We've been Brainwashed!

At some point I came to the conclusion that starting in 1619 with the beginning of the slave trade, continuing with Jim Crow, and extending into the apartheid level of underfunding of black schools, that as a population, many of us, but not ALL, have been brainwashed into believing we are mentally inferior in general, but especially in subjects like mathematics.

Of course, inferiority is a relative notion, so the flipside is that whites were brainwashed into believing that they were superior.  These are definitely NOT symmetric types of brainwashing, and it is certainly more fun to believe you are superior.

The reason for these sorts of conditioning efforts is pretty obvious: a program of dehumanization so that you can justify some or all of the following: genocide, land/resources theft, and slavery. Obviously, I am focusing on the descendants of the slave trade, or more politely, the African diaspora, but this story has been repeated around the world for millennia with many different populations.

Of course, there has always been a cottage industry of  "scholars" promoting these racist notions, dressed up in enough statistics so as to appear "scientifical". The one that comes to mind most often for me is the book "The Bell Curve", which sounds like a math, probability, or statistics book, but my recollection is that the book was basically saying Asians > Whites > Blacks. It's clever because it was written by a couple of white guys.  You see what they did there? Honestly, I might not have finished this book once I got the gist of it. I think I borrowed it from my racist housemate. It's an interesting story as to how I had a racist housemate incidentally.

Fortunately, there are also books like "Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority" by Tom Burrell which I recommend.

In any case, once an individual or group of people has been successfully brainwashed into accepting their inferior status in the world, or accepting that they can only be excellent at sports, singing, dancing, or entertainment in general, etc...combined with the objective reality of vastly inferior schools and educational opportunities for hundreds of years, the results are not really a big surprise.

This is the reason I am always railing against the over emphasis on sports, singing, and dancing, etc...but, just to be clear, I am not against these activities, after you have shown some mastery of, say for example, mathematics, just to pick a random topic.  In fact, while I was not a great athlete, unless you think ultimate frisbee is a sport, in which case I was death incarnate, I have a terrible singing voice, and even remember the guy from the Chicago Children's Choir visibly wincing at my singing when they came to evaluate our class for new prospects, but I actually like dancing and met my wife in a salsa club/class, you know, the old fashioned way.