Rage of a Standard Deviation

There's a book called "Rage of a Privileged Class" which I haven't read but discusses the discrimination that black recipients of Affirmative Action feel. A recent post by The Audacious Epigone underscores some of this.

To understand what I'm discussing you need to know that generally speaking the average IQ of whites is 100. Some writers, generally liberal, will attempt to show this as the average human IQ. It is not. Black Americans are generally 1 standard deviation below whites, with an average IQ of about 80-85. And for those who think that IQ is "white supremacist", Asians have an average IQ of 110 or so. It's a "neat trick" for white supremacists to invent a test that they get clobbered on, isn't it? Anyway. If you understand this you understand why, regardless of the amount of money and effort poured into "inner city" schools, test scores still lag (around the same SD). It is even known that accounting for income, generally speaking Black test scores of the highest income earners, on average are just about level of the average score of poverty stricken whites.

This information is critical if you want to understand the "rage of a privileged class". There is a "large" population, in terms of raw numbers, of very bright black people. However because the black population is relatively small, that number is minuscule in relation to the population as a whole:

So here's the thing. If you are one of those black people who are on the far right side of the IQ distribution you are a rare bird (statistically speaking). However, it is likely you also interact with many other rare birds. Because of this you likely think that there are more of you than is represented in the population. Because of this, the following chart burns you up inside:

As you can see, across the board, everyone thinks you're stupid. Everyone thinks that they are smarter than you are even though if you have an IQ of 120 you are "smarter" than 60% of white people (and about 20-30% of Asians). Even white folks without college degrees will assume that you are dumber than they are WITH your degree.

So this rage of a privilege class is right. Two interesting things pop out here:

1) Liberal whites are generally speaking just as likely to think of blacks as "not as smart" as white people even though these liberal white folks claim to believe in "equality". This not only shows their hypocrisy regarding their proclamation of equality but also explains why they have of late attached themselves to ideologies that infantilize black people and treat them as if they have no agency in regards to their bad actions. Clearly they believe black people are mental children and want to shape policy around that idea.

2) Whites with college eductions, who are most likely to have close contact with the smartest of the smart black folks, STILL think black people are less smart than whites. You would think that having been in contact with the brightest black folks that persons with such high educations would have a more "equal" view of blacks. What does this tell us? Indeed it is likely that in college, white students see all the EOF and special programs given to blacks. They see how few black people are in their classes (particularly the hard sciences). It dawns on them, perhaps on an unconscious level, that hey, I might know a few exceptional black people but shit, these folks are not all that bright. Of course this would go unspoken in public, but the chart clearly shows that proximity to the "brightest of the bright" does not alleviate perceptions of lack of intelligence of black people.

So now we see via the math why there is a rage of a privileged class. Why no matter how good a black person is at their job, their White, Asian AND Black coworkers don't think they are really that good. This would also explain why black people have that saying about working twice as hard...

So yeah, if you are a smart black person in a field in which high intelligence is required, you are not imagining things when you perceive that folks don't think you're as bright as they are (and perhaps didn't really earn your position and salary).