The Rawness

I was going to put up pt. 3 of Blacks and IQ later this week, but I got a comment on Part 2 of the series that I thought needed addressing. The response got so long I decided to make it a bonus post rather than a comment.

Basilransom commented:

T,

The topic of racial differences in IQ must be discussed, because it has real consequences. For instance, the differences account for some portion of the disparity in black-white academic performance. If you refuse to discuss race differences, you will have to look elsewhere to explain the gap, and overextend other possible causes to explain the entire gap.

And this has happened – people who refuse to acknowledge IQ and such are prone to blaming the difference on widespread if concealed racism. Or on poor upbringing. And then they try to eliminate the racism, or improve child-rearing, and their success, if any is nothing like they had imagined.

In short, silence causes misplaced blame and inflated expectations.

I just read your first post though, and I share your sentiments to a degree. Charles Murray, when asked ?say what you write is all true, what do you propose to do?? He always responded that he would treat people like individuals, eg, assess their IQ and track them accordingly.

I?m sure you could work it to avoid torpedoing kids prospects? before they start. Eg, say with a kid?s given IQ, there?s a 30% chance that he?ll complete a calculus class, or graduate from college, or what have you. There?s an arbitrary balance to be struck, as to how ?generous? or ?optimistic? you want to be, a balance that would be decided democratically. What with the frequent demands that every kid go to college, we?re on the generous side of the spectrum.

[Not that the difference accounts for all of the gap]

I still don’t buy that the topic of Race and IQ must be discussed in order to explainthe failings of social policies directed at blacks or to figure out how to proceed with future social policies. A discussion of IQ is irrelevant to why policies for blacks fail. I’ll give you examples to show you why:

• India went through a socialist period where everything was centrally planned and free market principles were abandoned and wealth redistributed and property rihts compromised. The country went into the shitter. People became lazier, no accountability was set, the economy and productivity went down, work ethic went down the tubes. Free-market capitalism was introduced and the country thrived and is now a powerhouse. Same race in both scenarios, same relative IQs.
• China in its early communist days tried collectivization of farms and changing private ownership in favor of communal ownership and central planning and redistribution of property. People became lazier, no accountability existed, the economy and productivity went down, work ethic went down the tubes. Free-market principles were reintroduced into agriculture and other areas, even though the country maintained a communist front and the country thrived and is now a powerhouse. Same race in both scenarios, same relative IQs.
• East Germany and West Germany were once one country with the same culture, genetics, family histories, race, etc. For several decades they were split into a West and an East, with capitalism in the West and communism in the East. Only decades of living apart under different governments and social policies, yet over that time the character and culture of both sides of Germany became radically different. 1 in 5 Germans polled actually wish the Berlin Wall would be rebuilt, and even more surprisingly most of those wishing it would be rebuilt are former East Germans. Only 3% of relationships are between a east and west Germans, showing a strong social divide still remains almost 20 years later. From this article:

The poll by the Forsa institute showed that 73% of those from the east believed that socialism was a good idea in principle, but had been poorly implemented. Over 90% argued that they enjoyed better social protection during the GDR era…

The overwhelming majority of people originating from West Germany who took part in the survey said that if the wall was rebuilt they would prefer to live in West Germany, while around 36% of former East Germans said they would prefer to live in the communist east

These people were once genetically and culturally one and the same before, yet a few decades of central planning and redistribution of wealth on one side versus more free-market principles on the other side has made them severely incompatible to the point they can barely function or form relationships with each other today.

The point is that government social planning and nanny states and redistribution of wealth didn’t fail in the black community because people misjudged their IQs and the policies failed as a result. THOSE POLICIES FAIL IN JUST ABOUT EVERY CULTURE, REGARDLESS OF RACE AND IQ. Whites, Asians and Indians, despite their superior average IQs, did not thrive under a nanny state either. This is just human nature, if you give people something for less effort, reduce competition, shield people from the full consequences of their actions and hold them to lower standards, they will underperform, regardless of the IQ involved.

In each of my examples, the nanny state scenario and the free market scenario all happened in the same groups of people with the same common culture, genetics and average IQ. No IQ and racial differentials to point to. By pointing to the history of failure of handouts, wealth redistribution and radical egalitarianism, you can make a strong case against the current welfare states without ever even getting into race and IQ at all.

My suspicion is this: to a certain degree, it strokes white people’s egos to believe that they are magically and inherently smarter than many other races. A lot of the supposed social good they claim will come from acknowledging race and IQ to me is a backwards rationalization that comes later. Much like there are ego reasons that make many blacks from wanting to discuss race and IQ, there are many ego reasons that make whites want the issue to reach the forefront.

And to me, further proof of this comes from the reactions I get from people when I propose that the higher average IQ of whites comes from a natural cause and effect positive reinforcing loop caused by history, environmental conditions, populations density, constant warfare and better livestock. Many of the “race and IQ” crowd have a knee-jerk resistance to these ideas of how the higher white average IQ came to be, and it makes me realize that even though I’m acknowledging they have a higher average IQ, it’s not enough for them. They don’t just want to be ackowledged as having higher IQs, they also want to believe that this higher IQ is magically innate and a fundamental, immutable characteristic of their race.

It’s like the student who not only wants to do the best, he also wants people to know that he did the best without even trying hard, that he’s a natural genius. If he did it by working the hardest, it kind of cheapens the victory because he’s not gifted, he’s just a hard worker. I think much of the race and IQ crowd treats race and IQ the same way, they want people to believe the IQ of their race is a product of natural inherent genius and not just a result of hard work, natural selection and historical circumstances. Just like many blacks are hostile towards race and IQ discussions because they secretly fear the conclusion that blacks have a natural, innate mental deficiency, many whites seem to be hostile to Jared Diamond’s theories about the causes of race and IQ for fear it may disprove that the higher IQ of whites throughout history stems from natural, inherent mental gifts.

As for the kid with the lower IQ and the 30% chance of passing Calculus? There’s an easy way to determine his chances of college success without touching upon IQ. The same way we judge it for white and Asian kids: his high school grades.

[Note that I'm not calling the "Race and IQ" crowd racists, just pointing out how they are often as motivated by ego and shortsightedness as the people who have a knee-jerk opposition to "Race and IQ" discussions.]

Part 1 can be found here, where I discussed reasons why to me the focus on Black IQ versus IQ is very much a waste of time. Here in Part 2 I’d like to discuss what I consider average IQ of a racial group to be indicative of.

Average IQ of a racial group is simply an indication of how hospitable that racial group’s history has been to unintelligent people. That’s it. It’s all just a matter of how easy it has traditionally been for unintelligent members of that race to survive and reproduce.

I read a book in the 90s called Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond, and although it’s been a while since I’ve read it, I recall it gave some convincing theories regarding the causes of Eurasian innovation and world domination throughout history. A good summary of the book can be found here:

[T]he book is not merely an account of the past; it attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations, as a whole, have survived and conquered others, while attempting to refute the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that: the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences amplified by various positive feedback loops; and that, if cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example Chinese centralized government, or improved disease resistance among Eurasians), it is only so because of the influence of geography.

For a real dumbed-down, oversimplified example, since I’m unable to track down the book (it’s somewhere in my parents’ attic in Long Island buried inside some dusty boxes), consider the following. In a civilization that is developing in a continent like Africa where its warm and sunny, it’s easier for people who are not too bright to survive since it doesn’t take much innovation and resourcefulness to figure out a way to survive in an environment like that. In a place with harsh climates with radical environmental changes accompanying the changes in seasons, and prolonged periods of bitter cold, it is much harder for a stupid person to survive. Thus significantly more stupid people will be weeded out of the gene pool in the latter example in comparison to the former example, which would probably raise the average IQ in the latter society more. This is just one example of how the environment a civilization develops in can affect its average IQ.

Level of concentration of different organizations such as city-states in a given space can affect average IQ too. For example say two continents have areas of equal size. In one continent, the given area is occupied by one society, a monolithic empire of shared language and culture with very little warfare and fear of invasion and few natural barriers. In the other continent, the given area is filled with numerous city-states formed by the separations caused by natural boundaries like mountain ranges, and the competition and warfare among all these groups forced Europeans to encourage innovation. More conditions to weed the less innovative out of the gene pool.

Here’s another example of how environments can influence cultural and genetic development: Sparta and Athens. Both countries probably started out with similar genetic stock (if anyone knows otherwise, please feel free to correct me). Why did one city turn into such an intellectual center of innovative knowledge while the other became a master of physical combat and warfare? Are Athenians simply inherently smarter than Spartans through genetics? No, the reason is this: Sparta was situated on fertile soil, very good for farming. This made it very attractive to invaders. Invaders would frequently attack Sparta over and over again to get some of that good soil. Spartans had to adapt, and survival favored those who were physically stronger and were better fighters and tacticians over those who engaged in purely intellectual pursuits like philosophy. An uberintellectual philosopher probably had little value in Spartan society while great warriors and leaders probably enjoyed the most status. Also, they weeded out weakness from birth:

Everything was now dedicated to making each Spartiati a superb and unquestioningly loyal soldier. The Process started at birth. Newly-born babies were inspected by a committee of elders, and, if considered too weak , they were left to die by exposure on the sloped of Mount Taygetos. Those who survived were carefully brought up as Plutarch describes:

‘The women did not bathe the babies with water, but with wine, making it a sort of test of their strength. For they say that the epileptic and sickly ones lose control and go into convulsions, but the healthy ones are rather toughened like steel and strengthened in their physique.

So as you can see, the environment influenced the culture in terms of what traits were valued, how they chose to improve themselves, how they raised their children and how they structured their society. These cultural factors in turn influenced who survived to pass on genes and who didn’t, as weak children were allowed to die even. Genetics influence behavior as well (for example, societies with lots of tall men with high testosterone will probably be more hostile and have more competitive values). Which in turn influences culture, and the cycle goes on. These are called positive reinforcing loops.

Meanwhile, Athens was situated on land that was too shitty to grow anything. Because of its poor soil, it was less desirable and therefore less prone to invasions. Being relatively unmolested and left alone allowed Athens to prosper intellectually and devote more time to intellectual and athletic pursuits. Being intellectual requires a lot of free time to read and ponder deep thoughts. One simply cannot become intellectual without having free time, and since Athens didn’t have to constantly fight and depend itself, it had the time to dedicate to creating centers of learning, pondering deep topics and pursuing knowledge for its own sake.

Spending time obsessing over the IQs of Spartans versus Athenians in an effort to shape policy would be pointless, because as shown above the relationship between environment, culture and genetics is very complicated and intertwined. Sure one society may have ended up with a higher IQ than another, but all that shows you are the traits that society historically needed for survival, not what that society is forever capable of. If somehow conditions got reversed and Athens suddenly was attacked incessantly while Sparta entered an era of unbroken peace, within a few generations the situations could end up reversed with Sparta becoming a society that favors intellectual pursuits and Athens focusing on developing military prowess and battle toughness.

This is why I have a problem with the idea many conservatives push that society is shortchanging itself by not paying more attention to the race and IQ issues put forth in The Bell Curve. Even if blacks do have a lower IQ, all that shows us is that the history of blacks is one that left more unintelligent people in the gene pool. If you subjected blacks to environment and cultural conditions that rewarded high intellect, competition and technical innovation first and foremost and made it hard to survive and thrive without these traits, you’d see a positive change in average IQ, much like if you devalued intellect, competiton and innovation in the culture and environment of whites and made it easy for them to survive and thrive without these traits, their average IQ would drop in time as well.

Average IQ of a racial group is simply an indicator of that racial group’s historical tolerance for the survival of unintelligent people, not an indicator of that racial group’s future potential for the rest of its existence.

In part 3, I’ll discuss why I think the history of Africans, and black Americans in particular, has produced environments that allow more unintelligent people to prosper, thereby lowering the average IQ for the whole group. And social policy solutions that can get great results for blacks without even having to address average IQ by race.

Recommended Reading:

A major difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals care first about whether a concept sounds reassuring and nice and politically correct, then care about whether or not it’s true or useful second. Conservatives on the other hand care more about what’s true and useful, whether or not it’s reassuring, nice or politically correct. The problem that conservatives often run into though is that they sometimes get so used to having the concept that is true and politically incorrect be the most useful solution that they start believing every concept that is true and politically incorrect must also be useful. Hence the obsession among some conservatives in pointing out race and IQ findings.

I personally don’t care about race and IQ findings, but not because I myself am black. I am uncomfortable dealing with unpleasant truths about black people all the time. Sometimes I even wonder if I’m too comfortable with that actually. And it’s not because it hurts my self-esteem and I want to sweep it under the table and not deal with it. And it’s not because I think the concept of blacks having lower average IQs is untrue; on the contrary there is much compelling evidence to show that blacks do on average have lower IQs.

My problem is, I don’t think it’s as important as many people think it is. If blacks have lower IQ averages than other races, now what? Say we all accept that fact, where do we go from here? How do we change our policies? Do we create low-IQ alternatives for all black people? Schools geared toward lower IQs? Vocations we funnel black people into due to their perceived lower mental capacity? Replace our current Ivy League-obsessed meritocracy with an IQ-based meritocracy where IQ tests become the norm for entry into all types of preferred endeavors? Good luck selling voters on those concepts. Not only would such initiatives never pass, they’d be political suicide for any mainstream politician that attached his or her name to them.

The other solution is to create a separate “slow track” for blacks to compensate for their lower IQs, similar to Special Education. The problem there is that if you create a separate set of standards and expectations for blacks, this will just end up reinforcing the IQ and achievement gap, which will just keep widening generation after generation. If some people out there think blacks are in danger of becoming a permanent, entrenched underclass in this country for all time, measures like this will really speed the process along. Not to mention that selling black mental inferiority as inescapable and genetically unavoidable will do much to preemptively sap motivation among blacks who do have the capacity to achieve much intellectually. For example, I think I’m damn bright, if I may toot my own horn, but if I was sold a bill of goods that I was destined to mental inferiority before I even got out of the gate, how much motivation would I even have had to achieve the intelligence I have? I’ve met people who were diagnosed with learning disabilities as kids who totally regret it as adults. A friend of mine who is very successful now said that he feels he would have achieved so much more if he was never diagnosed with learning disabilities as a young student, because it created a lowered set of expectations for him that he totally bought into. It wasn’t until he met a teacher late in high school that refused to accept the learning disabilities excuse and forced him to conform to the same standards as other students that he realized that he was capable of the same results as everyone else, even if it did require him trying a little harder. Accepting lower IQ in blacks as an unavoidable truth, I think, would have the same problem of causing both the black students who have the potential to intellectually excel and the people in charge of teaching them to achieve their full potential to conform to the lowered expectations and live them out.

I think of it like our legal system views guilt and innocence. Our legal system prefers to err on the side of innocence. Just like our legal system considers it worse to have one innocent man be imprisoned than to have a bunch of guilty people go free, our educational system should consider it much worse evil to have one person squander his potential than to have a bunch of people be ambitious beyond their capabilities.

The other route you can take is eugenics, or genetic cleansing. It’s not as far fetched or outdated or foreign a concept as you may think. Sweden, a very egalitarian and Western country had eugenics until as recently as 1976. This also would be a failure in the long run, even if it was remotely feasible for such a measure to pass politically (it’s totally not). Much like stock markets do corrections, as we are now realizing with the current state of our economy, I believe human rights in societies do corrections much like stock markets do corrections. Outrageous speculation in the 20s lead to the Great Depression, a huge correction. The boom times in the 1980s with leveraged buyouts, hostile takeover cowboys and junk bonds lead to a huge panic. Same with the internet boom in the 90s and our latest real estate boom in the 2000s. Societies and human rights work much the same way. I believe the extent of the welfare state and widespread entitlement system of affirmative action, hiring quotas and diversity initiatives that is currently undermining the initiative of blacks to achieve is a social correction that came about from this country’s former excesses in the suppression of human rights for blacks in the form of slavery and in the accepted discrimination that followed. (The book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen discusses post-slavery racism in alarming depth, as well as any good book on the Reconstruction era of the South). I believe on some level Sweden and the rest of Europe’s current path to cultural suicide though an obsession with diversity and openness at the expense of their own culture, borders and security is an extreme social correction of former inhumane and discriminatory policies (like eugenics in the case of Sweden or colonialism and perceived exploitation on the part of other European powers).

The pendulum of society always swings back, and the more you move it in a certain direction, the harder the eventual swingback in the opposite direction will be. If we suspend our disbelief and imagine that the more extreme of the “race realists” who obsess over race and IQ to the point of pushing for eugenics ever get their way and actually get eugenics to become a political reality, all they are doing is paving the way for an eventual social correction in the direction of socialism in a generation or two that would dwarf our current welfare and entitlement system. If they feel they are currently getting ripped off thanks to paying for the welfare state and losing out on good schools and jobs thanks to affirmative action, that would be nothing compared to what their descendants would have to deal with in a world of post-eugenics entitlements.

Next, Part 2: What Average IQ by Race Really Signifies

Related Reading:

Reminder: Don’t forget about the commenter contest.

I have to warn you, this is either going to be one of my weirdest posts, one of my most profound or both. Even if it sounds really pseudoscientific and downright preposterous at times, I encourage you to read through it and keep an open mind.

One thing I constantly hear educated black guys complain about is their experiences with black women, particularly how they constantly test them or pass them up for guys of a thuggier nature. The big complaint I hear is that black women, even those of middle class status and higher, seem to want “Tupac with a degree.” Black guys often use this as their reason for primarily dating women of other races.

Now of course most women of all races go through a “bad boy” stage, especially when they’re younger and attraction and excitement are more important to them than long-term security. One of the problems with black women though is that they tend to go overboard in this department. A bad boy to an Asian girl may be a guy who’s a liberal arts major. When black women go for a bad boys, however, a prison record and a gun are often be involved. I even found this to be the case when I was in college and hollering at educated black women. With white girls, though, the simple fact that a guy is black is often enough to confer “bad boy” status and make a guy edgy. So when a guy is faced with a choice of going for white girl and being edgy and a “bad boy” simply by being black and having a little bit of street smarts, or going for a black chick and having to be a “soldier” and risk a criminal record to impress a black chick with his edginess, it makes sense that a lot of black guys find it less stressful to date outside the race.

But I’m not writing this to excuse black men’s dating choices or condem black women, but rather to understand why this “thug lust” phenomenon is so prevalent in the black community. After doing a lot of reading on evolutionary psychology, I think I may have an answer.

One of the tenets of evolutionary psychology is that women are programmed to test men for strength and leadership. Constantly. The theory is that in prehistoric times, the world was a much more dangerous place, especially for women, who could easily be raped or killed at will. Weapons were primitive, there weren’t laws to protect rights and society was not very civilized. Women needed men that were strong and dominant to offer them protection from other men who may try to invade. For this reason, it was in a woman’s best interest to test a potential mate. If he was too weak to stand up to her and let her walk all over him, then how could he protect her and their children from other men? If he was wishy-washy in day to day activities, how could he make important decisions in a time of crisis?

Chances are, at some point in history there were not only plenty of women who were genetically predisposed to test men, but also plenty of women who were not genetically predisposed to test men. Thanks to the principles of survival of the fittest, however, the women who didn’t have the innate tendency to test their men probably chose weaker men and wound up getting their genes weeded out of existence once trouble came around and these weak men couldn’t protect them. On the flipside, the women with an innate tendency to test their men and not mate with punks were better suited for survival and ended up passing their genes to future generations of women. Thus as the human race evolved over time, women with “man-testing” genes thrived in the human population because they were beneficial to survival, while women without “man-testing” genes gradually ceased to exist because they were wiped out over time. For this reason, any woman alive today is descended from women with “man testing” genes and has these “man testing” genes too. This is why modern women constantly probe men in a million subtle ways for weakness and lack of leadership during the courtship process.

The irony is that civilization has evolved to a point where a man’s physical protection is not as necessary as it once was. Society is much more civilized, women have access to better weapons to level the playing field, policemen exist to add more protection, there are laws to protect female citizens and conquest of women and other men through brute force is not only frowned upon but actually illegal. So logically, man testing is not as necessary as it once was. However logic can’t change a woman’s genes or hundreds of thousands of years of cultural conditioning, both of which have bred her to test potential mates for leadership and strength. It is for this reason so many women are attracted to assholes. They may not be nice, but they will not stand for disrespect and will fight for their rights against other men. I also think this primal urge for men who don’t take shit plays a big role in why so many death row inmates have those women who write them love letters and are attracted to them: these men take no crap, are leaders in a bizarre way due to the fact that they refuse to conform to society’s rules and can offer a woman protection from outsiders in a way that the average, law-abiding man can’t. Even though logically a woman may know these assholes or thugs are a bad choice, biologically and culturally they’ve been bred through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to respond positively to dominant, alpha male traits on a primal, unthinking level.

Now over the past few centuries as the West has become more civilized and women have made great strides in gaining equality, Western culture has begun training women to tone down their man-testing ways. Even though the man-testing genes are still there, they seem to play less of a role in mate choice with each generation. This is why that ugly kid from Superbad and Juno can actually be a sex symbol to tweens today. Alpha traits still matter to women on a primal level, but given how safe modern Western society has become for women over the past two centuries, and how much safer society continues to become for them, it’s safe to say that testing a man for alpha status will continue to decline and become more subtle and it will be increasingly easier for beta males to thrive in the mating game.

So what does this have to do with black women and thugs? Simple. The black woman for a long time was denied the societal progress available to other Western women over the past two centuries. Unlike other women in the West, for a long time black women did not experience the same increase in status and societal protection that would allow them to feel less dependent on the protections of a mate. Europeans invaded West Africa and took black people as slaves. Once in America, the black slave woman could be violated at will by her master and his visiting friends. This was acceptable under law. Her black husband could do nothing about this, which had to be very emasculating for him. In addition, she probably gradually began to resent him for his inability to protect her, even if logically she knew there was nothing he could actually do. This dynamic likely was passed to her daughters too, who had to grow up seeing both their fathers and their mates routinely emasculated and rendered incapable of protecting them. After slavery ended, things didn’t get that much better. The Ku Klux Klan was around in the south, lynchings and other forms of racial violence were rampant, black families could be physically intimidated and wiped out at will and the black man’s emasculation continued.

Given all the hardships a black woman faced up until very recent history, it would make sense that her need to test a man would remain strong, even as this need subsided some in Western women of other races. If anything, man-testing genes may have increased over the last several hundred years in the black community due to the hardships they faced. Getting an strong alpha male probably became much more important to a black woman than to a white woman, since unlike the white woman she did not have the same alternative protections of law, status and police available to her. I imagine that black women needed man-testing genes more than any other race of women because they were more reliant on the protection of a strong man than any other race of women because they couldn’t rely on societal protections. And out of all the strong types of black men available, I figure a thug was probably the type of alpha male that made her feel the safest. A thug was probably the type of black man most likely to stand up to the white man or other dangerous blacks even at the cost of his own life. I imagine that over the course of history, evolution and cultural conditioning rewarded man-testing genes in black women much more than it did in other races of women because strong, tough men were much more vital to a black woman’s survival. I also think that history and evolution were probably more unkind to black women who didn’t test their men for strength than it was to white women who didn’t test their men.

The second most popular type of man in the West is the beta provider. He’s not as dominant, as strong a leader or as tough as the alpha male, because he’s a beta male. But thanks to his intellectual prowess and his ability to provide financial support, he becomes the next best thing to the alpha dog. He offers a different type of security. It may not be as primally attractive to a woman as a tough, dominant alpha male, but it is a very safe and secure (if somewhat boring) secondary choice. Examples of beta male providers can be your wimpy scientists, male lawyers, educated, civilized guys, sucessful metrosexuals, nerds with poor social skills but good incomes, etc. They may not have as much to offer in primal attraction and physical protection, but they make up for it in their ability to provide security in the form of financial assistance. The catch is, a beta provider can only compete with alpha males in extremely civilized cultures were society offers women a sense of physical protection through the existence of cultural norms and legal protections. This allows things like financial security and education to become as important as alpha dog status. That is why being a beta provider can be so attractive to Western women, since society allows them the luxury of choosing a man for reasons other than brutish alpha dog status. If society ever reverted back to the dangerously harsh, brutish free-for-all it used to be in the old days, the stock of beta providers would drop drastically.

Since black women didn’t have the same societal protections as white Western women, beta providers were probably a bad choice in the black community for a long time, even as the stock of beta providers was on the rise in the white community. How much good could a square, law-abiding doctor or lawyer be to a black woman in the heart of the rural, racist south? His money doesn’t have that much benefit since many white businesses wouldn’t take it and he couldn’t move to any neighborhood he wanted, even if he could afford to. If anything, his education and intellect and legitimate financial success could be interpreted as being “uppity” and not “knowing his role,” thereby making him a target and putting the family in more danger from racist whites. For all these reasons, I think that black American women have evolved to have even more man-testing genes than other women, especially in favor of men who disregard the white man and his laws. In the black community, the tables have traditionally been stacked against the beta provider black male. Money in the hands of a black man just didn’t offer that much protection and wasn’t as valuable as being tough and macho and strong.

And it only got worse once the welfare state came into effect in the 1960s. Once Lyndon Johnson introduced the Great Society, allowing single women with children to get money and housing from the federal government, this took away one of the black beta provider’s last bargaining chips: his money and house. Now a black woman could get that financial security from the government. Not just that, but if she did get together with a beta provider, she’d actually lose her free money, food, house and education because you had to be single to receive those benefits. The welfare system actually created an incentive against settling down with a beta provider. He can’t provide the primal attraction and physical protection an alpha male does, and now his presence is actually an economic liability. And since a man was no longer as needed for economic reasons, this helped raised the stock of thugs: the physical protection from racist whites and other blacks in the ghetto, the superior sexual prowess, the primal attraction that comes from his role as a “bad boy” alpha male and the tax-free, under the table financial benefits of his illegal money.

Even though society has changed greatly for black women in the past few decades and they no longer face the same level of racism or need for an alpha dog thug for survival, they still have generations of these thug-loving genes and cultural conditioning to fight against. And of course the glamorization of thug life through hip-hop probably doesn’t help things either. And this is why even as many black women move up socially and get more educated, they still have such a strong pull toward thugs.

Holla!

In Part 1, we focused on how human nature is driven by two primary drives, the drive of self-preservation and the drive to spread our genes through reproduction. In this part, we’ll focus on the role one particular aspect of our human nature, the tendency to stereotype, satisfies those two drives.

First things first, let’s be honest about one thing: we all stereotype. For example, say you were running late to attend an opera and you get lost. You see two groups of people walking by. Who would you rather stop to ask for directions to the opera hall?

This one?

Or this one?

Now what if you were asking for directions to a indie rock venue instead? Would your answer change then?

One benefit stereotyping has is to simplify our lives by helping us make split-second choices. It’s a mental shorthand for making decisions. This was especially important for our ancestors, given the dangerous conditions they lived in. Picture if every time you were faced with a scenario, you had to take the time to individually evaluate that scenario from scratch. Picture the time you would waste. And picture the increased danger you would face. For example, one of our ancestors faces a sabretooth tiger. The tiger attacks it, and our ancestor barely gets away with his life. Later on he faces a different sabretooth tiger. A certain part of him is going to be wary of that tiger based on his experience with the previous tiger. This wariness will change all his future interactions with sabretooth tigers, thereby increasing his chances of surviving and living to reproduce and spread genes. Now picture other members in the community who don’t have this tendency to stereotype. These members, no matter how many sabretooth tigers they encounter, are going to treat each instance like a blank slate and reevaluate the scenario from scratch. They will not change their current behavior toward a tiger based on their previous encounters with tigers. Instead of using the initial moments of encounter to run away or kill the tiger, they waste precious time making an brand new, independent assessment, giving the tiger more time to pounce on them.

Which group of ancestors is more likey to survive and reproduce, the ones who stereotype or the ones who don’t? The ones who do stereotype obviously. Natural selection favors them. And these people are going too pass along the same stereotyping tendencies to their children, while the people who don’t stereotype won’t be passing their aversion to snap judgments onto their children…because they won’t survive to reproduce. They’ll get weeded out of the gene pool by all the predators they’re trying to give a fair shake to.

The scenario I just described is an example of what economists call opportunity cost -meaning that due to scarce resources, for every opportunity you accept, it costs you the chance to accept another opportunity. You take an opportunity to go to the movies, you give up the opportunity to read a book for those two hours. You spend your money on a shopping spree, you lose the opportunity to spend that money on investments. In the case of the sabretooth tiger, choosing to not stereotype and make a snap judgment costs you the opportunity to run for your life, defend yourself and prepare for the worst. And since the consequences of being so stubbornly open-minded is injury or loss of life, the opportunity cost of not stereotyping is simply too high. What it costs you is infinitely more valuable than what you’re gaining.

Now most people would find no fault in stereotyping tigers. Everyone except the nuttiest PETA activist would admit that most tigers are out to get us. Stereotyping becomes more controversial in our modern society when applying stereotypes to groups that are not by and large out to get you. As shown by the fact that affirmative action continues to thrive and a black man is leading the charge for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, most whites are not as racist as some would like you to believe. And even though blacks and hispanics have higher crime rates per capita than other races in America, a vast majority of blacks and hispanics aren’t criminals. So unlike the tiger scenario, stereotyping most whites as racist or most blacks and latinos as criminals makes no sense, right? Well, it isn’t that easy.

The problem is that humans don’t weigh good events equally with bad events. As shown in The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold by Robert Levine:

[P]eople experience more pain from a loss than they do pleasure from an equal gain. We get more upset over losing $100 than we feel happy about gaining $100. This is true not only for money but for our lives in general. It’s been shown, for example, that bad emotions feel bad more than good emotions feel good: people try harder to escape bad moods than they do to prolong good mood and they remember their bad moods longer than their good ones…As one of my clinical psychology colleagues estimated it, the average person needs five good experiences to balance out a single bad one.

From an evolutionary viewpoint, a bias toward the negative makes perfect sense. The survival of our species has always been more closely linked to avoiding disaster than to finding happiness. We’re primed to see threats. People pick an angry face out of a happy crowd much more quickly than they pick a happy face out of an angry crowd. Potential danger signals action needs to be taken. The only action positive events usually call for is celebration, and nobody’s ever died from forgetting to plan a party.

Focusing on the negative over the positive gives an evolutionary advantage. You have more to lose from misjudging a bad person as friendly than you do from misjudging a good person as evil. The latter mistake will just lead to maybe hurt feelings and the loss of a potential friendship. You can possibly recover from that, and if not, fuck it, life goes on. The former mistake however can lead to serious injury and possibly death, from which there’s no recovery. It doesn’t matter if the good in a community outweigh the bad in the mind of the stereotyper because the damage that the bad apples can cause you (namely death) far outweighs any benefit you can receive from the good in a community (a good movie or job recommendation at best).

So if you’re black in the deep south in the 60s, and lynchings are a real possibility, avoiding death is a much bigger concern to you than taking the time to think of all the good white people you might be misjudging as racist. You would have had some negative experience with a white person in your life, or you would at least had had friends and family with bad experiences, and this would cause you to view all white people, fairly or unfairly, with suspicion. You waste time wondering if that white mob coming at you at night are out to lynch or out for a nighttime walk and you can end up lynched.

In his book, Larry Elder describes some disturbing trends in black crime in his book The Ten Things You Can’t Say In America. Although a majority of blacks and latinos are not criminals, they have proportionately higher rates of criminality against whites:

“Twenty-five percent of young black men are in jail, on parole, or on probation. A black man is ten times more likely to rape a white woman than a white man is to rape a black woman. Blacks account for 50 percent of the nation’s prisoners [despite only being 13% of the population]. Gang-bangers are almost inevitably black or Latino. Hurts the image, you know. Don’t think the young white woman in that elevator is oblivious. Don’t think that a white woman living in the city hasn’t seen, experienced, or had friends who experienced crime at the hands of black thugs…If Jesse Jackson himself says he’s relieved when the late-night footsteps on the street behind him belong to white rather than black feet, all bets are off.”

So it doesn’t matter that a majority of blacks and latinos aren’t criminals, or that a majority of whites aren’t violent racists. So long as the perception is out there that a higher than normal amount of criminality exists in minority communities or a higher than normal amount of racism exists among whites, humans are going to lapse into the very behavior that allowed their ancestors to survive for generations: accentuating the bad, being overly cautious and applying negative sterotypes to protect themselves.

But the best thing that can come out of negative stereotyping is that it’s a symptom that alerts us to greater societal ills. Rather than just demanding that people stop stereotyping, we should instead try to understand the reasons why we’ve evolved with this tendency and try to figure out what the stereotypes are telling us. Stereotypes arise for one of two reasons: because they are true conclusions based on valid premises or they are bad conclusions based on bad premises. If the stereotype is true and is negative to boot, we should focus on changing the reality of the situation for the better rather than chastising the stereotyper and forcing him to be politically correct. If the stereotype is false, than we should try to attack the faulty premises at the root of the stereotype rather than just demand the stereotyper “play nice” and be PC. But remember, if your only response to a stereotyper is to point out “Well most blacks/whites/latinos/gays aren’t like that” you’re wasting your time because our minds are programmed to give negative things five times the weight as positive things. You have to create the impression that the negative is outweighed by a vast and substantial positive majority if you want to really deter a stereotype.

Recommended Reading:

• The Power of Persuasion by Levine is so useful and has such a breadth of information that I can’t overstate its value in understanding the human mind enough. Especially when it comes to fallacies in logic and thinking, and how those fallacies get exploited.
• Larry Elder is a black conservative that gets a lot of flack for his conservative viewpoints and politically incorrect views, but he is a very sharp cat that makes very compelling and thought-provoking arguments that are worth reading, even if you ultimately end up disagreeing with him. This book, 10 Things You Can’t Say In America, is one of my all-time favorite books.