> That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school. Also, people have tried special high quality schools for poor blacks and it doesn't solve the problem.

Your research is out of date on these topics.
General scientific consensus today is that nurture is as important as nature for IQ, particularly among younger children (the Flynn Effect alone makes this conclusion obvious).

You're also placing an over-emphasis on IQ, Black wage gaps exist in industries where IQ is not a strong measure of success. There's also good research indicating that Black wage gaps continue to exist after you correct for experience/education, and that hiring rates are influenced by non-intelligence based factors like how "white" your name sounds on an application resume.

This has been the case not just in Black communities, but in many of the "they're just biologically different" debates that spring up, particularly around gender. There's a statistically significant difference in how many women-created pull requests get accepted into Open Source libraries based on whether or not names are obscured/anonymized before the requests are submitted. I think it's pretty clear that IQ is not a sufficient explanation for those results.

So we're going to get into the IQ stuff, but to be clear, your view of IQ is skewed. IQ is not as important as you're making it sound for income (there's some correlation, but it's a lot milder than people assume). This is particularly true when you start looking at high-paying management roles where intelligence tends to matter a lot less than social skills. No engineering job has ever given me an IQ test before they hired me or asked me about one. Resumes are based on experience, which is largely determined by opportunity, connections, and free time. So I think it's really problematic to focus on IQ to this degree or to try to reduce success to a pure factor of IQ, but since you brought it up...

> The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap.

Check your research on this, it's actually the complete opposite of what you claim. Black kids raised in higher-income white homes have dramatically better pre-adolescent test results.

Interestingly enough, test results actually go down as they age and interact more with the broader adult world, indicating that there might be something about the surrounding world that makes those gains recede over time. I wonder what that could be?

> You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems...

Oh come on. I'm not the person here disregarding decades of research that say that socio-economic status is a leading indicator of school performance, influencing everything from teaching resources, to pre-adolescent stress, to nutrition, to exercise, to time spent on homework and extracurricular activities. Cut it out with the "you're just biased" nonsense, very few scientists seriously believe that poverty doesn't affect IQ.

> You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic.

First of all, that's not really how science works. You don't get to propose a ridiculous theory and then make it everyone else's job to disprove you. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence that this is not genetic, not the least being that genes for intelligence don't work that way and there is no single gene for intelligence, and also race doesn't work that way and there is no single genetic makeup of everyone who is Black. No one has ever found a set of genes solidly linked to intelligence that is shared across every Black community.

And people have tried. Race science was big in America's history. But it turns out, there is no good evidence for it, and there is a ton of evidence that environment is as influential as anything else for education levels. This is generally accepted science, and I don't understand how you're seriously arguing that environment doesn't affect education. It's not intellectually dishonest when looking at a theory that has never produced evidence in its favor and that doesn't really make sense based on our current understanding of genetics, to instead go with the theory that actually does have evidence.

But if you believe otherwise, I have a teapot orbiting Mars to sell you.

> There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life.

So you support free preschool, childcare, and increased resources for low-income parents in Black neighborhoods? Would you support enforcing maternity leave to make it easier for low-income parents to spend more time with their kids, since early-childhood parental involvement is a statistically significant indicator of future intelligence?

I mean, you seem to be pretty confident that you know what the problem is, so you must have a list of solutions.

I get kind of tired when people who are not lifting a finger to help Black communities try to guilt activists and argue that they'd be more successful if they just focused on the "right things." So I'm curious what you're doing to help.