Intellectuals and Race Page 10
Another study, focussing on the effect of ability-grouping on the performances of students in general, mentioned among its conclusions: “Schooling in a homogeneous group of students appears to have a positive effect on high-ability students’ achievements, and even stronger effects on the achievements of high-ability minority youth.”62 In other words, high-ability minority youngsters do better in classes that are intellectually homogeneous, rather than racially homogeneous, or in which there are many members of their own race.
The negative effects of the black subculture on intellectual development are manifested in other ways as well. A study of high-IQ black adults found that they described their childhoods as “extremely unhappy” more often than other blacks.63 This study was done long before the current reports of academically striving black students being accused by their peers of “acting white.” Empirical studies during this later era show a negative correlation between black students’ academic achievement and their popularity among other black students. An opposite pattern was found among white Americans and Asian Americans.64 In England, lower-class whites show a pattern strikingly similar to that among American blacks who resent academically achieving classmates. British physician Theodore Dalrymple reports lower class school children being beaten up so badly by their lower class classmates as to require hospital treatment, simply because they are doing well in school.65
There is other evidence against the “critical mass” theory. In earlier times, from 1892 to 1954, all-black Dunbar High School in Washington sent 34 graduates to Amherst College, usually very few at any given time, and certainly nothing that could be called a “critical mass.” Seventy-four percent of those black students graduated from Amherst, 28 percent of these graduating as Phi Beta Kappas.66 Dunbar did not promote a black subculture. As Senator Edward Brooke, one of its alumni, put it:
Negro History Week was observed, and in American history they taught about the emancipation of the slaves and the struggle for equality and civil rights. But there was no demand by students for more, no real interest in Africa and its heritage. We knew about Africa as we knew about Finland.67
Yet the “critical mass” theory continues to flourish, with no evidence behind it, but with a peer consensus among the intelligentsia, which is apparently sufficient for many.
The cultural explanation of black-white IQ differences is also consistent with the fact that very young black American children do not lag behind very young white American children on mental tests, but that the gap begins and widens as they grow up. Research as far back as the 1920s found this pattern, as Otto Klineberg reported in a 1941 summary:
A study by Lacy, for example, showed that the average I.Q. of colored children dropped steadily from 99 to 87 in the first four school grades, whereas the White I.Q. remained almost stationary. Wells also noted that Negro children were equal to Whites at ages six, seven and eight; only slightly inferior at ages nine, ten and eleven; and showed a progressively more marked inferiority from the ages of twelve to sixteen.68
Professor Jensen offers an alternative, genetic explanation for this pattern,69 but a similar pattern was also found among low-IQ European immigrant groups in studies in 1916 to 1920, and among white American children in isolated mountain communities studied in 1930 and 1940,70 so it is not a racial peculiarity in a genetic sense. Professor Flynn’s explanation of this same pattern is consistent with the data cited by Klineberg. But these data are completely inconsistent with the prevailing multiculturalists’ doctrine that all cultures are equal. Flynn’s cultural explanation of black-white differences in IQ is also consistent with the otherwise puzzling anomaly that the mental test scores of white soldiers from various Southern states during the First World War were lower than the mental test scores of black soldiers from various Northern states at that time.71
Striking differences between the regional cultures of the South and the North in times past have been noted by many, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Frederick Law Olmsted and Hinton Helper in the nineteenth century, and Gunnar Myrdal in the twentieth century.72 Moreover, those differences went back for centuries, when similar differences existed in different regions of Britain, among people who would later settle in the American South and others who would later settle in New England.73
Some of these cultural differences have been detailed in Cracker Culture by Grady McWhiney and in Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer, as well as in my book Black Rednecks and White Liberals. The fact that whites who came out of that Southern culture scored lower on mental tests than Northern whites— as well as whites from some Southern states scoring lower than blacks from some Northern states— is much more difficult to reconcile with genetic theories than with cultural explanations. In fact, neither of the two main explanations of mental test score differences by the twentieth century intelligentsia— genetic differences or racial discrimination— can account for white Southerners scoring low on the Army mental tests in the First World War. But the cultural explanation is consistent with both blacks and Southern whites scoring low on these tests at that time.
Much has changed in the South in later generations, and especially in the latter decades of the twentieth century, in part as a result of interregional migrations which have changed the demographic and cultural makeup of the South, perhaps more so than other regions of the country. However, as late as the middle of the twentieth century, most blacks in America had been born in the old South, even when they lived in the North, so the culture of the South, which Gunnar Myrdal saw as common to both blacks and whites born in that region, lived on in black ghettos across the country.74 Many features of that culture have continued to live on today, often insulated from change by being regarded as a sacrosanct part of black culture and identity.
There is another striking phenomenon which cannot be explained by either the hereditary or the environmental theory of IQ differences— as heredity and environment are usually conceived. That is the fact that females are several times as numerous as males among blacks with high IQs,75 despite the fact that black males and black females inherit the same genes and are raised in the same homes and neighborhoods. Yet a cultural explanation seems more consistent with these findings as well, since the particular culture in which most blacks have lived for centuries, like the culture of white Southerners in the past, has emphasized especially macho roles for males.* It is hardly surprising if such a culture inhibited the intellectual development of both blacks and whites— especially males— in the South.
Further evidence that the male-female difference in IQs among blacks is cultural is that black orphans raised by white families show no such female superiority in IQs, in addition to both sexes having higher average IQs than other black children.76 It should also be noted that the male-female difference in average IQs among blacks is only a few points but, due to the characteristics of a bell curve, a small difference in average IQs translates into a large difference in male-female representation at high IQ levels. Since these high IQ levels are common among students at elite colleges and among people in elite occupations, their impact on demographic representation in such conspicuous places can be considerable.
There is other evidence that “environment” cannot be usefully defined solely in terms of current gross external circumstances, such as income levels or even levels of education. More important, environment cannot be defined solely in terms of surrounding circumstances at a given time.
During the era of mass immigration to the United States, for example, it was common for Italian and Jewish children to be raised in similar low-income neighborhoods and to sit side-by-side in the same classrooms. Yet the Jewish children began to improve educationally before the Italian children, who were mostly the offspring of southern Italian parents. Nor was this at all surprising, in light of different cultural attitudes that prevailed among Jews and among southern Italians, long before these children were born. Even uneducated Jews respected education, while the imposition of compulsory education in sout
hern Italy was not only resisted but evaded, and in places even led to riots and the burning of school houses.77 However similar the immediate circumstances of Italian and Jewish school children were on the Lower East Side of New York, each trailed the long shadow of the cultural history and tradition in which they were raised, and those histories and traditions were very different.
Just as the preferences of Progressive-era intellectuals for genetic explanations of group differences led them to give little attention to cultural explanations of intergroup differences in educational achievement, so the preferences of intellectuals in the second half of the twentieth century for external social explanations— racial segregation and/or discrimination in schools being prominent— led them to likewise overlook cultural explanations. But research on a school in a large metropolitan area in the North from 1932 through 1953 found IQ differences between Jewish and Italian children attending that school to be as persistent over the years as black-white IQ differences in racially segregated schools in the South, and IQ differences between Jewish and Puerto Rican youngsters in that same school to be not only as persistent, but as large, as IQ differences between black and white youngsters attending different, racially segregated schools in the Jim Crow-era South.78
There were similar IQ differences among Mexican American and Japanese American youngsters living in the same school district out west, at a place and time where there was little occupational difference among their parents.79 Cultural differences with educational consequences are not peculiar to the United States. When Maori students, admitted under preferential policies at New Zealand’s University of Auckland, fail to show up for tutorials as often as other students,80 their academic failures cannot be attributed automatically to institutional racism or to not having enough “role models”— not if the purpose is to advance Maoris rather than to protect a vision.
It should be noted that an internal explanation of racial differences— even if it is cultural, rather than genetic— deprives intellectuals of a moral melodrama and the opportunity that presents to be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. There are, of course, times to take moral stands on particular issues, but that is very different from saying that issues in general, or racial issues in particular, are to be automatically conceived in ways that create a moral melodrama. Yet internal explanations of economic outcome differences among Americans have become so taboo that it was literally front-page news in the New York Times when a conference was held on the possibility that “a culture of poverty” existed, and that this culture helped explain disparate economic and other outcomes among the poor in general or blacks in particular.81
Near the end of the twentieth century, another firestorm among the intelligentsia was ignited by the publication of a major study of intelligence testing in general, and the social implications of its results, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their book The Bell Curve. Although most of the data and analysis in this book dealt with samples of white Americans, its two chapters on ethnic differences in mental test scores dominated discussions of the book, and especially attacks on the book. Yet one of the most important— and most ignored— statements in The Bell Curve appears there completely italicized:
That a trait is genetically transmitted in individuals does not mean that group differences in that trait are also genetic in origin.82
As an example of that principle, it is known that differences in height among individuals are due mostly to genetics, but the difference in height between the people of North Korea and South Korea cannot be explained that way, because North Koreans were not shorter than South Koreans before drastic differences in living standards between the two halves of Korea began with that country’s partitioning after the Second World War,83 with North Korea being run by a draconian dictatorship that left its people in dire poverty. So, although genetics may explain most differences in height among most individuals and groups, it cannot explain all differences in height among all groups.
Whether there are, or have been, environmental differences of comparable magnitudes between other groups at various times and places, in ways that would affect mental capabilities, is a question that is open to empirical investigation. But what The Bell Curve says about the relative effects of heredity and environment on intergroup differences is that there is simply no foregone conclusion either way— which is the opposite of what was said by most of the intelligentsia in either the Progressive era or the later liberal and multicultural eras.
While The Bell Curve says that “the instability of test scores across generations should caution against taking the current ethnic differences as etched in stone,”84 it also refuses to accept the arguments of those who “deny that genes have anything to do with group differences, a much more ambitious proposition.”85 Authors Herrnstein and Murray declared themselves “resolutely agnostic” on the relative weight of heredity and environment in ethnic differences in cognitive abilities, because “the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.”86
Saying that existing evidence is inadequate to reach sweeping conclusions on a complex question like the existence or non-existence of differences in innate mental potential among races might not seem to be something to stir heated controversies, unless someone can point to definitive evidence, one way or the other, which no one has.* Nevertheless, The Bell Curve has been widely treated in the media, and even among many academics, as if it were just a restatement of the arguments of people like Madison Grant, despite the fact that (1) only two of its 22 chapters deal with ethnic differences and (2) their conclusions as to both facts and policies are as different from those of the Progressive era as from those of the later liberal and multicultural eras.
Like James R. Flynn, Herrnstein and Murray mention the fact that the children of black and white soldiers on occupation duty in Germany after the Second World War do not show the same IQ differences found between black and white children in the United States,87 though Herrnstein and Murray do not discuss it at length or offer any explanation. It is simply part of a general presentation of evidence on both sides of the issue, in a book that refuses to pretend that current knowledge permits a definitive answer that would validate the racial views prevailing among intellectuals in either the Progressive era or the later eras.
Whatever the merits or demerits of The Bell Curve in general (which I have discussed elsewhere*), neither seems to explain the heated reactions it has provoked. Perhaps the fact that Herrnstein and Murray publicly discussed the taboo subject of race and IQ at all— and did so without repeating the prevailing social pieties— was what offended many, including many who never read the book. The authors of The Bell Curve also did not share the prevailing optimism among people who see an environmental explanation of intergroup differences in cognitive ability as showing such differences to be readily amenable to enlightened social policies. Herrnstein and Murray pointed out that environmental differences among groups are passed on from parents to children, just like genetic differences,88 so their conception of environment is clearly not limited to current surrounding socioeconomic conditions, but includes the cultural heritage as well. Moreover, they did not see the mental tests which convey unwelcome news about intergroup differences in current mental capabilities as being the cause of those differences or due to “culture bias” in the tests themselves.
Just as Franz Boas had to argue against the dogmatism of the prevailing vision of race among the Progressives in the 1920s, in order to get his empirical evidence to the contrary even considered, so the authors of The Bell Curve have had to do the same in a later and supposedly more enlightened time. Even being agnostic about ultimate answers to the very complex questions that they explored was not enough to save them from the wrath of those whose social vision and agenda they undermined.
In an all too familiar pattern, the analysis and evidence in The Bell Curve were often side-stepped by critics, who instead attacked its authors as people with unworthy motives. John B. Judis of The New Rep
ublic dismissed The Bell Curve as “a combination of bigotry and of metaphysics,” using “linguistic legerdemain.”89 Michael Lind of Harper’s magazine called it part of an “astonishing legitimation” of “a body of racialist pseudoscience” representing “a right-wing backlash,” and “covert appeals to racial resentments on the part of white Americans.”90 Time magazine called the book a work of “dubious premises and toxic conclusions.”91 Such arguments without arguments were not confined to the media, but were also used by academics, including a number of well-known Harvard professors.
Professor Randall Kennedy, for example, declared that Herrnstein and Murray were “bankrolled by wealthy supporters of right wing reaction,”92 as if large-scale research projects of all sorts— including those at Harvard— are not bankrolled by somebody and, more fundamentally, as if an arbitrary characterization of those who financed the research says anything about the validity or lack of validity of the work itself. Professor Stephen Jay Gould depicted Herrnstein and Murray as promoting “anachronistic social Darwinism” and “a manifesto of conservative ideology.”93 Professor Henry Louis Gates said that the “most pernicious aspect of Murray and Herrnstein’s dismissal of the role of environment” is the implication that social programs to advance blacks are futile,94 though Professor Gates did not quote anything from The Bell Curve to substantiate this claim.