[PapaBear3625]

Environment plays a huge role. Things like lack of maternal nutrition during pregnancy, and malnutrition and illnesses within the first few years cause permanent and irreversible impairments of brain development. The black and Hispanic poverty cultures typically have very non-nutritious diets. A fetus can have the best combination of intellect genes possible, but if his mother only eats junk food while pregnant and only feeds him junk food during childhood, his brain simply will not develop to its full potential. Infectious diseases also prevent the brain from developing fully (because the body is spending so much energy to fight the disease, it has none to spare on brain development); some infectious diseases cause direct brain damage. In addition, the brain of a child who is not intellectually stimulated during infancy and toddlerhood will also not develop to its potential. All of these environmental factors exist in poor neighborhoods, which also tend to have a large minority population. (The whites living in those same neighborhoods also have the same issues.) These environmental factors lower IQ permanently.

From The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 2009:

For both blacks and whites, family income is one of the best predictors of a student’s SAT score. Students from families with high incomes tend to score higher. Students from low-income families on average have low SAT scores. Because the median black family income in the United States is about 60 percent of the median family income of whites, one would immediately seize upon this economic statistic to explain the average 200-point gap between blacks and whites on the standard SAT scoring curve.

But income differences explain only part of the racial gap in SAT scores. For black and white students from families with incomes of more than $200,000 in 2008, there still remains a huge 149-point gap in SAT scores. Even more startling is the fact that in 2008 black students from families with incomes of more than $200,000 scored lower on the SAT test than did students from white families with incomes between $20,000 and $40,000.

The above was also noted in the book, "The Bell Curve". Read the bolded part above again. The average black child, raised in a top-income household, has a lower SAT score than the average working-class white child.

Affirmative action in higher education does not primarily help the black child from the ghetto. It primarily gives an advantage to the children of upper-income blacks over working-class whites. It means that the child of a black professional will be more likely to be admitted, and likely get a better financial aid package, than a smarter working class white kid.

Where is the fairness in that?

[exDemMom]

The above was also noted in the book, "The Bell Curve". Read the bolded part above again. The average black child, raised in a top-income household, has a lower SAT score than the average working-class white child.

And I would still ask the question: how many generations removed from the ghetto are these black children, on average? That environment can take generations to overcome in terms of child development. Furthermore, what is the culture within the family? Is it still "black" poverty culture? Also, were those kids in the upper middle class families born into that class, or did their families fight their way there during their childhood?

The bottom line is that we're still talking environmental and cultural factors, here. Those need to be fixed before we see real improvement.