Are you saying that black people will continue to demand affirmative action programs forever because they are, in fact, inferior, and will always be inferior? This can’t be your position…”

You’re misusing the word ‘inferior’. No group is inferior, that’s a moral judgment and is unhelpful. What does seem to be the case, is that groups differ on average over a number of traits. That doesn’t imply much about individuals because obviously you get very stupid whites and very smart blacks. You get very athletic white basketballers etc but if you look at averages they do differ. And as Saletan pointed out in Slate a month or so back “Don’t get me wrong. Genetic and environmental explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. In the case of IQ, everybody accepts environmental factors, and there’s plenty of evidence and argument against the hereditarian view. But that’s just one battle in a larger war. Beyond the march of test scores, there’s the onslaught of genetic research. We’ve already identified genes that correlate with traits and vary in prevalence between ethnic groups. Are you confident that intelligence will turn out to be exempt from this list?”.

Steve Hsu notes here:

“There is no strong evidence yet for specific gene variants (alleles) that lead to group differences (differences between clusters) in behavior or intelligence, but progress on the genomic side of this question will be rapid in coming years, as the price to sequence a genome is dropping at an exponential rate.

What seems to be true (from preliminary studies) is that the gene variants that were under strong selection (reached fixation) over the last 10k years are different in different clusters. That is, the way that modern people in each cluster differ, due to natural selection, from their own ancestors 10k years ago is not the same in each cluster — we have been, at least at the genetic level, experiencing divergent evolution.

In fact, recent research suggests that 7% or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters (“races”) during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance). ” http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for-race.html

The problem with this view is that the differences between group averages has held firm at over 1 std deviation over 80 years. Note that Ashkenazi Jews have consistently tested 2/3 of a std deviation above other whites while Chinese have also consistently tested a few points above the european mean.

Also, note whites whose parents earn less than $30,000 a year score slightly better than blacks from households earning over $70,000 while the children of the high school educated whites score slightly better than the children of graduate degree blacks.

The problem with this view is that the differences between group averages has held firm at over 1 std deviation over 80 years. Note that Ashkenazi Jews have consistently tested 2/3 of a std deviation above other whites while Chinese have also consistently tested a few points above the european mean.

Also, note whites whose parents earn less than $30,000 a year score slightly better than blacks from households earning over $70,000 while the children of the high school educated whites score slightly better than the children of graduate degree blacks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Income2.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Education2.png

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php

Freddie,

Have you read Kanazawa’s paper on ‘the myth of pay discrimination in the US’?

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/MDE2005.pdf

Quite an amusing comment on Kos in relation to this line of thinking:

“That is indeed an accurate summary of Ginsburg’s position, which is precisely why it’s ludicrous. Suppose a private company promised — in writing — to promote someone to Public Relations Director based upon a written exam, and then after the test was done, it turns out a black guy had the highest score. Then the company bigwigs said “well… we really don’t want a black guy as our public face… so we’re going to rescind our agreement and invalidate the test.” The company in question freely admits that, if the guy had been white, he would have gotten the PR position. Do you really think this wouldn’t be a Title VII violation? Would “hey, we were so opposed to having a black guy in the position, that we decided not to promote anyone” been “non-discriminatory” under Ginsburg’s tortured logic as well?

OF COURSE the city’s actions were in clear violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ginsburg’s dissent borders on racist garbage. I read it twice and was disgusted both times. Shorter Ginsburg: “Fuck Title VII. Firefighting has a history of racial discrimination against blacks, so now it’s the white guy’s turn to suffer.” It is a spectacularly offensive opinion that left me sick to my stomach.

It’s just you assert that, “decades of affirmative action have done little to fix [economic mobility for Blacks and Hispanics].” A statement without numerical qualification, that Ryan and then Roque Nuevo both dispute.

Now, I don’t know either way. I would just like to have a better understanding of what change can actually attributed to affirmative action programs so that we’re neither clinging to insufficiently helpful placebos nor too quickly casting aside a helpful remedy for the continued effects of past injustice.

I completely agree that there isn’t enough of a change in economic mobility for Black and Hispanic Americans but affirmative action is a tool to achieve that not a goal in and of itself. I would be grateful if you or anyone else could point to analyses that would help better judge the efficacy or lack thereof of the programs at the heart of the Ricci ruling.