Earlier quoted context omitted.
The basic hypotheses for the pro-affirmative action crowd are: 1) Black people are not actually less “good at stuff”, we just have a habit of defining “stuff” in a way that excludes the things that black people are more likely to excel at. And, 2) Where black people do statistically worse, it’s not due to any innate difference, it’s because socially accepted “normal” support systems are more useful for people with ch…
Sorry, but I take offense at this "it is all a matter of opinion and all opinions are equally valid" BS. 1) It is trivially true that if you define your measure right, you can make anyone succeed. For example black people are better at looking like black people. But we try to define "stuff" in a way that correlates with ability to do economically useful tasks. There are excellent reasons to do so. 2) You are ignoring…
I'm sorry but this is blatantly false. "Innately better" is a vague and inflammatory term, but if you define the measure, we can use straightforward statistical techniques to find correlations.
Simple example: East Africans outperform others in long-distance running. In sprinting, west Africans outperform.
We can separate confounders out because we have large data sets. You don't have to just try to compare populations as a mass. We can, for example, look at performance only of black people raised in white families. Or rich black people. Or white people raised in black families. Etc.
Taking the example of IQ, which is the most important statistical measure in these discussions, we can also look at poor populations with high IQ, like Jews (at certain historical times) or various groups of people from East Asia. Vietnamese boat people are a great comparison. It has to be explained how they were so successful despite facing the very similar or arguably worse challenges (e.g. holocaust) as other population groups.
Or look at subgroups of black people, like Nigerian immigrants to America, who have generally better social outcomes than average whites.
All this has been studied to death for decades and many conclusions are well-supported by statistics (at least as well-supported as lots of noncontroversial findings).