I didn't miss the point. I consider it deeply offensive and am baffled that anyone would consider it germane in 2010.

You mention "inequality of opportunity." The linked PDF overviews didn't ignore race; they (like I) indicated that in the U.S., race and poverty are tightly correlated. They also indicate (without touching the third rail of racial politics in the U.S.) that "racial" performance differences exist even within broader socioeconomic groups. This is also unsurprising, as there's a lot of subconscious racism in the U.S. (there's documented bias toward picking white or lighter coloured children to answer questions in class, even when the teacher tries to avoid it, as well as many other examples such as [1][2][3][4]).

Go back to Gladwell for a moment: advantages multiply. Whether you agree with his approach or not, on this part he's right. Canadian hockey players born in January are substantially more successful than those born in December because of the way that junior and senior hockey leagues are organized. This is because they are bigger, play better, have better coordination, etc. and then better coaches become more interested. They get more advantage because they started with a birth advantage. The inverse is also true: disadvantages multiply.

You also mention "measured performance"; many of these measures are unconsciously biased toward a middle-class to upper-class experience. In my wife's teaching experience, she has had students who are raised without religion who don't get (Christian) religious allusions that are present in some of the books that they read. If one doesn't have a particular experience, then one cannot be meaningfully tested on that experience. If your measure of "success" is based on those experiences, then your measure of success is by definition biased. That bias may be good or not, but the exposure to those experiences must be measured and controlled for before you start making sweeping (and wrong) statements as Hilbert Spaces was doing.

In 2010, Hilbert Spaces suggestion that ethnicity is the primary factor involved here is as nonsensical as the idea that girls should think that "math is hard." It's stupid, it's racist, and it's offensive.

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[1] "One of the more upsetting discoveries is that children as young as three-years-old will associate positive traits with white people and negative traits with black people regardless of the race of the child or the attitudes of the children's parents and teachers." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-samuels/unconscious-racism...

[2] "But inequalities extend beyond UD's African-American students and onto other campus minorities. An American born and raised student, junior Ed Hazboun, has faced discrimination multiple times due to his Arabic ethnicity. 'At one time my advisor for three years was going over my schedule and made a comment about the paper work I would have to fill out. You would think that after three years, that advisor would realize that I was a current student and not a foreign exchange student,' he said. 'Another time my philosophy teacher asked me if the Muslim religion viewed the topic we were discussing about ethics differently. Being born and raised Catholic, I was unable to answer.'" http://flyernews.com/articles/volume/57/issue/36/id/5718

[3] "A 2008 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology took Norton’s research a step further, examining the effects that whites’ attempts at colorblindness had on black participants. Ironically, the negative nonverbal behaviors exhibited by “colorblind” whites were interpreted by blacks as signs of prejudice, making them suspicious of their partners. It is hardly surprising that racial tensions increased among participants." http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_perils_of_c...

[4] "In many situations, from either the dominant or the oppressed, simple unconscious associations may drastically change outcomes. An example is Steele and Aaronson's (1995) work on stereotype threat, in which the performance of African-American students in a testing situation was cut in half by asking them to identify their race at the start of the test. This simple act unconsciously reminded students of the stereotypes connected with their race. Moreover, when asked at the end of the test, the students who were primed to remember their race were unable to identify the reminder as a factor in their poorer test score (Steele 1997)." http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k_v90/k0901mou.htm