speedymama, the rates are of course averages, not assertions of deterministic outcomes. They do omit factors that you or I would insist upon. This includes some normalisation of where people start from, not just where they finish. In America, black people, especially boys are not on average served well by the education system.
Your British experience does not shock me a much as it should. I see anecdotal evidence of racism and sexism at schools that would get a commercial enterprise crushed by sheer weight of lawsuits. My (white) wife had artsgrads pushing her to do "caring" subjects, which apparently physics is not, but biology (cutting up animals) is.
I think equally damaging is the lower expectations for various groups. My experience, though less explicit than yours was that my teachers thought as the son of a manual labourer I had ideas well above my station. They said this explicitly. We weren't friends.
My firm put people into banks mostly at PhD/MSc level, and as it happens a majority of the people we've placed aren't white males. I also wrote both our equal opportunity policies. The long rambling never to be read one we are required to have, and the real one which says "we do this for the money, we don't care".
My perspective is that highly competitive environments are less racist & sexist, and investment banks are the least bigoted of any employer I've encountered. But on only 5% of our database is female, we of course both know that women who do hard PhDs aren't exactly the majority. And yes we do try to get women in, and that does frankly include encouraging them to be less girly.
As for the Bell curve itself, I have a big issue with anything that calls black people a single group from a genetic perspective. Any measure of "black" people in this way can only sensibly measure social factors.
However I am wary of your position that it was done by white people, so isn't valid. Again I worry about selection on data that one wants to be true.
I also am uncomfortable about hyphen-achievers.
If someone did good work, then I don't care about their gender or race. Indeed I just don't like teaching as an aspect of social engineering.
My ancestry is Irish, and we were treated far worse by the English than black people ever were.
But I despise that sort of competitive victimhood.
The history I did at school was in part a list of all the bad things the British did to others and each other. Indeed it was only in later life I learned that slavers were helped by locals, and that my ancestors had screwed up big time.
The lesson I took away from learning of imperialism, famine, slavery et al is that people do this shit because they can. Religion and race may make them more vicious, but ultimately the trick is not to be the done to.
Thus to improve the lot of groups that are under-attaining you need to make sure they do tough, useful subjects and that you do that well.
A bit of black history may well be good, as long as it is not a celebration but warts and all.
A better, and more useful approach would be to take various events and analyse them from different perspectives. There are any number of situations where both black and white people genuinely beieved they were the good guys. But I think we both know that doesn't happen much in BH.