[bobman0330]

There's been a fair amount of discussion lately about whether or not there are innate differences between the races. I'm not really interested in getting involved in that debate, because it's always been far too trivial for me to waste my time becoming informed. But I was thinking about it today, and I wondered the following:

If God came down in person tomorrow and announced that "blacks" (however that's even defined) were less intelligent by 2 IQ points, on average, what specific things would change?

The only correct answer, it seems to me, is nothing. Would we quit worrying about the legacies of racism, slavery, and inequality in our society? Why would we? Even if some of the achievement gap were related to innate racial differences, we know that racism is also a factor, and presumably we would remain committed to fighting it.

Would we start making racially-based judgments about blacks? I certainly hope not. It's not as if the only bad thing about racism is that stereotypes are often wrong. If you approach an Asian person and say, "Wow, you must really be good at math" it's still offensive even though the imputed quality is a positive thing. Even if minor differences do exist, that's still no reason not to treat individual human beings as human beings.

Would our everyday lives change? I can't see how they would. I personally have never interacted with the black race as a whole. I've often dealt with individuals of different skin color, but I've never used statistical distributions to approximate their characteristics. Why would I when I could just find out about them as human beings?

For a topic over which such a large amount of ink (and blood) has been spilled, it seems to me to be of surprisingly little importance. Can anyone explain to me why it would have any impact if minor but real differences between races were discovered? (Disclaimer: I am not suggesting that such differences do exist, and I am personally skeptical of such claims.)