGP results are paywalled behind the professional journals of the practioners of Psychology and Psychiatry and Anthropology, you won't find this stuff in public places like Science. They don't talk about this stuff in Freshman Psych, either. It's not for the likes of us, you understand, it's for professionals.

I had a backdoor through the paywalls because I worked on the Internet research project by one of my daughter's friends and a former member of her GS Troop. She wrote up the results from some information I injected into THIS FORUM and a couple of others, which she was reading, but never posted in herself. (Nor do I think she came close to telling me everything.) Several of you guys helped her earn a PHD with her dissertation on the Internet.

The UK websites are your best bet, for the laymen's version of the HGP, because they (kind of) speak American. I did this years ago and my links are all dead (the HGP was published between 1989 and 2003), the information was repressed by the HGP "Board of Ethics" (oddly enough all lawyers) they put in place in the late 2000's.

I'm not suggesting that the HGP causes or caused Racism, either, because that is thousands of years old. But "older and wiser heads" in the US Senate decided you didn't need this information, and that the government would not share it with you. But it is something that thousands of US citizens know about that simply is not discussed publicly. Which is why I am expecting this thread to either get closed or for it to disappear.

There is actually lots of implications here. If somebody were to take note of the fact that government programs like "affirmative action" and other forms of reverse racism would not ever fix disparities in abilities that arise in a person's genes, then the justification for these programs could and would be attacked. There are implications involving welfare, sports, and education, to name a few. That's why we cannot talk about such stuff in public without being labelled as a "racist" or some other disparaging label, the intent being to suppress discussion.

Tanada, allow me to apologize if this material causes you distress, you are the OP. I undertand and in fact am expecting that this thread will get closed.

[Cog]

No reason to worry about censorship KJ. Science is color blind or at least it should be. Like Planty I was aware of the Bell Curve study but not this one. But what are we trying to achieve here as a society? I would maintain that a child raised by two parents who encourage hard work and study will almost always out-perform those not raised that way regardless of IQ. Is the average IQ of a black person lower than either whites or Asians? Probably. But I can't dunk a basketball either. I don't worry about it and do other things that are fulfilling. The primary way you defeat a disability is to figure out what you can do and do that thing well.

But a culture, like the inner city ghettos, where there is a single parent who may not care about education themselves won't give rise to kids that do. Black kids are often ridiculed by their peers as "thinking white" if they go down the path of study and hard work. I do not know how to fix that except to make sure that equality under the law is maintained. No one can force you to be a good parent and role model to your kids. But we can discourage sloth and dependency by social policy. Kids need to see the role model of mom and/or dad working for a living. The jobs are there.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '
')... lots of implications here. If somebody were to take note of the fact that government programs like "affirmative action" and other forms of reverse racism would not ever fix disparities in abilities that arise in a person's genes, then the justification for these programs could and would be attacked.

[Cog]

The other thing that can account for some IQ differences is early exposure to reading. How much reading goes on in the Sub-Sahara? I'm not saying its 100% nurture, as there is a genetic influence to IQ, but it is a big factor.

[Ibon]

So nature and nurture both play a role and as this thread is courageous enough to address this what kind of a government leadership do you think would be required to translate this into effective policy? One that is uniting or one that incites racial hatred?