Wikipedia has an interesting chart showing how many blacks have been in the U.S. senate at different times over the last 235 years. Amazingly, it seems to consistently average around 0.5 from 1789 all the way to 2010, and then suddenly in 2013, the average triples to 1.5, and even that average has doubled to 3 since 2017. Note that the number of black senators is roughly equal to the percentage of the senate that is black since there’s been 100 senators for well over half a century and there were already 76 by 1870.

Now you may say “AmeriKKKa” is still an incredibly racist country since 14% of the country is black, but blacks have never been more than 4% of the U.S. senate.

However we have to consider that America is arguably a meritocracy, and last time I checked, black Americans are still 15 IQ points to below white Americans, and 13 points below all Americans. This matters because it’s estimated that 41% of the U.S. senate has IQs in the top 1% (+2.33 standard deviations (SD)) and thus the average U.S. senator is around +2.07 SD.

Given that IQ predicts how much power you’ll have in this World (r = 0.45), the median senator is probably +2.07 SD/0.45 = +4.6 SD in power (on a normalized curve), suggesting only one in 473,000 U.S. adults (age 25+) has that kind of power. Cutting that rarity in half, we can infer the the lowliest U.S. senator is at the one in 237,000 level (+4.47 SD). That suggests that of the 232 million Americans aged 25+, about 979 are either one of the 100 senators, or someone even more powerful (a U.S. governor, billionaire, high court judge, President etc).

Now how many of these 979 would we expect to be black? Well, if the average black IQ still tests at 0.87 SD below the U.S. mean (still waiting for the WAIS-5 to release their demographic data), and if IQ correlates 0.45 with power, then the the distribution of black power will be shifted 0.45(+0.87 SD) = 0.39 SD to the left of the overall U.S. distribution. That means that if the odds of achieving at least senator level power are one in 237,000 for Americans in general (+4.47 SD), they will be one in 1.76 million (4.47 SD + 0.39 SD = +4.86 SD) for black Americans. Now given that there are about 32 million black Americans over 25, that’s only 18 people, or 1.83% of the 979 Americans who are at least as powerful as a senator.

And yet prior to 2013, it appears blacks have never been more than 1.3% of the U.S. senate and as recently as 2010, were 0%. What this suggests is that prior to around 2013, there was significant white privilege to the point where even high IQ blacks were outdistanced by equally intelligent whites, despite affirmative action propelling blacks forward.

Then around 2013 it was pretty much a color blind society, with neither blacks averaging almost the 1.83% representation in the U.S. senate that their IQ distribution would predict.

But since 2017, that 1.83% representation has been greatly exceeded on average and it’s arguably been better to be black. We started hearing about people like Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug who pretended to be black to get ahead, a stunning reversal of hundreds of years of light skinned blacks desperately “passing” for white to escape racism.

This dramatic change may also explain why in 2008, Barack Obama needed to be more intelligent than most white Presidents to be considered a viable candidate, but in 2024, Kamala Harris is not being held to quite the same standards.