Rev 0, post but edit as time allow and blend in with the general theme.
Intelligence_what.I.observed.consistently.prep.work.research.minorities.inferiority.html
2021-03-23 What I have observed consistently throughout my adult life - prep work for research on blacks & inferiority
What I have observed consistently throughout my adult life (I cannot speak for any other place because all of my adult life has been in the United States) is that for so many young men and teenagers (perhaps girls and woman too) who come from poor circumstances in living and surroundings – (such as getto life) is that I sense and feel an undercurrent of sadness in their being. I saw this consistently in the boys and men I taught the martial arts to. I saw and felt this sadness all the years I taught karate and even in engineering school, where I also taught Karate in my freshman and sophomore years, I felt this feeling in them, (not everyone, but so many and never in the foreign students from Africa, India, Korea, and such.).
I felt it again about a month ago during a visit to the cardiologist. Waiting also for the doctor – was a black man, about my age – sitting on a two-seat bench. I went over to him to make conversation – and sat down on the bench ignoring social distancing with glee.
We talked light talk for a while. Some-how we got onto a discussion about differences in people. He asked if I thought there were difference between races. I said yes. Blacks are much more prone to sickle cell anemia. I added that black people also experience high blood pressure and diabetes more often than whites. He nodded in agreement.
Then I asked him what he did before retirement. He said he was retired but that he had been a coal miner. We talked briefly about how most of the coal mines had closed in Hopkins County and we blamed it on Obama, or at least I did.
I asked him if he liked what he had worked at. He said, "not really." I asked him then "what did you really want to do?" He replied but I don't remember what he answered because what happened next put that memory packet into the back of my memory banks.
I then asked him "why didn't you pursue that." He said "I would have had to go to college." I asked him "was it money" and he replied "no. That was not a problem"
Then I asked, somewhat impatient, "what then was it?" "He replied, somewhat dejected,"I wasn't college material."
I asked, I am sure in a voice that annoyed the other waiting patients, "what do you mean by – I wasn't college material?" But he refrained from replying. I sensed the undercurrent of sadness in his voice.
Then I went dialoging – really lecturing him about my thesis that I wanted to develop – The Myth of IQ and how the right of the bell curve median represented the curve of opportunity and intervention, and how the left of the bell curve median represented lack of opportunity and intervention. And that the whole curve of this Gaussian Distribution was actually showing a division of labor, and that if you did believe in evolution – you could not find an example of where the brains of any particular species divided into such precise slices, of intelligence in the brain, and that if you look at a dog's leg, for the species as a whole, a dogs leg was a dogs leg, in all breeds, crooked like the IQ claim, but you could not cite a variety of different shapes. Nor, with the human brain could you dice and slice atthe autopsy table – the human brain and find the sections that held "genius here" and a cab level brain there.
<!—develop experience when 12 and walking our dogs in central park near Mt. Sini hospital – Dr. Langer (with his Irish setting he called Red) invited me to his pathology lab in Mt. Sini to see his collection of brains in bottles. And no matter how you slice and dice them – the brains are all essentially the same unless diseased or malformed by other factors, etc. -->
I am not sure he was catching on – but he wasn't getting mad at my butting into his inner life. So, because I was annoyed that he had come to that conclusion - that he wasn't college material - and had acted on it and it had affected his whole life – for I thought about what had happened to me when I was tested for the vocational school at about age 19. I had dropped out of school when I turned 16 and thus basically had got to the 8th grade. But having not gone to any school until I was about nine and had come to the United States - I knew what it meant to be a failure, especially an academic failure, a failure in school.
<!—flash back and develop the episode where the psychologist said that I had scored 98 percentile in spatial reasoning but had all but failed the math portions and should never go into anything involving math. That I had no aptitude for math. But because of my years of martial arts training - this had given me the confidence to ignore what the man said to me.
I decided to change tactics by giving this fellow patient waiting to see the cardiologist - a couple of examples that he could relate to.
"You remember that guy with all the stars on his shoulders" I asked, really a retorical question – "the one that become chief of staff – the one that become secretary of state – you remember him?"
"oh yea, him." he replied.
I asked him, "what did he have that you didn't have?"
"I don't know, what?" the fellow patient of the cardiologist replied.
"He had two things and one other. He had opportunity and Intervention and then the tenacity of a pit bull to put out the hard work it took to get him where he wanted to go. I'm not sure my friend knew what tenacity meant.
So I gave it another try:"
"What about the doctor under Trump. You remember him? A doctor Ben Carson. You remember. And he became a neurosurgeon. And he had those two things you must have to get to the goal you want plus one. Opportunity and Intervention. And the tenacity of a bull dog."
"But also, but also, you have to have freed yourself from thinking you are inferior as a person, especially compared to the white man."
This undercurrent of sadness that I felt in so many black students who(m) I taught the martial arts – as with conjoined twins – feelings of inferiority and feelings of sadness are often joined together as with these twins. Yet if I am not mistaken, Dr. Carlson did in fact separate two cojoined twins. Did he not do that! It can be done. It can be done.
I too as a young child having come to America from Australia (and prior to that from German DP camp) had that strong bond inside me, feeling inferior in intelligence and and being physically inferior, weak and unable to defend myself against bigger boys who would push me around because I spoke differently and this producing constant and chronic sadness.
I felt I could not learn. That I was dumb. And even in the United States I would constantly tell myself and I believed it so, 'I can't learn." Ben Carson didn't tell himself that he was inferior. He knew he wasn't. George Washington Carver didn't tell himself he was inferior. He knew he wasn't straight from the get-go. Frederick Douglass didn't see himself as inferior. Yet he had been a slave but taught himself to read and write – while a slave. Obviously he had Intervention and Opportunity brought into his life.
Look what Martin Luther King did. As with Mahatma (Great Soul) Gandhi who turned an empire upside down and freed his nation, so too did Martin Luther King (a true Mahatma) turn a great powerful nation upside down and right side an injustice that had burdened this nations for hundreds of years. He too had on his side Opportunity and Intervention.
<!—bring in Ruth and the Harlem experiment and its success when I & O come together.
<!—bring in now how presupposition and implicit bias by much of the successful in society they, these minorities witness, the black children and adults (with them it often confirms their inner belief of inferiority) unintentionally infect black children when they are young – and how the constant reminders bring about a confirming belief that "I am stupid, I can't learn".
<!—bring in how it was necessary for the black sanitation workers in Memphis to boldly walk down the road in protest to an injustice – proudly witnessing to both the spectators and themselves that "I AM A MAN"
<!—this sense of inferiority is real and it is destructive, both to the individual and to the society. It often leads to action – to destructive acts upon the society that has caused this deep and painful feeling of being inferior; and or to personal destruction such as to commit suicide or to attempt
-more to develop- rev 0