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[sebastian_dangerfield]

There is no such thing as a "clinically rigorous apportionment of responsibility for disadvantages." Every single factor that leads one to be disadvantaged and to remain disadvantaged created and continues to create the conditions that make the people of that disadvantaged group act the way they act.

There is a way to make a scientific assessment of instances where the victims of a systemic oppression acquired responsibility for remaining oppressed.

I hate this, by the way, because I'm talking about people behaving monolithically, which offends my sense of intellectual honesty and my understanding of people. But to get through this, we have to do so.

There is nothing about black people that makes them more prone to give up on a job search. If they do, it's because there have been generations of negative experiences with job searches as well as the current conditions, in relation to white people (for example) when it comes to a job search, that results in that behavior. There is nothing innate about black people that makes them tend to be less educated.

Agreed it is cultural. The science here regarding any "race" is beyond dispute and reaches exactly the point you have.

The conditions in this country in which slaves and blacks generally spent generations being flogged and killed for attempting to educate themselves results in generations of uneducated people who do not have the same tools to use and give their offspring to succeed on the same levels as white people.

Agreed again.

And they don't have the same expectation or experience that leads them to conclude that education leads to success.

This is a really sad point. But, yes. And without trying to dilute the point in any way, it applies to many more communities. And is expanding.

We can do this all day with whatever example you can think of. If you accept the fact that race is a social construct, then the only explanation for how races act differently in comparison to each other is based on the racial disadvantages or advantages thrust on them.

I do, but I don't see why a solid clinical analysis can't be applied to the cultural issues. Granted, it's soft data, but cultural stuff is always soft.

What people who want to have this blame apportionment discussion really want to talk about is why black people don't try harder, or do more, or why they stay stuck. The shift in the conversation away from what I outlined above is intentional and the conversation always leads to personal responsibility and anecdotal evidence. That's when we get:

"Thurgreed made it, why can't everyone?"
"I had it tough too. Look at how well I've done."
"But what about affirmative action?"
"My ancestors came from Ireland and were treated poorly, but Irish don't have the same problems as blacks today."
"What about black-on-black crime?"

Agreed. And this is where the conversation turns sour and stupid. This is where Harris veered with Klein, and Klein had the better of him. I'll cop to having done it myself. It's easy to draw analogues using other “races,” and the debating hat overtakes the "let's have an enlightened discussion" hat. Where I've used the comparisons to Irish and Chinese, I've been cheap and lazy. And wrong. Its unforgivable for me to try to score points fucking around with someone like GGG using an argument that perpetuates discrimination.

In order to have a conversation on this front where you are "clinically and rigorously apportioning responsibility for disadvantages," you have to completely abandon the notion that race is a social construct.

Here's where I perhaps step on a huge third rail. I think one can assess cultural behaviors and conclude that, controlling for oppression, a group is shooting itself in the foot a bit.

My analogue there would be the Catholic Church. Catholics as a whole are held back by a very regressive religion. It teaches loathsome things, like one must reproduce regardless of economic concerns, one should not worry about this life as the next is more important. These insidious teachings are geared to control people. I'd never draw a 1:1 between this and what blacks have suffered, but I'd say a study of Catholics might show how one studies a cultural group and teases out where the oppressive control mechanisms (the institutional predation) ends, and the cultural behaviors reactive to it become superseding causes.

Catholicism's diabolical control mechanisms can be blamed to a point. But at a later point, many Catholics started to "game the system" and find a way around it, or just left. (Yours truly never joined. I wouldn't even pay fealty to it as a child, finding it abhorrent in second grade.)

If certain negative cultural behaviors persist despite clear evidence they are doing no one any favors, and actually holding people back (and I would say this applies too frequently to Catholic culture, where many people are content to remain of modest class and part of an often middling community), at a certain point, some responsibility falls on those of the community. That could be teased out in data. Fluffy data, subject to debate, but necessarily assessed to address the issue in whole.

And if such an approach were used, accepting entirely, as should be, that race is a cultural construct, it would end the genetics debate, which is truly evil and never offered for any legitimate point.

(I'll apologize if this offends a Catholic. But only for offending you. Not for what I've said. It's entirely factual.)

TM[/QUOTE]