I think the unspoken concern here is the same concern women have with men. That if we’re not the same, we might be worse. If black people aren’t the same, indistinguishable in their qualities and capabilities, from whites, they might be worse. Which is itself a problem, because, first, you’re tacitly assuming that there aren’t flaws or tradeoffs or limitations to being white (or male); and second, by arguing that you are in essence the same with interchangeable capacities (what we call character, distinctiveness), then you must have an equal share in their flaws and limitations. You can’t argue that you’re exactly the same, but also better. That’s incoherent. If the races are interchangeable, then we need to correct for the preponderance of black musicians and athletes and preachers just as much as the preponderance of white physics professors and insurance executives and crab fishermen.

There’s no sense in arguing that you’re just the same as someone AND that you also have certain special and distinct qualities that justify you occupying a unique territory. That’s trying to have your cake and eat it too.
Maybe there are some genetic and cultural and historical inheritances we all possess that have some similar emergent results, especially when all three line up favorably, and especially at the tail ends of distributions, where the extreme and rare and highly visible individuals exist, people like Cole Porter or Bill Gates or Michael Jordan. Most of us live in a broadly overlapping middle space of our race and gender and nationality.

And maybe those exceptional individuals aren’t representational or average and aren’t a natural default, and it takes all those genetic, cultural, and historical elements lining up perfectly to make a life like that possible. Maybe instead of being afraid of how we’re different we could learn to love and value those differences, both in ourselves and in others, and be thankful for everything we gain from one another’s uniqueness.
The great thing is, there is wonderful flexibility available today, more than at any time in history. You can learn about the cultures and history and abilities of a vast historical and cultural array of all kinds of different people, and if you feel a desire or affinity for them, to seek them and aquire them and participate in them, you have unprecedented opportunities, compared to any point in the past. On the basis of available information and experience alone.

And so Glen Loury and Thomas Sowell can be giants of economics, rubbing elbows with Milton Friedman and Adam Smith and John Keynes, despite their radically differing backgrounds. It’s easier than ever today to belong to a group and a heritage, yet still find your own individual distinctiveness. And Western civilization helped give us that opportunity.

I’m descended from peasant farmers. We never demonstrated a special talent for anything but dying young and uneducated, right up to my grandparents’ generation. But my dad and brother are both doctors. No one saw that coming in all the long generations of struggling to survive. No one guessed it was possible. Gratitude for the abilities and accomplishments of others is useful. Ambition to match or to join in or exceed those accomplishments is useful. Resentment isn’t. If what you want is to actually push yourself forward.

If you really do care about a particular quality and/or trait and do want to increase it within your group, there is something you can do about that. There are two fairly rapid means to alter the existing makeup of a group. One big one is sexual selection. Take a generation or two and select specifically for the trait that you want, favor the sort of partners that you want your children to be like, and within a fairly short timescale you can radically alter and adapt the distribution of qualities in a group. You just have to make sure that you are maintaining a culture that favors and selects for those qualities, wherever they can be found.
And because specific individuals and therefore whole cultures are somewhat malleable within themselves, and have qualities they can favor and develop, you can also work on the nurturing side of life to affect your outcomes by developing and promoting a social and familial culture that really values and encourages certain traits.
If you want to be represented more in academic or financial fields, if you want to cultivate intelligence or education as a trait, you can do that. You can maximize your nurturing and development of that trait by making it a primary cultural value and really seeking to encourage your youth to strive and compete and develop themselves in this area.
You can also look at what conditions and cultural qualities other groups cultivate that have helped foster development in this area. The Jews are around one standard deviation more intelligent then everybody else, and heavily overrepresented among doctors, financiers, and academics, and part of that is no doubt genetic, but there is also likely to be a cultural component that complements and develops those capacities that can be imitated and acquired and perhaps even used to drive the further development of the genetic component.
As more and more whites, especially in certain areas, fall behind other races, it also becomes apparent that whiteness alone isn’t sufficient to produce or maintain certain sorts of qualities and advantages. Intelligence and the capacity for positive intellectual and financial outcomes can be lost as well as gained.
What doesn’t work is doing none of these things and then complaining when nothing changes, then asking people to alter the outcomes and standards by force to compensate. That has never worked for anyone, ever. Especially if you’re up against people, like many Asians for example, who are willing to be truly competitive and strive to foster and master the skills necessary to maximize their accomplishments in these areas. If they’re willing to pay the price and make the investment, then chances are that they will succeed out of proportion. No one becomes great at something by lowering their standards for it and investment in it. Trying to shift the definitions and measurements so doing well means something less than it used to will only reduce the future likelihood of developing those capacities.
Personally, I don’t have the kind of aggressive ambition and dedication that many other people, and even whole cultures, seem to have. So I don’t expect to become a CEO. But I do have things that I care about and strive to develop in my children. I have my heroes that I push on them. And they happen to include Thomas Sowell and Glen Loury and John McWhorter and Condoleezza Rice. Because those are the sort of people I want them to become.

Not because of their race, but because of their character and wisdom, which are it confined by racial boundaries but are available to all as a fundamental human inheritance. Those are the people who have the traits I admire and want to foster. And I chose a wife who likes those sort of people too. So we’re doing our bit through culture and sexual selection to select for that heritage.