In his April Diary, the Derb brought up posts from the Inductivist (still relatively active here) and the Occidentalist concerning changes over time in the self-reported perceptions of why “on the average blacks have worse jobs, income, and housing than whites do”.
The response “less in-born ability to learn” has steadily declined from the 1970s through to the present, even as psychometric evidence and increasingly now genetic evidence for that explanation has accumulated over the same period of time.
Part of the change must be attributable to political correctness–“less in-born ability” makes normies squirm more than a value-neutral explanation like “genetic differences” would–but exactly how much is conjecture.
Reminiscing on my fellow GSS data miners, I took a look at the variable I don’t recall having analyzed much in the past…
One of Thomas Sowell’s major insights in Black Rednecks and White Liberals–that on many things black opinions and behaviors are closer to those of white conservatives than of white liberals–is relevant here.
On the other end of the spectrum, Jews–all Jews, not just liberal Jews–are even more prone to blank slate thinking than white liberals are.
Comments:
* First, Asians and Hispanics are not as heavily assimilated to the modern American way of being a two-faced pansy when it comes to racial issues. Second, there appears to be a correlation between cultural elitism and being full of BS.
On Steve’s three C benchmark (competence, creativity, and charisma), the highest scoring groups (Jews and whites) are big cucks on racial issues. High black ratings on creativity and charisma allow them to be well-represented among celebrities. Corporate/cultural elites seem to say “why not highly promote black figureheads as reparations on behalf of blacks since people find them entertaining anyway”. But most blacks still remain at a pretty low level, power-wise, so they aren’t as PC.
Asians are highly competent but lack either the temperament or perhaps verbal skills to climb to elite status in many sectors of America. Then again, as we see with college admissions, white/Jewish elites may find Asians to be both a status threat as well as still not fully American enough to be worthy of the sympathy extended to blacks and Indians. So there could be some merit to the idea that just as white elites seem to lift certain groups up, they may also be pushing others down. Culturally, whites/Jews/blacks eligible for elite status are expected to be as interested in liberal agitation as they are in anything else. Asians are more resistant to that, preferring instead to be stolid laborers focused on career and family rather than being distracted by getting too worked up over social/political issues. There’s also the fact that competent Asians to some degree can disdain Left-wing paternalism, while mediocre NAMs embrace excuses and hand-outs.
Hispanics score the worst collective three C score, though overall they are less toxic to society than sociopathic blacks. Nobody really believes they enrich anything, even with gregarious blacks people can fool themselves into hoping that blacks “get over” awful ghetto culture so we can have the best of both worlds: entertaining blacks, and a vast reduction in crime, disorder, and welfare use.
A greater Asian population has it’s drawbacks, and the black population as yet hasn’t really declined. Though we’ve seen some gentrified areas (which just caused blacks to move to another city anyway, not really hurting their overall numbers), and Hispanic gangbangers pushing blacks out of some areas out West, it’s hard to really foresee a time when blacks lose enough turf to diminish their numbers and thus their effects. Which is a shame because they do so much damage.
Perhaps, as whites lose status among the Dems due to Gen X/Millennial non-whites displacing white Boomers, we’re really then going to see war break out between the Dems. As much talks as there is about the Dems uniting via hatred of whites, the irony is that it is precisely the homogeneity of the current and recent past Dem leadership (Silent and Boomer whites and blacks) that’s allowed them to have any semblance of camaraderie and consensus. Black and white Dems born before ’65 mostly agree on most issues. The much greater cultural and ethnic diversity seen among X-ers and Millennials, raised on MTV, video games, and YouTube as opposed to the sweeping group oriented generational social movements and straightforward culture of older generations, is going to bear some bitter fruit for liberals. They’re going to find out that the hedonistic and multi-cultural approach they’ve favored for 50 years produces quarreling and sometimes petty/cynical factions. Such as demanding that True Dems don’t oppose abortion.
* Per Steve Sailer, the Sixties last from about 1964-1975, and were a period of political/social unrest considerable drug use, promiscuity, crime (for the first time in documented Western history, hundreds of serial killers were know to be operating at the same time), and relative affluence for many. These aren’t contrived or corporate things. Neither was the Roaring Twenties. Society periodically goes through different phases. Every cultural decade is unique and memorable in some respects. I don’t see much point in denying it, even if some feel these things being over-rated or exploited.
For example:
– the Fifties, 1946-1963 (peace, prosperity, progress)
– the Sixties, as noted above
-the Seventies, 1976-1981 (Bicentennial, the Carter admin disaster, cynicism)
– the Eighties, 1982-1991 (Just Say No, AIDS, Soviets crumble)
– the Nineties, 1992-2001 (End of History, grunge/gangsta rap, greater push for neo-liberalism and PC/mutli-culturalism)
* Spend anytime around blacks, Asians and Hispanics and you quickly learn they are less romantic about the human condition than the honky. Blacks are quite blunt about it as are Asians. Hispanics seem to know you’re not supposed to notice, but they can’t figure out why so they notice anyway.
* I own a lot of autobiographies by rich and famous people. The only one that attributes the lion’s share of credit to his genes is Wilt Chamberlain’s.
