[haihaibye]

Nobody has ever claimed a 100% genetic basis of difference. The individual heritability of IQ is .5 to .8 for example

Sub-Saharan diversity is a real thing, eg Bantu, Nilotic, Pygmy and Bushmen are extremely diverse (African Americans are not Pygny or Bushmen so not as diverse)

But if you use cluster analysis on human genomes and ask it to divide humanity into 2 clusters, it divides humans into Sub Saharan Africans and everyone else.

The key is selection not just randomness (most variation does little or nothing) you can't say eg "Africa is the most diverse therefore it will have the best adaptations for altitude" (that would be Tibetans, courtesy of interbreeding with Denisovians)

The number of variants responsible for skin color is actually extremely small. It's why you can have such large variation between siblings.

In contrast yes intelligence is highly polygenic. However, given sufficient sample sizes you can calculate genome wide association scores and work this all out.

[s1artibartfast]

I think the more telling test for bias (genetic, social, or otherwise) is to compare groups with long standing US ancestry with recent immigrants of the same background and education.

My understanding is that while we attribute much of inequality to bias in treatment, recent immigrants and their decedents vastly outperform comparable individuals with the same skin color.

To me, this indicates that much of the differences we observe are due to biases of past treatment, opposed to discriminatory treatment in the present.

[jjeaff]

Comparing modern African immigrants to modern day Black Americans descended from enslaved people is not going to get you a clean comparison by any means. Modern African immigrants are one the most highly educated groups of people in the US. And many of them come having already attained that education due to family money, intelligence, whatever. The poor or even average African immigrants has little chance of making it here. In other words, you are comparing an all star team to the general population.

And yes, biases of past treatment is one of the main issues that many are trying to correct with affirmative action-like programs. There doesn't have to be any modern, active racism at all to try and correct the terrible damage done in the past on a systemic basis. In many cases, this past injustice is exactly what systemic racism is referring to.

[haihaibye]

There are also cultural differences, I would bet they have different mindsets of 'grievance' vs 'opportunity' towards the USA

It would also be hard to not be affected by selection effects, eg compare Obama's dad who came to America for an economics PhD at Harvard vs someone whose ancestors were enslaved for hundreds of years

[jjeaff]

Yes, sub-saharan diversity is even more diverse. But diversity among African Americans is still much higher than that of the white population. In fact, most African Americans descended from enslaved have 20-40% European/white DNA (and for unspeakable reasons, most of that DNA is of the supposedly wealthy, elite, most intelligent white progenitors of this country). So I just see no way to make any useful extrapolations based on genetics. Especially considering the externalities involved in being Black in America.

[haihaibye]

The white admixture could allow you to do admixture studies. Ie examine the inherited white regions see how white polygenic educational attainment scores vs pigmentation scores affect outcomes

This is explicitly forbidden in terms of use of the best databases however

https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/nih-genetics