by Jack
From kindergarten through the 3rd grade one of my best friends was a black kid named Sterling who lived with his grandparents. My folks were middle class and had a nice home and a newer car, but Sterling’s family lived in a dump of a house. It was on a large lot with no lawn and a lot of junk in the yard with a broken down chicken wire fence around the whole mess.
They lived almost next door to my grandpa and he didn’t have any money either although his house was better kept, so this part poverty didn’t bother me in the slightness, but I admit their old house intimidated me a little and so did his grandpa. He got stinkin drunk on many occasions. Once when we walking back from the grocery store, my dad and I found him in an ally a few blocks from his home. My dad, a big guy, literally carried the man in his arms back to his home and delivered him to a very upset older black lady that must have been his wife. After that I wanted to steer clear of his grandpa and that spooky looking old house.
As the time passed we had these rules, we didn’t talk about Sterling’s home life and especially about his grandpa’s drinking. I was curious and I wondered why Sterling was living with his grandparents, but I had to accept this was the way it was and let it go. Besides, at that age kids are consumed with two things, school and play, we didn’t have time for any deep thoughts and obviously my friend didn’t want to talk about his home life anyway. So we just ignored the bad parts of life.
By the time we were in the 3rd grade Sterling changed. He started acting more aggressive and less like a friend. He was developing what I would later call a hateful attitude. I finally realized he didn’t want to be friends, but I didn’t know why. I tried to talk to him, but every time I did he just got tough about it. I figured he just wanted to be left alone. Looking back, obviously something was seriously wrong in his life, but I was a kid what could I know?
As I got a little older I learned more about his grandpa. He was a mean drunk and the worst part was he was a racist too. He hated white people and he was teaching Sterling to have the same kind of thoughts. The next summer before 4th grade Sterling moved away and that was it, I never saw him again.
This was my first experience with poverty and racism. Later in my career as a cop I learned there’s a lot of Sterling’s out here and most of them wind up in prison. That’s a huge problem today and our current prison overcrowding is telling us, we can’t keep locking them up. At some point we’ve got to try something different. . . while we still have a chance of saving them. I don’t know exactly what the answer is, but I know enough to ask the question and that’s a start.
Yes, it is sad.
A lot of people do not know about “Black Rage”- the underlying anger that too many blacks have for whites, believing that starting with slavery, all their problems are caused by whites.
Unfortunately, this has deepened over the years to the point of black “youths” forming into mobs (mistakenly referred to as “flash mobs”) and attacking whites, asians, and latinos- brutally beating, robbing and even killing them.
Feelings of entitlement means millions of blacks on government assistance (EBT, food stamps, welfare, section 8, ADC, etc.) and believing that they are OWED these things based on their race alone. 3/4 of the populations of American jails and prisons are blacks, yet they only make up 12.9% of the population of the USA.
Saddest yet is the fact that there is a difference in the intellectual or ‘bell curve” levels between blacks and whites- it’s a fact, part of the diversity of races, and cannot be helped or changed.
Compounding all the above problems is the decline of morals and education, inspired by the “hip-hop” and “rap” mentality, which clearly opposes higher education and job skills, while glorifying rape, drugs, murder, and gang activities.
I used to have a great deal of black friends, and they have faded away from me one-by-one. A few have even told me it was because of my success in the business world, or the fact that I ride a Harley Davidson, (that somehow means I’m racist!?) and by doing so, that means I’m flaunting my happy, successful life in their faces!
I am at a loss for an explanation.
Wyatt what you said is courageous and very reasonable and it needed to be said. It was very interesting.
I’ve wondered about the physical differences between blacks and whites too, although I suspect we are 99% similar, I still think there is something else going on that is different. This is not a put down, it’s just reality, IMHO. We’ve never really had a good scientific study to detail our differences because of those ugly racist implications that go with it. That’s wrong, being P.C. should have ZERO influence on science.
The one study relative to the bell curve that I can recall resulted in the researched being hounded as a racist. I don’t think he was, but he’s study showed some negative differences so the PC crowd blasted him.
However, I’m satisfied there are real differences in our brain wiring and physical components.
I think these “differences are worth examining in order to help us with crime interdiction, family relationships, racial understanding and how we reason.
One thing I know for sure, as a white person I am sick and tired of taking the heat for $hit I didn’t do or have any part of!
Naomi Shaefer Riley was fired for writing about how colleges are teaching blacks to hate or be suspicious of whites through black studies and women’s studies courses. Her piece can be read here:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-most-persuasive-case-for-eliminating-black-studies-just-read-the-dissertations/46346
Abraham Mielle elaborates at American Thinker concluding:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/naomi_schaefer_riley_and_the_corruption_of_the_academy.html
Roger Kimball weighs-in at PJ Media:
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/05/09/craven-and-pusillanimous-at-the-chronicle/?singlepage=true
The best thing that could happen in America would be for parents and students to simply choose not to attend for a year or two. What would these “institutions” do if nobody applied or attended?
Wyatt Man:
“Saddest yet is the fact that there is a difference in the intellectual or ‘bell curve” levels between blacks and whites- it’s a fact, part of the diversity of races, and cannot be helped or changed.”
This is not a “fact,” you ignorant racist. It’s pseudoscientific garbage with no plausible evidence to support it.
“The Bell Curve” has been totally dismantled by numerous scholars in many different fields. Many years ago, Thomas Sowell did his part to show why the conclusions drawn in “The Bell Curve” made no sense in an article for the American Spectator. I can’t find the original article online, but a large portion of it is quoted at this site:
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/000792.html
Wyatt: “A few have even told me it was because of my success in the business world, or the fact that I ride a Harley Davidson, (that somehow means I’m racist!?)”
No, the fact that you drive a Harley does not make you a racist. The fact that you think blacks are inherently stupider than whites makes you a racist.
Jack: “We’ve never really had a good scientific study to detail our differences because of those ugly racist implications that go with it. That’s wrong, being P.C. should have ZERO influence on science.
The one study relative to the bell curve that I can recall resulted in the researched being hounded as a racist. I don’t think he was, but he’s study showed some negative differences so the PC crowd blasted him.
However, I’m satisfied there are real differences in our brain wiring and physical components.”
Jack, the next time you complain about being called a racist, I’m just going to bring up this quote of yours.
Of course the idea that some races are intellectually inferior to others is racist–if it isn’t, then the word “racist” has no meaning. If it were scientifically proven that some races were less intelligent than others, that wouldn’t make people who believed it any less racist. It would just make racism the appropriate and logical response to the world.
But there is no evidence that one’s race determines one’s intelligence, and it’s ill-informed to say that we don’t have this evidence because of “political correctness.” For most of our nation’s history, the belief that other races were naturally less intelligent than whites WAS the politically correct viewpoint, and it was accepted by a majority of scientists. This was based on faulty science, and was used to justify not only slavery and segregation of blacks and oppression of Native Americans, but also anti-Semitism and prejudice toward the Irish, Polish, and Italians (all of whom were viewed as “non-white” during this period, demonstrating that race has always been a changing social construction, not a real biological category).
We have better science now, and contrary to your statements, plenty of studies have been done to determine genetic and racial factors for intelligence. None have been convincing in showing that race plays much of a role absent environmental factors. As Thomas Sowell points out in the link I posted above, European immigrants in the early 1900s showed similar scores on mental tests as African-Americans do today:
“Strangely, Herrnstein and Murray refer to “folklore” that “Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence. ” It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve. These groups repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War I era, both in the army and in civilian life. For Jews, it is clear that later tests showed radically different results–during an era when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews.
My own research of twenty years ago showed that the IQs of both Italian-Americans and Polish-Americans also rose substantially over a period of decades. Unfortunately, there are many statistical problems with these particular data, growing out of the conditions under which they were collected. However, while my data could never be used to compare the IQs of Polish and Italian children, whose IQ scores came from different schools, nevertheless the close similarity of their general patterns of IQ scores rising over time seems indicative–especially since it follows the rising patterns found among Jews and among American soldiers in general between the two world wars, as well as rising IQ scores in other countries around the world.
The implications of such rising patterns of mental test performance is devastating to the central hypothesis of those who have long expressed the same fear as Herrnstein and Murray, that the greater fertility of low-IQ groups would lower the national (and international) IQ over time. The logic of their argument seems so clear and compelling that the opposite empirical result should be considered a refutation of the assumptions behind that logic….
…While this open presentation of evidence against the genetic basis of interracial IQ differences is admirable, the failure to draw the logical inference seems puzzling. Blacks today are just as racially different from whites of two generations ago as they are from whites today. Yet the data suggest that the number of questions that blacks answer correctly on IQ tests today is very similar to the number answered correctly by past generations of whites. If race A differs from race B in IQ, and two generations of race A differ from each other by the same amount, where is the logic in suggesting that the IQ differences are even partly racial?”
The authors of “The Bell Curve” were not just hounded because their positions were politically incorrect. They were hounded because their positions were based on bad science.
Chris, I’m sure you will use every opportunity to label me something, and you will use my quote “However, I’m satisfied there are real differences in our brain wiring and physical components.” Fine, go ahead. I said it and I am prepared to take a beating for it., but just be sure you put what I said in its proper context: I’m not saying one race is better or worse for their difference, only that there ARE some slight differences.
Chris, tell me, who gets sickle cell anemia? Blacks, Whites or Asians?
If you answered blacks then according to you standard, you would be a racist. Being politically correct, we must assume that all races are equally affected and that even doctors disagreeing with us must therefore be saying we are wrong because they are racists.
I do believe that every race has some slight…SLIGHT…. characteristic/s that make them different, and this is besides facial features and skin color.
Now this…”Athletes of West African descent – which include most African American, Caribbean and black British athletes – have, on the other hand, a physique which is suited to explosive events, requiring sprinting and jumping. Such athletes possess what biologists call a mesomorphic physique with bigger, more visible muscles including a larger chest. Their muscles contain a higher proportion of fast-twitch fibres than do whites or East Africans. Athletes of West African descent also possess less body fat, a higher centre of gravity, narrower hips, and higher levels of testosterone in their blood.
For Entine such physiological and biomechanical differences demonstrate the natural superiority of black athletes. For Entine’s critics, on the other hand, the very search for such differences demonstrates a racist outlook. ‘I don’t think it matters what the biological conclusions are’, argues former footballer Garth Crooks. ‘It forges a distinction between black and white athletes which is unhealthy, unhelpful and untrue.’ According to the prestigious science journal Nature, ‘The danger that interracial comparisons will be inhibited by considerations of political correctness is less serious than that interracial studies will be wrongly used.’ ‘There are some things better left unsaid’, concluded the New York Times.” Kenan Malick from his essay, Why Black will beat White at the Olympics.
Is Malick a racist Chris?
Jack, if you’re not saying that blacks are less intelligent than whites than I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. Wyatt was saying exactly that, and you seemed to be mostly agreeing with him.
Can you clarify what you mean when you say that there are “some slight differences” in “brain wiring” between the races? What kinds of differences do you see? What scientific evidence, if any, are you basing this on?
I guess you could be saying that blacks and whites have different types of intelligence, but that neither is inferior to the other. If so, then I suppose that wouldn’t necessarily be racist as long as you’re basing it on sound science. However, I don’t think such science exists.
I also think there’s a difference between saying there are physical differences between races and saying there are mental differences. One, because physical differences between races are often (though not always) apparent and observable (although I think some of the research about “African athletes” has been exaggerated). Mental differences are much harder to test in an unbiased way, and it’s almost impossible to show that these are due to genetic factors rather than environmental factors. And two, because in our society I think we judge physical differences less harshly than mental differences. For instance, Jewish people and Asians tend to be shorter than average, but that’s not used as an argument to show they are inferior. Saying that one race isn’t as intelligent as another, however, packs a much heavier punch. It implies that the less intelligent race might not be as “evolved” as the other, and that perhaps they shouldn’t be treated the same in the law.
Again, if different races were scientifically proven to have different levels of intelligence, then we would have to accept that fact. The word “racist” would still apply, but it would lose it’s punch; it would be like calling someone a “specist.” But the fact is that no such evidence exists today, and the hypothesis that there are innate mental differences is not only unsupported, it’s contradicted by a lot of other evidence.
Funny nobody seems to mind that Asians outscore whites in the IQ tests that were part of the bell curve research.
Wikipedia has a pretty good short summary of the book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
The listing includes criticisms and agreement from interested parties and detractors including a paragraph from the Thomas Sowell article in the American Spectator (Must be an archive subscriber to get the full Spectator article at [23]):
I’m with you Jack, research that might help us understand and deal with problems is often murdered on the PC block. If I recall correctly the authors of the study did not write their conclusions in permanent ink. It was more like they wanted to inspire researchers and academics to look for solutions and innovation in the information they offered. As you pointed out though, noting a difference does not mean “less than” as so many who immediately cry racist assume.
Tina, thanks for weighing in on this one. Yes, there is much to be learned about our human existence and the sooner the better. But, whatever the findings, good or bad, I would hope it would only be used in a positive way to promote understanding and acceptance.
I believe the African race is our mother race and all other races are descended from them. There is DNA evidence to support that. So to be prejudiced against them or for them to be prejudiced against us is kinda lame, we are all of the same family, even though we have developed slightly differently. The differences are miniscule compared to what we share in common. But, like I said earlier understanding those differences can go a long way to also understanding the problems that keep us divided.
Jack I agree. We are brothers and sisters having come from the same original source it is as ignorant to think we are fundamentally different as it is to hold racist views. Most of us know this and can celebrate the differences…as we do the different structures of snowflakes and the many types of birds.
My feeling exactly Tina, well said.