Why do you think whites accepted Affirmative Action? Because it gave them an excuse when a black man took their job.
I have mixed feelings about AA, too. All in all, I think it was an appropriate compromise, or at least not a bad one. I am open to the argument that it needs to be changed, though.
What I would like to see in its place is an investigative division like the FBI that only investigates racism. No more quotas, but if you really are racist in your hiring, then BAM! The Feds drop a hammer on your head.
We do have a governmental agency that investigates racism. It's called the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It's swamped. Unfortunately, most of the charges of racial discrimination filed with it are unfounded, or at least unsubstantiated. "Racism" is far too easily charged, and actual incidents of overt racism are very difficult to spot due to the low signal-to-noise ratio. It's a real shame, actually, that a**holes toss the term around so casually; they do their brothers and sisters a tremendous disservice.
Probably much more powerful than the EEOC in keeping businesses from practicing overt racism, however, are the private agents enforcing their own brand of anti-racism. The two most prominent practitioners of this style are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. These men are unemployed, yet they live very well-to-do lifestyles. How? They are professional shakedown artists. They extort hundreds of millions of dollars from large corporations with cheap accusations of racist employment practices, and they take a healthy cut from the settlements resulting from those charges for themselves (oh, excuse me, for their "foundations"). In many instances, those two are probably guilty of practicing law without a license. They get away with it by calling themselves "spokespersons" and because no one wants to call them on it and be on the receiving end of their shakedowns.
Am I cynical about casual charges of widespread overt racism in the workplace? You bet. In my private practice of law I quit seriously entertaining taking cases in which my potential clients claimed racism long ago. That's because I kept getting calls claiming that racism was behind their firings from menial jobs at McDonald's and the like. After about the 40th time of looking into them and finding nothing to substantiate their claims, I grew uninterested in taking any more of those calls. Why? Because every single time I investigated further, it turns out the firings were the result of insubordination, excessive absenteeism, or poor performance on the part of the fired employee. I got jaded and tired of listening to the noise and trying to find a signal. Just because you're black and you lose your job doesn't mean your former employer is guilty of firing you due to racism. That's especially true when about 80% of your remaining fellow employees (including management) are black.
Your exemplar overlooks an important detail: fifty years ago, he would have failed. AA was necessary, at least for a time. Now that we are starting to get examples like this, we should focus on them, and we should start to scale back AA.
Too bad facts have to get in the way, right? It turns out that Thornton Stanley, the man in the family I've been referring to, began his construction business with his own money in a spare bedroom of his house in my city in Alabama way back in 1961. That was 45 years ago, so that puts the humble beginnings of his entrepreneurial venture squarely in the pre-Civil Rights Act of 1964 era.
He is now one of the top 20 general contractors in the state and well-to-do. As I mentioned above, he won
the national Small Business Person of the Year award in 2001, and President Bush presented him the award at a special ceremony at the White House. Stanley's success is due to his willingness to roll up his sleeves and get his own fingernails dirty, his strong drive and ambition, his persistence, his commitment to keeping his customers happy and satisfied, and his own vision, intelligence, personal charm, and hard work. He did it right smack in the Heart of Dixie, and he just happens to be black, but he doesn't dwell on that. He didn't fail, as you claim he should have.
But Dave is proof that it hasn't gone away. And until somebody can show that lower level of expecation is not able to account for the minor differences in test scores... I win. (Note this is a sucker's bet, because we do not know how to measure social expectation.)
I disagree, but it's due only to my own speculation. I think parental influence is probably far more important than the pressures/influences from the larger society as a whole in one's formative years. For any given child, the absence of a strong parental influence leads to a vacancy in that role. By default, societal pressures then play a more prominent role in the child's development, or lack thereof. This may account for much of the measured discrepencies in the average black versus average white test scores. A lesser proportion of black children grow up in healthy, stable, two-parent homes than do white children. Hell, I suspect a lesser proportion of single parent homes with black children versus those with white children have mothers or single fathers who have the time and resources to spend being the strong parental influence the children need. Unfortunately, for such children, negative societal and cultural influences likely play a more prominent role in shaping their futures than they do for comparable white children.
That's not social expectation. It's social and cultural circumstance.
Change that circumstance and I suspect very strongly that you'll change those test averages for the better too.
(BTW, my friend's parents are still married and living together. As I mentioned earlier, theirs is a strong, tightly bound family, and I have no doubt that fact played a tremendous role in the success of all four children in their formative years and beyond).
The point is that it could be complete, and we cannot in good conscience rule it out. We do, after all, have compelling evidence of the power of social expectation (the gorilla).
Too bad there's so much compelling scientific evidence that heritability plays a large role in determining one's cognitive capacity. That means your theory is incomplete as an explanation.
Sure it does. Your friend's family is an outlier, no more damaging to my theory than Jeffery Dahmer.
It depends on what you mean by outlier. Are they at one end of a continuum of personal academic and professional success? Of course. They would be for any family, regardless of racial identity or ethnic background, and regardless of where they live. Are they freaks of circumstance? No way. My city has several other successful black-owned businesses (another prominent one for example, one with over 650 employees, is owned by NFL Hall of Famer John Stallworth, one of our native sons), and it happens to be a friendly environment for entrepreneurs, especially in high-tech industries. Thirty miles away is a sister city that is the original home of a black female astronaut who flew on a Space Shuttle mission in 1992 (although she actually grew up in Chicago). She attended Stanford University on an academic scholarship at age 16, and later became a medical doctor before she was an astronaut.
Someone with Dave's apparent prejudices might have a hard time believing that my city and its metro area has a fair number of black engineers and other high tech persons, but it does. I hate to break it to him, but my city has a substantial black middle and upper-middle class, including black doctors, lawyers, judges, and educators, and one can easily find plenty of black persons driving late model Mercedes and BMWs around town. Then again, we have the highest per capita income of any city in the southeastern US, including Atlanta.
So much for expectations about black persons in the deep south.
AS
) I wonder if any such studies have been done. Good nutrition has a positive benefit on total height...and on g too--but not a lot--and not any at all once you have met adequacy standards.