Is lower intelligence the reason why Africans/blacks fail to thrive in the west on average?

[thedarkknight]

So, I'm black but I gotta ask this question.

The reason why black " communties " , in the Anglosphere, are amongst the lowest earners, most obese and least educated due to lower median IQ?

Let us not get it twisted : there are intelligent African ( descent) people in the west but there might be fewer.

Thoughts?

 

[jarlo]

I don't think so - at least in terms of "raw intelligence". African immigrants to the U.S. often do very well, and are also on average fairly Christian. I think it's a combination of genuinely bad policies, and bad culture.

If what's seen as aspirational in your community is being a basketball player, then a few make it, and the vast majority fail with no appreciable skills gained. But simultaneously, the drug war has been terrible for blacks. I don't condone the use of illicit drugs. However, people go to drugs, because their life is shit in some way. If you live in the ghetto, your life sucks, and we punish you twice by sending you to jail when you're drawn to drugs. If your dad's an otherwise decent guy who has a drug problem, it's better for a kid to grow up with his dad than to grow up with no dad at all.

I think the right approach is to increase police, decriminalize possession of drugs, increase school funding in shit areas, raise teacher pay to get better teachers, break up teacher's unions so that you can weed out shit teachers, and give parents school vouchers, so they can make their own choices about their kids' education (e.g. to use at Christian schools). But unfortunately, these BLM commies have everyone fixated on absolute nonsense.

 

[911]

You're on the right track, it's mostly cultural. Black American culture has been plagued with two generations of fatherless males, a culture of victimization, and dysfunctional school systems. Prior to the 1960s. Blacks had stable family structures and churches with low crime rates and very low rates of kids born out of wedlock.

The solution is to change the culture, and overturn the Dem plantation system. It's not a financial issue with the schools, it's a culture and disciplin issue.

 

[Coja Petrus Uscan]

Copying this in from another thread:

* It's missing a little context.

What's the source for that? It's hard to believe since the average IQ of blacks in the UK is about 93 (young only - source later), something like 85 in the US and probably lower in Serbia (about 90), where the average salary is several times higher than Kenya.

From a search I found one study of school children that appears to be what you are referring to. However, they have applied the Flynn Effect to the result, which means they boosted the numbers under the assumption that IQ will be higher in the future.

Also in reference of the study of young children (like this study). The IQ of infants are very similar and they disperse until they become adults. In US studies the IQ of children at various ages show little difference due to race at a young age and large ones at adulthood. That this is due to environment can be ruled out with evidence such as adoption studies. That one in particular shows the effect of a black child being adopted by higher income white families is the additions of about 4 IQ points.

Will continue with this thread...



It partly refereed to motor skills, which are not relevant (enter Steven Hawkins).

Also, the results of that test are from the Bayley Scales, which is a test given to children of 0-1 years of age.

As already mentioned, IQ (or cognitive ability) of children is very much clustered and it changes with age. So this data is not particularly relevant for this thread.

You titled this thread as covering IQ, but that was the only part of your thread in which you mentioned it.

What have you done to look into this? There is a wealth of evidence on the cognitive abilities of people from around the world. It all points very strongly to considerable differences of IQ between ethnicities and classes of people.

It is the case that people around the world have IQs that are lower than what they could possibly be, due to the circumstances of their lives.

We are born with genes that code these fleshy pulps we inhabit. As we are born with genes that can only lead us becoming so tall, or only seeing so well, people are born with a threshold to their cognitive ability limited by their brain. No one has a solution to cure poor eye sight as it's coded for by genes. We likewise don't know how to make people more intelligent, because genes limit how intelligent one can be.

For those who say IQ is not that important. Maybe if you need complex surgery you wouldn't mind someone with a 90 IQ operating on you, or maybe an 80 IQ (considered mildly retarded). It is simply not possible for someone with a 90 IQ to undertake professional occupations. They can be trained to do complex things, but as soon as a complex problem arises outside of that training, they can't solve it. This is what IQ measures - the complexity of the problems you can solve. The average IQ of professional occupations (US) is about 112. The main reason certain places in the world are undeveloped is because there are less people cognitively capable of undertaking the tasks of a complex society. In the case of Africa it's 1-2% of people who have the cognitive ability to undertake these jobs. And a lot of them are leaving.

Here are some real scores, but note they have all been inflated as to account for the Flynn Effect.

When you take into account these are just young people, the not so well nourished and educated previous generations reduce those scores. And since most of them are results for children, they will likely drop a few points more compared to the London standard of IQ (100) by adulthood.

And here is maybe one of the largest relevant studies, of British pupils:

It's a Cognitive Ability Test (which is interchangeable with IQ).

As you will see the average IQ of Sub-Saharans is about 93, but this is in the UK, and people who immigrate to the UK are not representative of their homelands. Immigrants seem to always skew higher in IQ. It wouldn't be possible for an 80 IQ person to immigrate over 1,000s of miles, using various modes transport and arrange all they need to.

The reason for differences in cognitive ability across ethnicities and classes is man-made environments. Over many generations those who are more successful in their environment slowly proliferate. So people who live high in the Himalayas are better at processing oxygen. Those who live in regions with high amounts of selenium in the soil have a higher tolerance to it.

But we have been adapting our environments and creating social and economics structures that have also acted as components in sexual selection. If you live in a commercial society without a juicy welfare state and where it was important to improve your offspring's lot by marrying advantageously then you create an environment where intelligence is positively selected, sexually. Estimates run at IQ increasing by about 0.3 per generation in such circumstances. The only way this can happen is if the more intelligent produce more children than the less intelligent. On the balance, there is no way for less intelligent people to create more intelligent offspring.

So England, varying by location and by class has been somewhat in that stream for around 800-900 years. The average IQ (in good living conditions) is probably about 105.

Then you take Eastern China, excluding their dark ages, they've been in an environment where sexual selection of intelligence was at play for around 2,000 years. The average IQ (in good conditions) is about 115. For the extra 1,100 years - that's about 33 generations, with the IQ increasing at 0.3 per generation.

Then you take Sub-Saharan Africa, where people have undertaken little more than hunter gathering and subsistence farming. It requires some cognitive ability, but the threshold isn't that high. In those societies having a 100 IQ is not any more desirable for sexual selection than having an 80 IQ.

However, in most or all societies there were classes of people who had callings and mating patterns that lent themselves to a small group who had some sexual selection based on intelligence. These were merchants, priests, keepers of history and so on. Africa has had those people, but in very limited numbers.

What sets parts of Europe and a few parts of Asia apart is these people existed in larger numbers and in a broader scope - a large middle class (in the terms of the time).

Last point is that due to the controversy around the research there is not enough good data on IQ by country. But there is a lot more data on standardised educational attainment. They show the same as IQ studies - a difference of about 40% between those in Bejing and those in Sub-Saharan Africa. See.

 

[whitewashedblackguy]

I say nurture.

 

[kel]

Fatherlessness, and general lack of male role models, is definitely a bigger problem. There's definitely a correlation between race and IQ, but IQ is an incomplete measurement and intelligence isn't the ultimate measure of a man anyways. Modern society has lionized "intelligence" above all else (scare quotes because intelligence largely means credentialism, ability to politick and adhere to the narrative, etc. rather than actual mental acuity) which is why we can't talk about IQ differences between races, but also has a lot of other problems. I've spent my professional life working as a STEM guy in offices filled with ostensibly "smart" people, but a lot of them are (as above) not actually all that bright but just credentialed, and worse, because they were told how smart and special they were their whole lives they didn't bother to develop any of the more important traits - honor, work ethic, etc - because they just assumed they could coast by on that big ol' special brain.

 

[paninaro]

It's simple -- children born to unwed mothers. Those cases tend to mean there's no father around. A child with both parents around is more likely to succeed, and is more likely to have a better life (two incomes instead of one).

69% of all black children in the US are born to unwed mothers, compared to 28% of white children.

Even when you add in education, and look at cases where the mother has a bachelor's degree or higher, it's still 33% of black kids born to unwed mothers, compared with just 7% of whites.

So right off the bat (or.. straight out of the birth canal), most black kids are being born father-less and the deck is already stacked against them.

As for biological difference between races, I don't think that matters much since all kids have the same opportunity to succeed in terms of schooling available and so on. Whether they take advantage of it is the issue.

 

[R.G.Camara]

So, I'm black but I gotta ask this question.

The reason why black " communties " , in the Anglosphere, are amongst the lowest earners, most obese and least educated due to lower median IQ?

Let us not get it twisted : there are intelligent African ( descent) people in the west but there might be fewer.

Thoughts?

Yes, but its also temperament differences between blacks and non-blacks.

Many 70-80 IQ people can live quiet, happy lives in our society, and many do, contributing positively to society, working steady jobs, having loving marriages and even raising their kids right. It's not just their IQ, but their temperament. They stick to tasks, don't flip out when things don't go their way, stay on tried-and-true paths for work and don't try get-rich-quick schemes, go to church, don't stay out late, don't cause huge ruckuses on the regular, etc.

But amongst blacks, in addition to lower IQ, there is a much higher percentage of anti-social behavior. Extreme impulsiveness, extreme self-centeredness, trying for glamorous careers or trying to hustle instead of working stead, quick to anger and quicker to assault, putting down others to make themselves feel top dog, no loyalty to children or spouses, etc.

That kind of trait is, in my strong opinion, worse for blacks than their lower IQs. We can find a place in society with a person with a lower-than-average IQ. We cannot find a place in a society for a person who consistently acts in an anti-social, anti-societal way.

These riots are a great example. Yes, Antifa is running them and instigating them, but blacks wholeheartedly bought an individual as proof that "cops are out to kill them" (when its exactly the opposite) and happily looted and rioted and destroyed property once Antifa bird dogged them. Other ethnic groups are not so easily led into behaving so extremely anti-socially or impulsively violent, even when egged on. Can you imagine Mexicans, Koreans, or Irish committing 10+ days of rioting and looting because just one of their own was wrongly killed (or so it seems) by the police?

In short, blacks on average cannot live up to the standards of behavior of First World nations. Every first world nation that has blacks has the most problems with blacks over any other ethnicity in terms of random street crime and random violence. There needs to be a mass repatriation of American blacks to Subsaharan Western Africa, where they originated. That is the only place their behavior works, because those are not first world societies. The few that will remain must acquiesce to our standards or else they, too, must get the boot.

 

[kinjutsu]

Also a key point/reason for the fatherless homes is because back in the 1970's when the government started the welfare program to help black poor people, one of the rules was that if they were giving money to mother there couldn't be a man living in the home. As a result, women were choosing to raise the children by themselves because of free money.

As the years go buy, the young males dont have a father figure around to keep them in line and more importantly show them how to be a man and not listen to woman and observe how irrationally emotional they are.
Alot of the misbehaviour is just emotionally lashing out. Almost like they believe their feelings can justify their behaviour...sound familiar??

How many of these young black guys would be acting like idiots if they had a father at home to smack them upside the head and enforce punishments? A large portion wouldn't be in trouble. We see example of this in white cultures.
I know i'd catch a beating from my dad if i misbehaved at school.

 

[Max Roscoe]

If you take an Eskimo and place him in Ghana, is he going to perform well by the standards of Ghana?
Whites on average have higher IQs, and blacks have superior traits over whites such as distance running and freestyle dancing
Whites are not the smartest IQ group and as a white man this doesn't bother me at all. Play to your strengths. Maybe there aren't any black Grand Chessmasters, but Caitlin Jenner is never going to be able to menstruate either. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

Re: underperforming: It's not just the culture shock or inability to adapt. It's that "performing well" means something different to an Eskimo, a Samurai, and a Native American. If I had a Jewish mother, she would probably want me to become a doctor or lawyer. That sort of life would be pure torture for me. To some extent, I would say the question attempts to judge blacks on extra-societal standards.

Re: being the lowest earners: Africa is a naturally wealthy continent, with fertile lands and vast riches and minerals. And yet Africans are poor. A good bit of this can be attributed to time preference and r/k selection theory. The Cold Winters Theory also makes a bit of sense to me: people in warm climates never have to worry about planning more than a day or two ahead, because abundant food is hanging from fruit trees all around them, while Nordic peoples had to plan and save food in advance of the cold winter or else they would die.

Colder European nations developed a long term mindset and tend to have low time preference, while Africans and others living near the equator have a relatively high time preference, and accumulating wealth and choosing to say no to debt and instead purchase things with cash is going to be difficult for someone with a high time preference. If political correctness would let us recognize these things, one could use it as a justification for eliminating payday lenders and other predatory groups that make it difficult for certain groups to succeed.

Re: Being obese, I have never seen a fat person in Africa. I think that's just an American thing because you will see fat Asians here as well, which is mind boggling.

The culture in America is toxic for all Americans, but in particular African-American culture is some of the worst culture in the world. Don't misunderstand, there are some uniquely good things about it, but as a whole, the profanity, the broken households, the drug use, the materialism, the glorification of sin and greed, it's all really ugly stuff.

Finally, don't just listen to what some honkeys say about black people. Listen to what smart black people have to say about the problems of black people. The Negro Problem from over 100 years ago is one place to start:

The Negro Problem by Charles W. Chesnutt et al.

Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by Project Gutenberg.

www.gutenberg.org

 

[Leonard D Neubache]

One of the fundamental problems is the erasure of low intellect labor jobs like ditch digging and so forth. Most of these jobs have been replaced by machines operated by one low intellect worker who does the job of ten of his fellow proles. There is a smaller proportion of slow whites than slow blacks but we can see the slow whites are also suffering in this regard. To make matters worse for blacks, Mexican immigration is crowding them out for the few low IQ jobs left in the market.

Before extreme automation and mechanization there was plenty of room for dullards because they too had an important albeit unglamorous role to play. The dullards are having a hard time here in my state, and we're still lily white.

True, dullard blacks are less removed from tribal warfare than dullard whites and whether it's a spiritual issue or a genetic one it's inescapable that they have a higher natural propensity for extreme violence and substance abuse when they're not tired from a long day with a shovel in hand. Dullard whites also predictably abuse substances when otherwise unoccupied but they are evidently less likely to become murderous even if they do engage in violence. There is still a vague sense of proportionality and repercussions which I am currently beginning to consider is not merely genetic but the result of many centuries of spiritual racial rehabilitation under Christ.

The cultural issue is obviously relevant but the jews (like demons) can only amplify what already exists in the heart. They cannot manifest it from nothing.

 

[Rob Banks]

...Caitlin Jenner...

Who?

Is that Bruce Jenner's daughter or wife or something?

 

[Hypno]

I think the biggest factor is cultural. I don't mean they don't have a father. I mean most are raised in an environment with different values. Buy nice clothers and spend all your money rather than save. Dont' work for the Man/the system. Anyone who separates from the pack and tries to get ahead is ostracized, except in narrow contexts like sports or music. Its part of the corrupting effect of handouts and set asides.

Compare black culture in the U.S. to Mexicans. Mexicans are not a lot higher on the totem pole in this country, but they value savings, living below their means, kicking money back to their elders either here or in Mexico, big family units. They might be on welfare but if they are they are probably working 40+ hours a week under the table too.

There are exceptions of course. When I go to a sports arena, you always see kids hustling bottles of water and what not, respect.

 

[EgoDeath]

 

[STG]

People have evolved to be best fitted to their environment.

Africa favored the more athletic and strong humans. Africa is a place where there is no winter, so humans fitted to live there never needed to develop the foresight and critical thinking needed to survive a winter.

In Africa, as long as you are strong and healthy you can go into the jungle kill something and eat it. Or take from another tribe.

In northern environments where winter occurs, you have humans who developed to survive the winter. To survive a winter you need to provision for months. The ability to plan long term, have delayed gratification, and other traits of people who evolved with winter is a result. Humans who lived with winter might not be on average as athletic as the Africans, but on average their mental abilities and IQ are higher.

Civilization is the end result of the environmental pressures of winter being applied to humans. The only people who have created and maintained civilization are people that had to live with winter.

From the book The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant (1916):

In Grant's view, Nordics probably evolved in a climate which "must have been such as to impose a rigid elimination of defectives through the agency of hard winters and the necessity of industry and foresight in providing the year's food, clothing, and shelter during the short summer. Such demands on energy, if long continued, would produce a strong, virile, and self-contained race which would inevitably overwhelm in battle nations whose weaker elements had not been purged by the conditions of an equally severe environment" (p. 170). The "Proto-Nordic" human, Grant reasoned, probably evolved in "forests and plains of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia" (p. 170).

The Nordic, in his hypothesis, was "Homo europaeus, the white man par excellence. It is everywhere characterized by certain unique specializations, namely, wavy brown or blond hair and blue, gray or light brown eyes, fair skin, high, narrow and straight nose, which are associated with great stature, and a long skull, as well as with abundant head and body hair."[3] Grant categorized the Alpines as being the lowest of the three European races, with the Nordics as the pinnacle of civilization.

 

[STG]

Pastor Manning, a Black Man, says Africans Have Never Built a Major Enduring City in 3,000 Years

Pastor Manning: Black People have never built anything out of stone

 

[Blade Runner]

"Culture" is a chicken and egg concept, principally, at least with genetics. You can equally say that on average any group acts a particular way en masse due to proclivities toward an action, like time preference, as above. Inheriting the "sins of your fathers" is the rule of life without having a major, virtuous influence from surroundings or the advanced civilization to form you. For some, that can be overcome, but it is the exception and just as every group is bound to have outliers; this is the truth with IQ as well. Any given group can flourish under another majority (civilized) culture if they take on the healthier characteristics of said civilization and have a role, what Leonard refers to as available jobs that provide some way of reasonable life --- but in modern times these have rapidly deteriorated.

A few things as well:
In IQ, individuals that are outliers revert to the group mean when they have kids. There is no evidence that combinations of elevated individuals lead to IQ persistence over time, given group realities.

The problem is that egalitarianism is in the spirit of the age, but is false and is an idol for most. The harsh reality is that the characteristics the advanced civilizations (european) have had are the way that took over and run the world, whether we like it or not. For this reason, "cultural bias" is poppycock (when you hear it in standardized testing etc) because this is the culture that dominates and is desired by the world for skills to make money, right or wrong. As a result, if you can't cut it, you will be relegated to what is consider a "lower class" or less prestigious (read: less wealthy, lower status) job. Cue envy and egalitarian temper tantrums, "racism" and all other "isms" the mass man wants to throw at the successful out of his covetousness. That is a part of culture that could be overcome, understanding that with humility you can be ok with others having particular qualities that on average elevate them in areas that perhaps you can't excel as easily in. As we know, you need a very strong religious background to counteract this predisposition in humans, otherwise you see its demons seep it and in full force. Throw in years of welfare and supporting broken families and the lower rungs of IQ among that, and it's no wonder we see what we see.

 

[nomadbrah]

Several groups of people have no tradition of academic success, but don't cause the problems that blacks do.

It's the aggression and superstition that are the real issues.

 

[Emperor Constantine]

I'm not sure about intelligence, but I can say with certainty that blacks seem to have the odds stacked against them. Specifically, the white leftists have worked as hard as they possibly can to keep blacks in poverty through the welfare state. By enacting policy that rewards single motherhood and joblessness, white leftists created incentive to remain in poverty. It's even more insidious because Leftists wrap it up the welfare state like a gift: "Look what we're giving you, vote for us!"
Then they frame everything bad in the black community as being the result of racist oppression by white conservatives. White leftists are particularly dangerous when it comes to rhetoric because they actually believe their own drivel. Malcolm X correctly identified them as being the greatest threat to America. There are several speeches available on youtube where he explains the problem: whereas the white conservatives were authoritarian about wanting to discriminate and such, the white liberals were (and still are) totalitarian. They wanted to obtain complete control over how blacks acted and thought. And worse, they lie to themselves about their motivations, so that they are able to see themselves as some kind of crusaders against racism even while they go about destroying everything they touch.
The left tries to brainwash everybody, and they've been pretty successful across the board, but they've put more time and attention into screwing over blacks than any other group of people over the last several decades.

 

[Mike_Key]

In the 4th grade I had this black guy named Ken shut down a history lesson because the topic was slavery. Sadly that history class became a silent reading class for the remainder of the semester.

That was long ago, from that point on I witnessed blacks just like Ken make crazy arguments like Blacks can't be racist, etc. I've not had good exchanges with blacks as a whole but I have much experience with them. More than people that think they know blacks, I know a good many. One gal thought she knew more bc she dated a Christian black for a couple of months. The Black women were racist toward her and so they broke up. Outside of that she worked for a world famous research institute where not one (1) black person ever worked. She was surrounded by whites, jews, Hispanics, french, asians, ukranians and Italians.

IQ, I don't know.
Jordan Peterson would talk about competence and hierarchies.

What I do know is this; three (3) blacks have abandoned fatherless kids in my family (bastards) and extended family. One black dude, separately, left the family through divorce. That's 4 total and it's not over yet.

All of this is on the whole, some generalities. There seems to be little-to-no conscientiousness. They don't have a healthy fear of the future where they worry about getting educated no matter the cost. They are fearful. It takes bravery to spend 4 to 8 years in post High school education. It takes bravery to stand before a Professor.

I think generally their IQ suffers by who they associate with; i.e. SJWs, Poverty Pimps, welfare check distributors, socialists, marxists, communists and godless Wrappers/Gangsters.

Blacks as a whole could use a major transformation by infusing the Fruits of the Spirit into their DNA (But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control).

Every other ethnic group has their issues but when it counts many of them, not all, make it count. Many whites have been slaves too, slaves to mid-east arabs and northern africans.

As for slavery, my question is Does God care about slavery?
God definitely cares about lost souls being saved. The Great Commission.

I could probably share more but that's it for now.

God Bless

John 3:16