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Comment by wycs | Hacker News Reader

If this is your explanation for disparate outcomes, it does not strike me as a good one. No population has gone through more stress than post-war Jewish immigrants yet their children were the most successful cohort in America. Chinese immigrants were subjected to horrific racism and yet they are far more successful than gentile whites on average.

Whatever the explanation, Lysenkoist propagation of intergenerational trama is unlikely to be correct, though it may prove politically expedient.

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> No population has gone through more stress than post-war Jewish immigrants yet their children were the most successful cohort in America.

That's really ignorant. How can you defend this viewpoint? Jewish immigrants were many levels better off than black Americans.

Jewish at least had an opportunity to migrate to other places. European atrocities in South Asia, for example, the engineered famine affected 40 million lives and 5 million dead.

The trauma olympics isn't usually a fruitful discussion, but I think it's worth pointing out that Holocaust survivors were from a single generation or two, while slavery in America existed for 240 years, so it might not be a fair comparison. And the level of racism Chinese immigrants faced is still of a much lower intensity than black Americans faced. I mean, even if you don't count the first 240 years of slavery, there's still the next hundred years of weekly extrajudicial executions in public by mobs.

Hell, the whole "hard working" Asians stereotype was a racist attempt to discredit criticisms of racism towards African Americans. "Hey, look! We're not racist! If the blacks were as hard working as the yellows we wouldn't have a problem!" was literally their argument.

> Hell, the whole "hard working" Asians stereotype was a racist attempt to discredit criticisms of racism towards African Americans.

Did you really just attempt to discredit the rather well documented history of industriousness of Asians and Asian-American immigrants in particular in order to further your political narrative?

I think you’re missing their point. People of all races are hard working. That should go without saying. To say a whole race of people are not hard working is nothing more than a form of racism.

Jews have been persecuted for a thousand years [1]! They whole reason for the Jewish diaspora was they kept getting kicked out of countries wherever they settled. Even where they were temporarily tolerated, they were still often discriminated against. Antisemitism wasn't just a Nazi thing, it was global and lasted far longer than slavery.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany

I know, but I was responding to the claim that "no population has gone through more stress than post-war Jews" and it being a counterexample to American slavery. It's a difficult thing to compare as it's essentially an apples-to-oranges comparison.

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