NobodyKnows wrote:
The_Walrus wrote:
The reason you know "scientific racism" is rubbish? Academic consensus!
Yes, consensus
is the reason, but not in a good way. We decided as a society that it's wrong to suggest a racial difference, but only after a lot of
uneducated black people got themselves arrested and beaten and it looked really bad. So not only did the academic world not drive this change, but the consensus was reached politically rather than scientifically. We actually
don't know that it was rubbish (at least not from the data). On the contrary, we just switched from a racist rationalization to an anti-racist rationalization. For all I know, black people might be
smarter than white people.
Well, there is a considerable amount of data on this. Being a somewhat controversial topic, it has naturally attracted a lot of study.
Phrenology is obvious rubbish; the brain is not a muscle, so it does not grow with use and shrink with disuse. Instead, changes happen at a microscopic neurological level.
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Eugenics, of course, is a moral issue rather than a factual one, so the support of "academics" is moot.
The "scientific racism" issue was also settled with moral arguments rather than factual ones.
No, enacting racist policies was settled using moral arguments. You can't use morals to prove that black people are just as smart as while people, you need to use facts.
These studies tend to be very much centred on America, whereas the majority of genetic diversity amongst humans exists in Africa and is hard to fairly sample by studying people of African descent in America. However, it is hard to deny that, when it comes to intelligence tests, Asian-Americans (i.e. those from the Far East) outscore white Americans, who outscore Native Americans, who outscore African Americans. There are several possible explanations, including some evidence that genes might play a role, but the gaps between races are closing quite dramatically, which is reasonable evidence that these are not inherent differences. The Wikipedia article is a really good read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence