eg Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice.

Clarence Thomas is widely considered one of the worst Supreme Court justices in memory, and is famously uninvolved, going years without a question; he has also written harshly about how he feels affirmative action cheapened his degrees. Colin Powell's parents are both Jamaican immigrants, similar to Malcolm Gladwell or Barack Obama whose father was African, highlighting how select and successful African immigrants are. Condoleezza Rice, amusingly enough, is almost as white as Obama is (which given the last admixture fractions I read, means she has about twice as much European genetics as the average African-American).

If I assume no difference in std dev or skew in intelligence distribution, it seems to me that I observe too many intelligent black folks for the mean to be in the 80s. Moreover, adding an assumption that std dev is lower doesn't help - now the successful black folk are explained, but I don't observe enough extreme low IQ folk.

I don't see why you think you observe remotely close to a population sample; ordinary observations are censored in many ways - how many supermax prisons do you visit every day? How many ghettos? When was the last time you saw a retarded person bashing their head against the wall? How many people do you know that are Creationists, anti-gay marriage, depressive, schizophrenic, on probation, demented, alcoholics, or have been sexually abused? What is your score on Murray's high-IQ bubble quiz?

Now, moving on from absurd assertions from anecdotes, we can see that there are a reasonably large absolute number of intelligent black professionals who you might often run into, especially in government circles, by calculating the implications of the gap.

The gap has shrunk somewhat over time: http://humanvarieties.org/2013/01/15/secular-changes-in-the-black-white-cognitive-ability-gap/ It's probably around 0.9 standard deviations right now, so the mean would not be '80s', it'd be 100-(0.9 * 15) = ~87.

The US black population is apparently ~38,929,319. People who strike one as notably intelligent tends to imply >=130 IQ, in my experience, or more specifically the famous 99th percentile, which specifically works out to 2.32SD. We combine this with the 0.9SD gap to get an equivalent selectiveness on blacks of 3.2SDs, which translates back to 0.21% of the black population. And out of 39m people, that's a good dnorm(qnorm(0.99) + 0.9) * 38929319 ~> 86,000 black people who pass that highly stringent bar. So one could arrange to run into more intelligent black people than one could ever keep straight in one's head without any contradiction of the gap.

(Incidentally, given a life expectancy of something like 75 implies that there's around 1173 very intelligent young black people each year being fought over by elite universities, which helps explain why they have such ferocious difficulties recruiting and why Harvard can be so thrilled at enrolling 170 black students.)