{"id":20437,"date":"2020-12-16T01:11:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T05:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=20437"},"modified":"2020-12-16T18:22:20","modified_gmt":"2020-12-16T22:22:20","slug":"black-behavior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/black-behavior\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Behavior and Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What are the racist beliefs about Black behavior? How are these stereotypes explained by a condition known as post-traumatic slave syndrome?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In behavioral racism, Black behavior is anticipated to be poor actions and poor judgement by the entire race. One explanation for the cause of this behavior is a condition known as post-traumatic slave syndrome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more about behavioral racism, Black behavior, and the factors explaining such stereotypes and phenomena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Behavioral Racism and the Stereotypes About Black Behavior<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Behavioral racism <\/strong>is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities, the main idea being the belief that individuals represent their entire race, and racial groups represent the behavior of individuals.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Example #1: President Clinton claimed that no social program was going to be able to help Black people deal with absent fathers, welfare dependency, or pregnancy out of wedlock unless Black people first took some personal responsibility for getting themselves into these situations. Clinton\u2019s ideas were racist because they suggested that the difficulties Black people faced were caused purely by their behavior, not by policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Example #2: In the 90s, Black parents held their children to a very high standard because both Black and White people held the idea that if an individual Black teenager did something wrong, it made the Black race as a whole look bad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The truth is, racial-group behavior doesn\u2019t exist.<\/strong> There\u2019s no scientific evidence to link behavior and race\u2014all theories are anecdotal and based on stories of individuals\u2019 behavior. The actions of individuals can lead them to individual success, but group success depends on policy, not on any level of personal responsibility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Additionally, culture and behavior are separate.<\/strong> Culture is a group tradition. Certain racial groups might share culture, but not every group within a race, or every individual member, participates in that culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

History and Invention of Behavioral Racism<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Behavioral racism came into being in 1869 when Francis Galton (Darwin\u2019s eugenicist cousin) tried to find a way to prove that Black people weren\u2019t as smart as White people.<\/strong> He couldn\u2019t come up with a way to prove this, but two of his successors did\u2014they invented an IQ test. Lewis Terman<\/a>, a Stanford psychologist, tested Americans and found that IQ varied by race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eugenicist Carl C. Brigham, a psychologist at Princeton, took these results to mean that an intellectual racial hierarchy<\/a> existed. He later created that SAT, believing it would show that White people were by nature more intelligent than people of other races.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAchievement Gap\u201d<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

By the 1960s, the idea that an intellectual hierarchy existed was dying out, but there was still a gap between White and Black students\u2019 results on standardized testing. This gap was named the \u201cachievement gap\u201d and initiatives such as Race to the Top, Common Core, and No Child Left Behind were implemented to try to close the gap. However, these initiatives only amplified the importance of standardized testing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Standardized testing is a massively effective racist policy<\/a>. It seems like a legitimate measure of intelligence, because it\u2019s \u201cstandard\u201d and relies on hard numbers, but it disfavors certain races. <\/strong>Test-taking is an art, and most tutors and test-prep courses are in White and Asian communities, so many Black students don\u2019t have access to them. Even if you\u2019re very intelligent, doing well on standardized tests requires learning how they work. The \u201cachievement gap\u201d is a gap in opportunity, not intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: The Cause of Black Behavior?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Behavioral racists link all sorts of behaviors to race, not just studiousness. Behavioral racists over time have attributed \u201cBlack behavior\u201d to three sources:<\/p>\n\n\n\n