Inductivist

 

Some people argue that blacks do not perform academically as well as other groups because they lack a culture that places a high value on education. Is such a view supported by General Social Survey data? In 2021, respondents were asked, "Please show for each of these how important you think it is for getting ahead in life . . . c. Having a good education yourself?" Answers ranged from 'essential' to 'not important at all.' 

The table displayed below shows the distribution of responses for blacks (raceacs = 1) and non-blacks. 46.2% of blacks say education is essential, compared to only 31.8% of others. This contradicts the claim that African Americans do not value getting an education as others do. 

You might respond that blacks have been taught the importance of education, but many only pay lip service to the idea and have not internalized the attitude. If true, this points to the impotence of attempting to improve performance through teaching and stressing certain values.   

The General Social Survey rated the skin darkness of a sample of black Americans, ranging from "very dark brown" to "very light brown." Biologically oriented researchers might see the question as a rough measure of the percentage of European ancestry, while sociologists would see it as a measure of discrimination--lighter-skinned blacks getting better treatment. Respondents were also given a job prestige score that ranges from 16 to 80--16 is a shoeshine and 80 is a physician. Here are the job prestige means listed by skin tone:

You can see that average job prestige tends to rise with lighter skin. The mean for blacks with "very light brown" skin is roughly two-thirds of a standard deviation higher than the mean for "very dark skin" blacks. 

The pattern can be interpreted in at least two ways: 1) genetic--blacks with more European ancestry tend to rise in the status hierarchy much more than African blacks, or 2) sociological--whites discriminate more against darker blacks, and perhaps light-skinned blacks have white (privileged) relatives who gave them advantages. 

For several reasons, I'm inclined toward the genetic explanation. For one, my experience is that when a white person is interacting with a black person, his thought is, "I'm talking with a black person," not, "I'm talking with a light-skinned black person." For another, how do those Nigerian immigrants do so well in the US when their skin tends to be so dark? The sociologist would predict severe discrimination. The biologist would argue that African immigrants are a select group of Africans--above average in IQ and drive--and this overwhelms any bias they might experience. 

 Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) has a discussion going on at Twitter about which race currently faces the most "systemic racism." Some people are assuming that Asians are victimized by blacks more than whites are. Two sources of data are not very helpful here: hate crimes and victimization data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. Hate crimes are a tiny drop in the bucket of all violence, and you don't see NCVS tables with Asian victims by race of offender. (Let me know if I've missed them.) Victim data in general indicates that Asians face low levels of victimization, which makes sense because most crime is intra-racial, and Asians have very low rates of criminal offending. 

Perhaps homicide data is the best way to go here. I looked at expanded FBI homicide data and the Census to calculate rates for being murdered by a black person for two groups: 1) Whites/Hispanics, and 2) Asians/ Native Americans/Pacific Islanders. I'm afraid the FBI lumps people together that way. The rate for group 1 is 2.30 murders per 1 million population. For group 2, it's 1.44 murders per million. According to FBI data, blacks pose more of a threat to whites and Hispanics than Asians plus. 

Ross Douthat wrote in the NYT recently that the declining appeal of the GOP is the fault of Rush Limbaugh. He claims that Republicans were a 55% proposition during the Reagan Era because the message of conservatism was preached by well-bred men like William F. Buckley. Rush came along and turned conservatism into something angry and strident and that only appeals to 45% of voters. 

If Ross is correct, we should see greater support for Reagan among racial minorities--the groups we have a hard time winning over. After all, Buckley was a leading advocate for conservatism during that time and Rush was unknown.

Using the General Social Survey, we can compare minority deficits over time. I calculate this as the percent of a racial minority voting for the GOP presidential candidate minus the percent of all voters who cast a vote for the Republican candidate.

Minority deficit

1980
Blacks  -39.2
Mexicans  -18.2

1984
Blacks  -48.3
Mexicans  -19.5

Damn, impressive: under Buckley and Reagan sophistication, Blacks and Mex-Ams supported the GOP by only 18 to 48 points less than the general population! The power of positivity!

And since then? Bush Sr. wasn't strident. Perhaps he did better.

1988
Blacks  -41.9
Mexicans  -26.2

1992
Blacks  -34.6
Mexicans  -18.1

1996
Blacks  -26.2
Mexicans  -12.1

The numbers are slightly less bad with grumpy Dole. 

2000
Blacks  -42.5
Mexicans  -6.5

It looks like angry Rush didn't chase away Mex-Ams in 2000.

2004
Blacks  -37.6
Mexicans  -11.7

2008
Blacks  -34.7
Mexicans  -15.3

2012
Blacks  -33.3
Mexicans  -17.8

2016
Blacks  -38.2
Mexicans  -19.7

The Republicans did no better among minorities before strident Rush became influential in the early 1990s. 

Douthat ignores the obvious: the GOP is struggling because there were fewer than 20 million Hispanics during the Reagan Era. In 2021, there are more than 60 million--and this perennially poor group likes generous social programs and is susceptible to anti-white propaganda like all non-white groups. And probably will be for a very long time. 

This study, using a sample of ~94k teens and young adults, examined the link between religiosity (church attendance and saying religion is important in their life) and drug selling and theft. The researchers found a robust inverse association for various age and demographic groups. The magnitude of the link was considerable for black males and females: the incidence of drug selling and theft was between 1.6 and 3.3 times higher for irreligious blacks compared to their religious counterparts.

Of course, a correlational study can't tell us anything about causation, but this study provides pretty good evidence that one finds more law-abiding blacks at church, and the Church has always been a central institution in the black community.

It's hard to find good stats on racial differences in intimate partner violence since this is the kind of information that makes blacks look bad. One way around this problem is to focus on the easily available homicide victim statistics. We can learn about race and perpetrating domestic violence with victim stats for two reasons: 1) at least 90% of homicides are intra-racial (within a race) so if the victim is black, the perp is too. (And when crimes are interracial, they are more likely to be black-on-white than the reverse); and 2) if a woman is killed, it's usually by a man with whom she had some kind of relationship: a boyfriend, husband, ex, or on the rare occasion, a John.

The CDC has a great website for analyzing mortality data. I generated female homicide rates for race and Hispanic status:

2018 homicide victimization rates (per 100k)

Black  6.3
American Indian  4.4
Hispanic  1.9
White 1.8
Asian  1.0

So the victim rate for black women is 6.3 times that of Asian women,  and 3.5 times that of whites. While these racial gaps are large, they are not as big as those for men (39.0 for blacks and 3.7 for whites). The male-male dynamic--killing for vengeance or saving face--seems to separate blacks and others more than the intimate partner dynamic: the man kills the woman out of jealousy, a desire to get his way, or to punish the victim.

Methods

Results

Looking at the period 2005-2010, Steve Sailer shows that the black rate rape was 3.5 times higher than the white/Hispanic rate. His calculations are based on a very large national survey of Americans that asks about being a victim of crime and the characteristics of offenders.

If we do the same calculation based on FBI arrest data for the years 2008-2010 (2005-2007 are not available), the black rate is 3.1 times higher. What this tells us is that black rapists are less likely to get arrested than white/Hispanic rapists. The bias at the level of arrest is in favor of blacks and is in direct contradiction to the message that is drummed into us on a daily basis that the criminal justice system is deeply racist.

With the rise of militant, celebrity atheists, quite a bit of attention has been devoted to data that show that atheists tend to be smarter than theists.  Race realists are likely to rely on IQ to explain the greater religiosity of blacks and Hispanics.

I can think of another factor that might help explain these patterns: having a sense of control over one's fate, called locus of control by psychologists. As a religious person myself, I see that some people get interested in religion when they feel helpless. They turn to God when there is trouble they can't seem to handle. Many of my irreligious colleagues seem very in charge of their lives; they've got it all under control.

I've also read research that indicates that poor minorities tend to feel that they do not control their life outcomes. This is called an external locus of control. Maybe this sense of vulnerability explains their stronger belief in God.

The General Social Survey asked respondents, "Do you agree or disagree with the following: We each make our own fate." Answers ranged from "strongly agree" (1) to "strongly disagree" (5).

They were also asked about their confidence in the existence of God with responses ranging from "don't believe" (1) to "know God really exists and have no doubts about it" (6). As a first step, let's use OLS regression analysis to see if race is linked to belief in God and locus of control (sample size = 741):

Confidence in the existence of God (standardized OLS coefficients)
Black   .13***

Hispanics did not differ from whites significantly in belief in God, so we'll focus on blacks. They have greater confidence in God's existence.


External locus of control
Black   .06**

Compared to non-blacks, blacks are more likely to think they do not make their own fate. Now let's look at race, IQ, and belief.


Confidence in the existence of God
IQ   -.16***

As expected, we see IQ is associated with more doubting, but the correlation is weak.


Confidence in the existence of God
Black   .10***
IQ   -.14***

Recall how the black estimate for belief was .13 when only race was entered into the model. We see that when IQ is added, the black coefficient shrinks but does not disappear. This indicates that some of the greater belief by blacks is explained in terms of lower IQ, but much of the gap remains unexplained. Let's add locus of control:

Confidence in the existence of God
Black   .00
IQ   -.14***
External locus of control  .18***

When external locus of control is added, the race coefficient drops to zero. Much of the reason why blacks are more likely to believe in God is because of a sense of helplessness.  And when it comes to predicting belief, an external locus of control is more powerful than IQ.

This is a reminder than while HBD-ers are right to focus on intelligence, there are other consequential traits. Moreover, there is evidence that locus of control, like practically all psychological traits, is genetically influenced. According to this twin study, about 1/3 of the variation of a sense of control over your own life is due to genes.

What are the patterns of inter-racial violence?

This report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics is an analysis of 2012-15 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data based on hundreds of thousands of American households. Victims of any kind of violence (assault/battery, robbery, rape) are asked about the specifics of the crimes committed, including the race and Hispanic status of offenders. Of course, we don't have data on homicides since "dead men tell no tales."

Adjusting for group size, I calculated the ratio of black-on-white crimes versus white-on-black crimes. Blacks are 6.3 times more likely to attack whites than the reverse.

Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely to commit some kind of violence against whites than whites against Hispanics.

Finally, blacks are 4.8 times more likely to assault Hispanics than vice-versa.

Elites always portray whites as the victimizers, but when it comes to rape, robbery, and assault (and murder which shows the same patterns) whites are most likely to be the victims, and blacks the perpetrators.

UPDATE: Looking at the numbers, what drives the large black-white difference is that despite the large numbers of whites in the population, their share of all black victimizers is small. Whites rarely attack non-whites. Their violence is confined mostly to other whites. 

Over the years, people like me have disagreed with Ron Unz that the rate of serious crime by Hispanics is not much different than that of whites.

Analysts typically rely on police or imprisonment data to estimate Hispanic/White differences, but Hispanics are significantly less likely than whites to report crimes to the police. Since Latinos are typically victimized by other Latinos (crime is typically intra-ethnic), there is an undercount of crime committed by Hispanics.

Using victim data is a method around this problem.  The National Crime Victimization Survey contacts tens of thousands of people each year to ask them about being victimized.  We can use these statistics as proxies of crime rates for various races/ethnicities. I took the estimates for 2014-2018 and averaged them since there is quite a bit of annual error, especially in a group as small as Asians.  Here are the percentages of people who were victimized by serious crime in the past year:

Percent victimized
Blacks  2.1
Hispanics  2.1
Whites  1.6
Asians  1.0
Other  3.1

See how the rates for Hispanics and blacks are the same. Prevalences for whites and especially Asians are significantly lower.

I doubt serious criminality among Latinos is exactly the same as blacks. While most crimes are intra-racial, some of the victimizations of whites, Latinos, and Asians are by blacks committing robbery or assault.

By the way, I assume that the "Other" category is mostly American Indians. Their very high prevalence is consistent with Cochran and Harpending's hypothesis that racial groups with deep histories of agriculture and powerful states experienced selection for docile and self-disciplined individuals.  Criminological research has found that criminals tend to be impulsive and disagreeable.  As people with shorter histories under agrarian states, Native Americans might have a higher percentage of these types.

Richard Lynn's new book Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality describes hundreds of studies conducted around the world. One American study that strikes me is a simple one of racial differences in doing one's homework that is described on page 61.

The mean number of hours studied per week by high school seniors looks like this: Asians, 3.9; whites, 3.4; Hispanics and blacks, 2.0.  Asian teens study roughly twice as much as other minorities.

Academic apologists work full-time concocting reasons for the racial gaps we see, but how do we blame homework differences on malevolent, discriminatory whites?  Homework is done at home with no whites looking over your shoulder. The schools provide even poor minority kids with books and materials for assignments. Parents and kids simply decide how much time gets devoted to studying.

You might respond that minority kids are given less homework because of the "bigotry of low expectations." But why do Asians do more than whites?  If you answer that schools are just following stereotypes, so schools with lots of Asian students assign more homework, it simply starts to seem like schools might respond to what students are like, or hardworking families select schools with higher expectations.

It just becomes absurd to pin these racial gaps on anything at all bad that whites do.  Again and again,  we see that whites are mediocre.  What sort of white supremacist country sorts whites into the undistinguished middle?  I want a better brand of supremacy!

After reading Lynn's descriptions on more than 700 studies from dozens of countries, Occam's Razor demands the simplest explanation: the races are internally different.

One of the strongest findings in sociology is that people follow the principle of homophily--they naturally associate with people like themselves.  It goes without saying that sociologists never take the next logical step and conclude that this universal tendency is rooted in biology; that it is very resistant to change; that it's counterproductive to swim against a very strong tide. The typical view of a sociologist when it comes to a social universal is, "Yes, we see it everywhere, so naturally, we should get rid of it!"

Nowhere is this truer than in the case of race.  Around the entire globe, people of the same race tend to gravitate to each other, so in America, we're bound and determined to see the day when a random white person has all non-white buddies.

So how are we doing on this?  I looked at a question given in the General Social Survey where participants were asked to list friends (sample size = 1,300).  I assume that the first person mentioned is a close friend, if not the closest friend.  When the respondent is white, how often was the first friend mentioned black?  Two percent of the time.  Black respondents first mentioned a white friend 11.2% of the time.

If making friends were truly random, the distribution of friends would match the racial distribution of the population. (We'll set aside the goal of preferring friends from other races.)  For example, 13% of the first friends mentioned by whites should be black since blacks are 13% of the population.  But when I do the math that takes into account the size of the black and white populations, blacks are 37.1 times more likely to say their first-mentioned friend is black rather than white. A white is 9.3 times more likely to mention a white person.  I doubt the numbers were much different in 1960.

For all America's efforts, biology seems to be stronger than sociology.

This new study looked to see if polygenic scores for educational attainment that have been developed from samples of white people work for blacks (sample size = 1,050). A polygenic score sums up how many variations in locations on genes a person possesses that have been correlated with the outcome variable, weighted for the strength of the relationships. In plain English, the higher your score, the higher your genetic risk.

The researchers found that, even though blacks have a genetic history that is very different than whites, the polygenic scores that were developed for whites significantly predicted going to college among blacks. While scores did not predict reading achievement, they did predict math achievement.

Bottom line: genes matter. They matter for whites, they matter for blacks.   

Recently, I documented that of the four racial groups examined -- whites, Hispanics, Asian Indians, and East Asians-- four showed a positive correlation between lighter skin and IQ.  But what about blacks?

This graph shows mean IQ for blacks born in the US at increasing dark skin tones (as rated by General Social Survey interviewers, N = 658).  I am using skin tone as a rough measure of the degree of European ancestry:
















Tones 6-10, especially 10, have lower average IQs than tones 1-5.  The difference between level 1 (IQ = 93.6) and level 10 (IQ = 86.4) is well over half a standard deviation.

So blacks with more European ancestry tend to have higher IQs. The explanation that light-skinned blacks receive better treatment than dark blacks is unconvincing.  When someone of another race encounters a black person, you say "black person" to yourself, not "light-skinned black person."  And anyway, there's no evidence that poor treatment makes somebody dumber.  If it did, Jewish Holocaust survivors would be morons, not people with above average IQs.

If you didn't know better, you might assume that blacks who are conservative or religious might be less race conscious than their black counterparts.  You might assume that religion and conservatism might nudge blacks toward the ideal of color blindness, or that loyalty to one group might reduce loyalty to another.  Wrong.

The General Social Survey asked blacks on a scale from 1 to 4 how important their ethnicity was to their sense of who they are.  Here is a graph showing means scores of this question by political orientation:
















While ethnocentrism does not rise smoothly with conservatism, blacks who describe themselves as extremely conservative are the most black-centric group.  So don't think that a black right-winger wants to forget about race.

Let's look a ethnocentrism by church attendance:
















The effect is not strong, but there is a tendency for more religious blacks to focus more on race identity, rather than the fact we are all children of God.

How do we explain this (admittedly weak) pattern?  (Keep in mind that mean ethnocentrism is so high for blacks of any category, there isn't much variation to explain.) Perhaps it's due to a liberal tendency to see oneself as a citizen of the world, while conservatives might be more comfortable with local loyalties. 

According to General Social Survey (GSS) data, both whites and Mexican Americans born in the US have experienced mean IQ drops in the past decade.  Is this also true of blacks?  Here are the means by decade (N = 3,865):

Mean IQ

1970s  88.0
1980s  89.0
1990s  90.8
2000s  92.1
2010s  92.4

The 70s/80s increase was 1 point; the 80s/90s was up 1.8 points; and it was up 1.3 points for the 90s/00s.  The past decade witnessed the smallest increase of 0.3 IQ points.  The 1970s-2000s gain is impressive, but lately things seem to be slowing down.

I don't how to explain the trend but suspect that American society might expose blacks and whites (via schools, mass media, etc.) to more similar words used to test vocabularies than in the past.

The typical IQ mean you read about for black Americans is 85, but the black/white verbal IQ gap appears to be smaller: GSS data indicates that in this decade the gap is six-tenths of a standard deviation.  Notice how the black mean is a point higher than the 91.5 mean for Mex-Ams reported in a recent post.       

We know that colleges have gotten less selective as they have tried to boost the numbers of blacks and Hispanics.  (In fact, as higher education has gotten more egalitarian, it has become less selective for all races.)  My guess is that mean IQ for blacks of a given degree level has dropped over the past few decades.  Here's what GSS data say (N = 3,856):
















It looks like I'm right, but only for graduate school.  Mean IQ in the 70s was 112, but now it has fallen all the way to 101.  For a 4-year degree, the average has hovered around 100.

Two things really strike me.  First, the average black with a Master's degree or higher has an IQ close to the average white in the general population. That really needs no comment, but you can imagine what the thesis is going to look like (if a thesis is even required).

Second, a black person with an advanced degree is basically not smarter than one with a bachelor's.  Universities are not recruiting a select bunch out of the pool of college graduates. They're selecting on other traits like who thinks a teaching assistantship sounds preferable to a real job.

The General Social Survey has been giving participants a vocabulary quiz since the 70s. Research indicates that this is a decent proxy for verbal IQ.

Supposedly, education for blacks in the South was awful prior to the civil rights movement.  If education makes any difference, perhaps IQ scores of southern blacks have gradually improved since the 1960s.  The graph below shows mean IQ per decade for southern (blue line) and northern (red line) blacks (N = 4,435):

Keep in mind that the sample is all adult blacks, so educational improvements for children would have a very gradual impact on the whole adult population, if any at all.  In the 1970s, the gap for the two groups was six IQ points (85 vs. 91). By the 2000s, the gap was down to three points (90 vs. 93).

Notice, too, how the means increased for both groups, especially for southerners, over this period. Perhaps southern schools have gotten better, and some other factor has boosted scores for blacks in both regions.  It could be some biological factor like nutrition, or perhaps something like more exposure to mainstream vocabulary words via television.  I'm pretty sure the same 10 questions have been used since the beginning, so the quiz hasn't gotten easier.

Here is the graph for whites (N = 24,363):

Like blacks, whites from the South gained significant IQ points from the 70's to the 2000s; four points to be specific (96 to 100). Northern whites, on the other hand, only gained 6/10's of a point, from 100.6 to 101.2.

It looks like northern blacks and especially southerners of both races benefited from something.

UPDATE: The South has gotten to be a more attractive region post-civil rights era. Perhaps part of the story is intelligent black and white northerners moving south, thus boosting the mean IQ.

When former slave Frederick Douglass was asked what must be done for former slaves, his answer was, "Do nothing for us... Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall."