I think he's equating racism to being prejudice against people based on their ability.
That's close, but not quite what I'm aiming for. I actually
support discriminating against people based on their ability. Don't admit stupid people to Harvard. Don't put weaklings on your Olympic team.
I'm saying that those differences in ability are not nearly as genetically predetermined as most people assume they are. They are not entirely in your control either, but your affinity for Mozart over Jay-Z is not fixed at the moment of conception. You are the product of a million random chances that have influenced your early childhood development patterns and rates. You will reach adulthood with different learned skills than what other adults have learned. Those differences are NOT GENETIC.
Why is this part so hard? There is no genetic mechanism to store musical ability, or mathematical ability. Like virtually evert "talent", these are mental traits developed as your brain developed. Your brain is a constantly changing organ that is continuously flooded with extraordinary amounts of data you can't even consciously perceive. It does things you don't do on purpose. It responds to your environment in ways you can't see and certainly don't understand. It makes some of you shy and some of you enthusiastically bad singers some of you play too much dungeons and dragons, and NONE of that is stored in your genes.
I'm just repeating myself now, of course. I recognize and accept differences in abilities. I'm just saying that the common perception that these differences are inherent, instead of environmental, is completely without evidence. The supporting evidence is anecdotal at best, and has always been suspect because it was promoted by people with repugnant social agendas that colored their interpretations. Are you really surprised that white american sociologists is the 1950s thought that white people were genetically superior to black people? Do you accept their findings at face value?
Sure, they're related (insofar as a racist might think they're related), but racism is a huge step in the wrong direction from acknowledging that people are born with different natural capabilities.
I even accept that people are born with different natural capabilities! Such as they are, I suppose, since newborns have almost no abilities to speak of. But newborns are not blank slates, they have had nine VERY important months of environmental influences. I think it's well established that the pregnancy is a complicated process in which mom's diet and sleep and chemical exposure and even her mood play a huge roll on her developing fetus. We're each enormously vulnerable to environment during those nine months.
He's saying that if you live in a world where you believe that people are born with varying degrees of intelligence and capability then you must believe that people born of certain colors are more superior than others.
No, I'm saying over and over again that if you live in a world where genetics predetermines a person's abilities, then it's a tiny tiny step from there to also living in a world where race predetermines a person's abilities, since genetics and race are absolutely correlated. That latter is called racism, and it is widely used (by racists) to convince other people (generally non-racists) that their racist beliefs are acceptable because the must be at least partly true. You don't need to fall for that. Your genes are not determinative of your abilities. They're only partly determinative of your possible range of physical traits (muscle size, endurance, height, etc.) which can STILL be dramatically influenced by your environment (diet, training, etc). Effectively zero percent of human beings out of seven billion are currently bumping up against their maximum genetic potential.
If we're still talking about "talent" and whether or not a person can be genetically unable to earn $100k/year, then I think the assertion that a person's genetic or ethnic background can prevent them from achieving that level of success is pretty ridiculous. There are all kinds of other reasons a person might be unable to reach $100k, but "genes" isn't one of them unless they have conferred a disability.
people are not the "blank slate" you think they are.
Definitely not at birth. Do you make the same case at the moment of conception?
Do you make the same case if we're talking about the hypothetical future child of two black parents vs two white parents? Because I believe that if you could extract those minutes-old impregnated eggs and implant them in the other couple's womb, and then somehow obscure the skin color, the genetically black child raised by white parents and the genetically white child raised by black parents will both be the product of their environment. If one couple is rich and the other is poor, that will matter. If one couple is healthy and the other is sick, that will matter. Religion, diet, neighborhood, nap times, preschool activities, ALL of that matters in determining which child is more successful more than the effectively blank slate they were each given by their parents. Your genes can give you disabilites, but for otherwise normal healthy humans the human brain blueprint in your DNA and in my DNA is basically identical, no matter what race you are. Brains just aren't that different on their own, they are different based on how they are used. It's literally an adaptive organ, that's what it's for. It changes as needed.