Intellectuals and Race Read online

  Professor Nathan Glazer likewise questioned “the motivations of the authors”95 and concluded that, even if Herrnstein and Murray were correct in saying that currently prevailing beliefs are based on an untruth, “I ask myself whether the untruth is not better for American society than the truth.”96

  By falsely portraying the authors of The Bell Curve as genetic determinists, and then offering little besides vituperation against them, intellectuals may inadvertently promote the false conclusion that there is no serious argument or evidence against genetic determinism. With certainty remote and the magnitudes now in dispute of questionable social consequence,* the ferocity of the attacks on those who deviate from the prevailing orthodoxy may signal little more than the sanctity of a vision or fear of the truth.

  __________

  * These differences are by no means limited to racial or ethnic groups. In Indonesia, residents of Java score higher than Indonesians living in the outer islands, and women score higher than men. (Robert Klitgaard, Elitism and Meritocracy in Developing Countries [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986], pp. 119, 124.) In China, low-income and rural youngsters score lower on examinations (Ibid., p. 19). First-born children in general tend to score higher on mental tests and to do better in school than later children in the same families. (Lillian Belmont and Francis A. Marolla, “Birth Order, Family Size, and Intelligence,” Science, December 14, 1973, p. 1096. But see also Phillip R. Kunz and Evan T. Peterson, “Family Size and Academic Achievement of Persons Enrolled in High School and the University,” Social Biology, December 1973, pp. 454–459; Phillip R. Kunz and Evan T. Peterson, “Family Size, Birth Order, and Academic Achievement,” Social Biology, Summer 1977, pp. 144–148.)

  * In many parts of the Army Alpha test used during the First World War, the modal score of black soldiers was zero— derived by subtracting incorrect answers from correct answers, in order to neutralize the effect of guessing. But the actual intellectual substance of some of these questions involved only knowing that “yes” and “no” were opposites, as were “night” and “day,” “bitter” and “sweet” and other similarly extremely easy questions— questions too simple to be missed by anyone who knew what the word “opposite” meant. However, in the Army Beta test, given to soldiers who could not read, some of the questions involved looking at pictures of a pile of blocks and determining how many blocks there were, including blocks that were not visible, but whose presence had to be inferred (and counted) from the shape of the piles. Yet fewer than half of the black soldiers received a score of zero on such questions, which were more intellectually demanding, but did not require the ability to read and understand words. Given the very small quantity and very low quality of education received by that generation of blacks, even those who were technically literate were unlikely to have a large vocabulary of written words, so it is hardly surprising that the completely illiterate black soldiers did better on more challenging questions than did blacks with some ability to read. For details, see Carl Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1923), pp. 16–19, 36–38; [Robert M. Yerkes,] National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Examining in the United States Army (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1921), Vol. XV, Part III, pp. 874, 875; Thomas Sowell, “Race and IQ Reconsidered,” Essays and Data on American Ethnic Groups, edited by Thomas Sowell and Lynn D. Collins (Washington: The Urban Institute, 1978), pp. 226–227.

  * Anyone with experience teaching in American schools or colleges may well question whether either the average black or white student is working so close to his or her ultimate mental capacity as to make that ultimate capacity a matter of practical concern.

  * There may be another, but different, environmental reason for the male-female differences in IQs among blacks. There is evidence that females in general are less affected by environmental disadvantages of various sorts than are males. (Arthur R. Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review, Winter 1969, pp. 32, 67.) This possibility is independent of the peculiarities of the culture of the South and would apply to other groups with a very different culture, but who have low IQs for other reasons. Which factor carries more weight is hard to determine. Since there was no mass mental testing of white Southern females during the era when there was mass mental testing of white Southern males in the U.S. Army, we have no way to know whether there was a similar IQ difference between the sexes in the white Southern population at that time. However, there are data on sex differences between males and females among Jews, back during the early twentieth century, when Jews scored below average on mental tests. In that era, Jewish girls scored higher than Jewish boys on mental tests. Clifford Kirkpatrick, Intelligence and Immigration (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Co., 1926), pp. 26–27.

  * Even if such definitive evidence were possible, its practical effect would be questionable, given the limited magnitude of the differences in scientific dispute today. If science were to prove, for example, that the innate mental potential of blacks is 5 percent more than that of whites, of what practical value would that be, except to alert us to an even greater waste of potential than we might have thought? But that would tell us nothing about how to stop this waste. Moreover, the practical relevance of concerns about the limits of mental potential seems questionable when it is by no means clear that either black or white American students are operating anywhere close to those limits.

  * My comments on both can be found in the essay “Ethnicity and IQ” in The Bell Curve Wars, edited by Steven Fraser (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 70–79.

  * Even though the social consequences of a 15-point intergroup difference in IQ are very significant, what remains in dispute among major contemporary protagonists on opposite sides of the heredity-versus-environment issue is not whether all of that difference is due to genes. Nor is the issue between today’s major contending protagonists whether there is a racial ceiling to intelligence, as was once widely assumed among genetic determinists of the early twentieth century. Moreover, the research of Professor James R. Flynn has destroyed the early twentieth century prediction of declining national IQs, while radical changes in the relative rankings of Jews on mental tests between the period of the First World War and their very different rankings in later years undermined belief in the permanence of group and intergroup IQ levels.

  Chapter 6

  Liberalism and Multiculturalism

  No issue in American society in recent times has generated more pious rhetoric, unctuousness, and sheer hypocrisy than race relations and racial problems.

  Paul Hollander1

  Between the earliest years of the twentieth century and the last half of that century, the prevailing ideologies about race among intellectuals did a complete reversal. But, just as there was not simply one view among intellectuals in either period, so there were transitions within both the first half of the century and the second half. The biggest transition during the second half of the twentieth century was the transition to what can be called the liberal era on race in the United States, which in turn metamorphosed into the multicultural era. Moreover, such transitions were not confined to the United States, but were common in Western civilization, whether in Europe, the Western Hemisphere or Australia and New Zealand. In both the liberal and the multicultural eras, the issue of “racial justice” loomed large, though the meaning of that term changed over time, as well as differing among different intellectuals at the same time.

  THE LIBERAL ERA

  Just as the horrors of the First World War led to an about-face among Progressives who had before supported overseas expansions that conquered other races during the Spanish-American war and later American interventions in Latin America, as well as the historic intervention in the war raging in Europe, so the horrors of the Second World War— and, more specifically, the Holocaust— led to painful reconsiderations of racial beliefs and policies in the Western world.

  This is not to say t
hat there had been no change in attitudes toward race since the Progressive era until the Second World War. A coherent school of thought, opposed to the prevailing Progressive era view of race, emerged in the 1920s under the leadership of anthropologist Franz Boas, a professor at Columbia University, to challenge the Progressive era orthodoxy. Boas and his followers emphasized environmental explanations of racial and ethnic differences, and apparently this approach made some inroads into the way some intellectuals saw race. Some changes were apparent by the 1930s. As already noted, in 1930 Carl Brigham recanted his earlier views on what the Army mental tests implied about the intelligence of men of various ethnicities.

  As the Jewish population in America, whom Brigham had especially singled out for their low scores on Army mental tests during the First World War, became more assimilated and more educated, later mental test studies usually showed them doing far better than on the Army tests— and better than the American population as a whole.2

  By the 1930s, the climate of opinion had changed sufficiently that Madison Grant’s last book, The Conquest of a Continent, was panned by reviewers and Clashing Tides of Color by his prize pupil, Lothrop Stoddard, was ridiculed.3 The Christian Century magazine, for example, said of Grant’s book: “It gave to prejudice and hatred the false rationalization of an argument having the form, if not the substance, of science.”4 A 1934 survey of opinions among psychologists found 25 percent still believing that blacks had innately inferior intelligence, while 11 percent believed that blacks had equal intelligence and 64 percent believed the data to be inconclusive.5

  What had eroded were not only the particular beliefs of the Progressive era but also the dogmatic tone of certainty of the Progressives. Otto Klineberg, one of Boas’ disciples who promoted the alternative, environmental explanation of mental test differences, did so without the claims of scientific certainty made by Progressives, when he said: “We have no right to conclude that there are no racial differences in mental ability, since it is conceivable that new techniques may some day be developed which will indicate that such differences do exist.”6

  The Liberal Vision

  Despite these developments in both beliefs and methods, however, it was the Second World War that marked a decisive turning point in American intellectuals’ views of race relations. If there is a single book that might be said to mark that turning point in thinking about race among the intelligentsia, it would be An American Dilemma by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, published in 1944. It was a massive study— more than a thousand pages long— of the many aspects of black-white relations in the United States, and its thesis was that American racial policies, especially in the South, marked a glaring contradiction between the nation’s fundamental founding principles of freedom and equality and its actual practices as regards blacks. How to resolve that contradiction was the dilemma posed by Myrdal.

  By this time, Progressives had begun calling themselves liberals, so this now became the prevailing liberal vision, as it evolved in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Broadly speaking, while in the Progressive era socioeconomic differences between races were attributed to race— genetics— in the liberal era such differences between races were often attributed to racism. In neither era were alternative explanations taken seriously by much of the intelligentsia. In the liberal era, attributing any part of the differences between blacks and whites in incomes, crime, education, etc., to internal causes— even if social or cultural, rather than genetic— was often dismissed as “blaming the victim,” a phrase preempting the issue rather than debating it.

  If heredity was the reigning orthodoxy of the Progressive era, environment became the reigning orthodoxy of the liberal era. Moreover, “environment” usually meant the external contemporary environment, rather than including the internal cultural environment of minorities themselves. If minorities were seen as the problem before, the majority was seen as the problem now.

  These premises were stated quite clearly in the introduction to An American Dilemma, where that dilemma was described as “a white man’s problem” and Myrdal added, “little, if anything, could be scientifically explained in terms of the peculiarities of the Negroes themselves.”7 Despite the invocation of science, so reminiscent of the earlier Progressive era intellectuals, this was an arbitrary premise which, if followed consistently, would treat black Americans as simply abstract people with darker complexions, who were victims of what Myrdal called “confused and contradictory attitudes” in the minds of white Americans.8 Yet Myrdal’s own massive study brought out many behavioral and attitudinal differences between blacks and whites, though in the end none of this changed the basic premise of An American Dilemma, which remained the central premise of liberal intellectuals for decades thereafter.

  This premise— that the racial problem was essentially one inside the minds of white people— greatly simplified the task of those among the intelligentsia who did not have to research the many behavioral differences between blacks and whites in America— or the many comparable or larger differences between other groups in other countries around the world— that have led to other intergroup complications, frictions and polarizations, which were in many cases at least as great as those between black and white Americans. Nor did intellectuals have to confront the constraints, costs and dangers inherent in group differences in behavior and values. To the intelligentsia of this later period, racial problems could be reduced to problems inside people’s minds, and especially to racism, not only simplifying problems but enabling intellectuals to assume their familiar stance of being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil— and morally superior to the society in which they lived.

  Life magazine, for example, greeted publication of An American Dilemma as showing that America was a “psychotic case among nations.”9 As with many other such sweeping pronouncements, it was not based on any empirical comparisons. For example, the number of blacks lynched in the entire history of the United States would be a fraction of the Armenians slaughtered by Turkish mobs in one year in the Ottoman Empire, the Ibos slaughtered by Hausa-Fulani mobs in one year in Nigeria, not to mention the number of Jews slaughtered by mobs in one year in a number of countries at various times scattered throughout history. While specifically black-white relations in the United States— especially in the South— were more polarized than black-white relations in some other countries, there were even more polarized relations between other groups that were not different in skin color in many other places and times, the Balkans and Rwanda being just two examples in our own times.

  Gunnar Myrdal’s basic premise— that racial problems in America were fundamentally problems inside the heads of white people, and that the resulting discrimination or neglect explained black-white differences in economic and other outcomes— was to remain the fundamental assumption of liberal thinking and policies for decades thereafter. As Professor Alfred Blumrosen of Rutgers University, an important figure in the evolution of federal racial policies, put it, discrimination should be “broadly defined,” for example, by “including all conduct which adversely affects minority group employment opportunities.”10 This particular formulation preempts the very possibility that any behavior or performance by minorities themselves plays a role in the economic, educational and other “disparities” and “gaps” which are common among racial or other groups in countries around the world.

  Such feats of verbal virtuosity were not peculiar to Professor Blumrosen, but were common among the intelligentsia of the liberal era. Even where there were demonstrable differences in behavior among racial or ethnic groups— whether in crime rates or rates of unwed motherhood, for example— these were more or less automatically attributed to adverse treatment, past or present, by the white majority.

  Celebrated black writer James Baldwin, for example, claimed that blacks took the building of a subsidized housing project in Harlem as “additional proof of how thoroughly the white world despised them” because “people
in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else.” Therefore “they had scarcely moved in” to the new housing project, before “naturally” they “began smashing windows, defacing walls, urinating in the elevators, and fornicating in the playgrounds.”11

  From this perspective, anything negative that blacks do is the fault of whites. But however much Baldwin’s picture might fit the prevailing vision of the 1960s, anyone who is serious about whether it also fits the facts would have to ask such questions as: (1) Was there a time before the 1960s when it was common for blacks to urinate in public areas of buildings where they lived? and (2) If not, was that because they felt that whites had higher regard for them in earlier times?

  To ask such questions is to answer them, and the answer in both cases is clearly No!* But few asked such questions, which remained outside the sealed bubble of the prevailing vision. What was different about the 1960s was the proliferation of people like James Baldwin, promoting resentments and polarization, and making excuses for counterproductive and even barbaric behavior. Nor is this a phenomenon peculiar to blacks or even to the United States. Writing about lower-class whites in British public housing projects, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple observed: “The public spaces and elevators of all public housing blocks I know are so deeply impregnated with urine that the odor is ineradicable. And anything smashable has been smashed.”12

  The people behaving this way in Britain have none of the history that is supposed to explain black behavior in the United States. What is the same in both situations has been a steady drumbeat of grievance and victimhood ideologies from the media, from educational institutions and from other institutions permeated by the vision of the intelligentsia. In the United States, the racial version of such notions has not been confined to a fringe of extremists. Urban League director Whitney M. Young, regarded as a racial moderate, echoed the same 1960s vision when he said, in an article in Ebony magazine, “most white Americans do not link the rapid spread of blight and decay of our central cities to racism. But it is the main cause.” He added, “The white man creates the ghettos and brutalizes and exploits the people who inhabit them— and then he fears them and then he flees from them.” The white man, according to Young, “creates a climate of despair and then acts surprised when the protest marches fill the streets and riots erupt.”13