What you are describing above are not cognitive skills but personality traits – it might be that black slaves have evolved the personality trait to make maximum use of the intelligence they have.

While intelligence is always the same, a persons performance in life is always an interaction between his personality and his intelligence.

Consider Asians – they seem to score higher than whites yet to this day people talk of a “creativity gap” between the West and Asia. Asians dominate the Ivy Leages yet the top scholars, the pioneers and inventors, the Nobel Prize winners, tend to be white.

Why has this pattern endured for over 150 years (interestingly, Japan and Germany became industrialised nations at the same time. Yet look at the contributions to modern technology in terms of new inventions and theories of both), in and out of Asia, and even among Asians born in the West ? One likely explanation is simply that Asians lack the genetic makeup to channel their high intelligence into creative endeavors. In other words they lack boldness and independence, necessary traits for creativity.

Now imagine someone with the black personality traits described in the above article – improvisation, ability to make the best use of one’s intellectual resources, etc, combined with white peoples ability to think boldly and independently and penchant for exploration, with Asians high intelligence – now THAT would be a real man!

First, I was shocked at the “premium” given to black law students on the basis of their race. I’ve always been in support of affirmative action, but only on condition that it were only used when academic qualifications are very similar. The tie-breaker principle.

As it turns out, after reading this paper, this tie-breaker principle isn’t really used for admissions. However the schools want to describe their admission evaluation criteria, black students are in effect given a quantifiable “premium” if you look at the outcome on matriculation. If you put academic qualifications of accepted law student on a 0 to 10 scale, black students get a premium of anywhere between 1.7 to 2 points at ALL levels of school prestige. So if your median white Harvard/Yale/Columbia Law Student had GPA/LSAT index of 8.7, the median Black student had index of 7.0. A similar gap also held for lower tier schools.

There are some important implications from this:

1. Black students as a whole are at a substantial academic disadvantage when they attend schools that used preferences to admit them. Close to half of black students end up in the bottom tenth of their classes. Read that again. This is shocking to me.

2. Black students ended up failing out of law school at higher rates due to this clustering at the bottom of the grade distribution. Part of this is due to academically strong black students who would have easily graduated from a less competitive school. Removing affirmative action puts this group into a more appropriate school and thus more likely to graduate. Another reason for this high failure rate is due to academically weak students who shouldn’t even have been accepted to even the lowest tier school. Removing affirmative action stops this group from pursuing the legal profession in the first place.

3. The higher a law student’s grades are, the higher the probability of passing the bar. It follows then, that if black students at higher tier schools that were ‘underqualified’ go to a school more appropriately matched to their academic ability, they get higher grades, and have a higher probability of passing the bar. Simplified, but there’s data in the paper to support this assertion.

4. Sanders shows data that makes the plausible argument that there would be MORE black lawyers in the absence of race-preferences. This stems from the argument above. While there would be fewer black students that get accepted into lawschools under this system, the bar passage rate would increase at least 20% for black law school graduates.

5. Most black law grads, with the exception of those from the most elite schools (H/Y/C), would be better paid under a system with no affirmative action. Law school racial preferences give blacks fancier degrees, but also systematically lower their GPAs. And employers put a big weight on GPAs when determining starting salaries and job offers.

‘Nuff said. Caveat: I’m black and went to one of these so called elite schools in undergrad. I wouldn’t have agreed with these assertions I just wrote until I saw the data. Thanks for the info T.

A lot of high IQ guys are seriously pissed that they can’t get laid.

Sounds simple I know, but so often we miss the obvious for other ish.

I think we as a society really need to think, hard, about this problem. At the end of the day, the really smart guys of whatever background, ain’t busting the nuts needed to make more really smart people. Methinks a great deal of this IQ Debate is a proxy for all of that.

Comments?

Salaam
Mu

Mind you, given how IQ plays out, regardless of whatever hard work black students put into doing well in school, will we ever have a sizable number of high IQ black people in high ranking positions without affirmative action?

What makes you think we have a sizable number of high IQ non-black people in high ranking positions now?

One could argue that the next step is to see if these skills can be useful and harnessed in making blacks in America richer, otherwise, it’s nothing more than a cheap trick. I’m not downplaying the usefulness as detailed by your description of how Frederick Douglass learned how to read, but I still fail to see how it can lift up the black community from it’s weakened economic state.

A great post illustrating some of the ways in which the Great Society derailed black achievement can be found here.

A cursory reading of that post does bring up some interesting points because admittedly, low-wage powered single motherhood only exacerbates the poverty statistics. Mind you, I’ve also viewed the de-industrialization of urban cores as part of the problem as it removed relatively decent paying jobs for men and replaced them with service sector work that never paid as well and offered less opportunities for advancement. Plus, even though immigrants form a small number of the black population in the States, I wonder if the initial income levels of immigrants are skewing the statistics.

At first this will probably lead to less blacks in Ivy Leagues and top schools

Some would argue that’s a problem because it leads to less blacks in high ranking institutions that are opened up via Ivy League or high ranking private schools. One’s response to such a statement depends on whether having the most qualified black people possible is better than just simply having as many black people graduating as possible.

Mind you, given how IQ plays out, regardless of whatever hard work black students put into doing well in school, will we ever have a sizable number of high IQ black people in high ranking positions without affirmative action?

Lots of groups have their own “slang.” Doctors, soldiers, physicists, World of Warcraft players… they all have their own vocabulary that outsiders may not understand.

That said, schools would probably get more out of black kids if they could incorporate cunning in lessons, but moralistic liberal educators would surely find that deplorable. SWPL culture isn’t a huge fan of cunning. If you could think of a nuanced and positive way that cunning could be “sold” to educators you’d be doing black kids a great service. And I do believe that many whites have a little fear of cunning black people.

By the way, do you agree that high cunning, high IQ people are on a whole other level?