Intellectuals and Race Read online

  Even if races, as such, did not initially have different genetic potential, the fact that the genes of less successful members of a particular race become a growing proportion of all the genes passed on to subsequent generations can reduce the average hereditary potential of the race as a whole, in much the same way that environmental factors can reduce heights, not only in the next generation, but in subsequent generations as well. Two different kinds of environment can influence such an outcome: (1) an external environment which produces various activities of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations to subsidize a counterproductive lifestyle and (2) an internal culture in which large numbers of members of a particular racial or ethnic group are willing to live on the dole and spare themselves the efforts required to rise to economic independence.

  This second requirement, without which the first may not do nearly as much damage, may be entirely environmental, but it can be no less damaging to the race and to the composition of its pool of genes. The same subsidies may be available to everyone below a specified income level but, if some racial or ethnic groups are from a culture that refuses to adopt a lifestyle of dependency, then these groups escape both the immediate and the longer-run consequences of that lifestyle. Here a crucial distinction must be made between environment conceived as the immediate surroundings and environment conceived as including a cultural heritage which can differ greatly between contemporary groups living at similar socioeconomic levels and facing the same objective opportunities in schools and in the economy.

  Whether or not this hypothesis can be validated by empirical research, like the hypothesis about the heights of Frenchmen it demonstrates that heredity theories and environmental theories of group differences are not hermetically sealed off from one another, since environment can influence the survival rate of hereditary characteristics. Moreover, the question of average mental potential or average developed mental capabilities between races is different from the question whether some races have a limited range of mental abilities— a ceiling on their intellectual potential that is lower than for some other races, as implied by genetic determinists of the Progressive era.

  While the average Frenchman may not be as tall as the average American, Charles DeGaulle was much taller than most Americans. There is similarly no reason why differences in average IQs between any two groups— racial or otherwise— need to imply that high IQs cannot be achieved by members of both groups. These are questions to be answered empirically. These are also questions relevant to assertions by people like Madison Grant and others in the Progressive era that whole races must be severely restricted in their reproduction or, in Sir Francis Galton’s words, require “the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”1

  Heredity and environment can interact in many ways. For example, it is known that children who are the first born have on average higher IQs than their later born siblings.2 Whatever the reasons for this, if families in group A have an average of two children and families in group B have an average of six children, then the average IQ in group A is likely to be higher than in group B— even if the innate genetic potential of the two groups is the same— because half the people in group A are first-borns, while only one-sixth of those in group B are.

  In some cultures, marriage between first cousins is acceptable, or even common, while in other cultures it is taboo. These differences existed long before science discovered the negative consequences of in-breeding— and in some cultures such patterns have continued long after these scientific discoveries. Races, classes or other social groups with very different incest taboos can therefore start out with identical genetic potential and yet end up with different capabilities. The point here is simply that there are too many variables involved for dogmatic pronouncements to be made on either side of the issue of innate equality or innate inequality of the races as they exist today.

  Since there has been no method yet devised to measure the innate potential of individuals at the moment of conception, much less the innate potential of races at the dawn of the human species, the prospect of a definitive answer to the question of the relationship of race and innate mental ability seems remote, if possible at all.

  Put differently, the utter certainty of many who have answered this question in one way or in the opposite way seems premature at best, when all that we have at this point, when it comes to race and intelligence, is a small island of knowledge in a vast sea of the unknown. However, neither certainty nor precision have been necessary for making practical decisions on many other questions, so there needs to be some assessment of the magnitude of what is in dispute and then some assessment of how the evidence bears on that practical question.

  THE MAGNITUDES IN QUESTION

  The genetic determinists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries asserted not merely that there were differences in the average mental capacity of different races, but also that these differences were of a magnitude sufficient to make it urgent to at least reduce the reproduction of some races, as people like Margaret Sanger and Madison Grant suggested, or even to promote “the gradual extinction of an inferior race”3 as Sir Francis Galton advocated. The mental test scores of that era, which seemed to support not merely a difference in intellectual capacity between races but a difference of a sufficient magnitude to make drastic actions advisable, have since then been shown empirically to be far from having the permanence that was once assumed.

  Both the magnitude and the permanence of racial differences on mental tests have been undermined by later empirical research, quite aside from questions about the validity of such tests. As regards magnitude, Professor Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley, whose research published in 1969 reopened the question of racial differences in mental capacity and set off a storm of controversy,4 provided an insight that is especially salient, since he has been prominent, if not pre-eminent, among contemporaries on the side of hereditary theories of intelligence:

  When I worked in a psychological clinic, I had to give individual intelligence tests to a variety of children, a good many of whom came from an impoverished background. Usually I felt these children were really brighter than their IQ would indicate. They often appeared inhibited in their responsiveness in the testing situation on their first visit to my office, and when this was the case I usually had them come in on two to four different days for half-hour sessions with me in a “play therapy” room, in which we did nothing more than get better acquainted by playing ball, using finger paints, drawing on the blackboard, making things out of clay, and so forth. As soon as the child seemed to be completely at home in this setting, I would retest him on a parallel form of the Stanford-Binet. A boost in IQ of 8 to 10 points or so was the rule; it rarely failed, but neither was the gain very often much above this.5

  Since “8 to 10 points” is more than half the average IQ difference of 15 points between black and white Americans, the disappearance of that much IQ differential from a simple change of immediate circumstances suggests that the magnitude of what is in question today is not whether some people are capable only of being “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Professor Jensen’s conclusions on a practical level are therefore very different from the conclusions of Margaret Sanger, Madison Grant or Sir Francis Galton in earlier years:

  Whenever we select a person for some special educational purpose, whether for special instruction in a grade-school class for children with learning problems, or for a “gifted” class with an advanced curriculum, or for college attendance, or for admission to graduate training or a professional school, we are selecting an individual, and we are selecting him and dealing with him as an individual for reasons of his individuality. Similarly, when we employ someone, or promote someone in his occupation, or give some special award or honor to someone for his accomplishments, we are doing this to an individual. The variables of social class, race, and national origin are correlated so imperfectly with any of the valid criteria on which the above decisi
ons should depend, or, for that matter, with any behavioral characteristic, that these background factors are irrelevant as a basis for dealing with individuals— as students, as employees, as neighbors. Furthermore, since, as far as we know, the full range of human talents is represented in all the major races of man and in all socioeconomic levels, it is unjust to allow the mere fact of an individual’s racial or social background to affect the treatment accorded to him.6

  Nor was Arthur R. Jensen as confident as the writers of the Progressive era had been about the meaning of a mental test score. Professor Jensen said he had “very little confidence in a single test score, especially if it is the child’s first test and more especially if the child is from a poor background and of a different race from the examiner.”7 He also acknowledged the possible effect of home environment. Professor Jensen pointed out that “3 out of 4 Negroes failing the Armed Forces Qualification Test come from families of four or more children.”8 In other words, he saw that more than race was involved.

  Jensen’s article, which renewed a controversy that has since lasted for decades, was titled “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” His answer— long since lost in the storms of controversies that followed— was that scholastic achievement could be much improved by different teaching methods, but that these different teaching methods were not likely to change IQ scores much.9

  Far from concluding that lower IQ groups were not educable, Jensen said: “One of the great and relatively untapped reservoirs of mental ability in the disadvantaged, it appears from our research, is the basic ability to learn. We can do more to marshal this strength for educational purposes.”10 He argued for educational reforms, saying that “scholastic performance— the acquisition of the basic skills— can be boosted much more, at least in the early years, than can the IQ” and that, among “the disadvantaged,” there are “high school students who have failed to learn basic skills which they could easily have learned many years earlier” if taught in different ways.11

  As someone writing against a later orthodoxy— one in which only such non-genetic factors as test bias and social environment were acceptable as factors behind racial differences in IQ scores— Jensen confronted not only opposing beliefs, but also a dogmatism about those beliefs reminiscent of the opposite dogmatism of genetic determinists of an earlier time. Professor Jensen wrote in 1969: “A preordained, doctrinaire stance with regard to this issue hinders the achievement of a scientific understanding of the problem. To rule out of court, so to speak, any reasonable hypotheses on purely ideological grounds is to argue that static ignorance is preferable to increasing our knowledge of reality.”12

  Jensen was also concerned with social consequences, as well as with questions of scientific findings. He pointed out that “Negro middle- and upper-class families have fewer children than their white counterparts, while Negro lower-class families have more,” and that these facts “have some relationship to intellectual ability,” as shown by the disproportionate representation of blacks from large families among those who failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test. He said that “current welfare policies”— presumably because they subsidized the birth of more children by black lower-class families— could lead to negative effects on black educational achievement. Jensen concluded that these welfare policies and “the possible consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be viewed by future generations as our society’s greatest injustice to Negro Americans.”13

  To argue, as Professor Jensen has, that environment can have detrimental effects on the average hereditary endowment of a race is not to say, as Madison Grant did, that “race is everything” or to say, as Francis Galton did, that “the gradual extinction of an inferior race” is the only solution for those races whose intellectual potential must be written off. Both Grant and Galton argued as if there is some inherent ceiling to the intelligence of some races— not simply that differential survival rates of people of the same race with different IQs can statistically lower the average IQ, even though the IQ range for individuals of that race may go as high as that of other individuals from other races.

  While controversies about race and IQ focus on explanations for the differences in median IQs among groups, the magnitude of those differences is also crucial. Research by Professor James R. Flynn, an American expatriate in New Zealand, concluded that the average IQ of Chinese Americans in 1945 to 1949 was 98.5, compared to a norm of 100 for whites.14 Even if we were to arbitrarily assume, for the sake of argument— as Professor Flynn did not— that this difference at that time was due solely to genetics, the magnitude of the difference would hardly justify the kinds of drastic policies advocated by eugenicists.

  In reality, the occupational achievements of both Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans exceed those of white Americans with the same IQs. Japanese Americans were found to have occupational achievements equal to that of those whites who had 10 points higher IQs than themselves, and Chinese Americans to have occupational achievements equal to those of those whites who had 20 points higher IQs than themselves.15

  In short, even though much research has shown that IQ differences matter for educational, occupational and other achievements,16 the magnitude of those differences also matters, and in particular cases other factors may outweigh IQ differences in determining outcomes. Incidentally, other IQ studies at different times and places show people of Chinese and Japanese ancestry with higher IQs than whites,17 though the differences are similarly small in these studies as well.

  The importance of other factors besides IQ is not a blank check for downplaying or disregarding mental test scores when making employment, college admissions or other decisions. Although empirical evidence shows that Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans tend to perform better in educational institutions than whites with the same mental test scores as themselves, other empirical evidence shows that blacks tend to perform below the level of those whites with the same test scores as themselves.18 Clearly, then, with blacks as with Chinese and Japanese Americans, other factors besides IQs have a significant influence on actual educational outcomes, even though these other factors operate in a different direction for different groups.

  None of this means that mental tests— whether IQ tests, college aptitude tests, or others— can be disregarded when it comes to making practical decisions about individuals, even if they do not justify sweeping inferences about genes or discrimination. When deciding whom to hire, admit to college or select for other kinds of endeavors, the relevant question about tests is: What has been the track record of a particular test in predicting subsequent performances— both absolutely and in comparison with alternative criteria? It is essentially an empirical statistical question, rather than a matter of speculation or ideology.

  The issue is not even whether the particular questions in the test seem plausibly relevant to the endeavor at hand, as even courts of law have misconceived the issue.19 If knowing fact A enables you to make predictions about outcome B with a better track record than alternative criteria, then plausibility is no more relevant than it was when wine experts dismissed Professor Orley Ashenfelter’s use of weather statistics to predict wine prices— which predictions turned out to have a better track record than the methods used by wine experts.20

  PREDICTIVE VALIDITY

  Even if IQ tests or college admissions tests do not accurately measure the “real” intelligence of prospective students or employees— however “real” intelligence might be defined— the practical question is whether whatever they do measure is correlated with future success in the particular endeavor. Despite numerous claims that mental tests under-estimate the “real” intelligence of blacks, a huge body of research has demonstrated repeatedly that the future scholastic performances of blacks are not under-estimated by these tests which tend, if anything, to predict a slightly higher performance level than that which actually follows, contrary to the situation with Chinese Americans or Japanese Americans
. While blacks tend to score lower than whites on a variety of aptitude, academic achievement and job tests, empirical evidence indicates that those whites with the same test scores as blacks have, on average, a track record of higher subsequent performances than blacks, whether academically or on the job. This includes academic performance in colleges, law schools, and medical schools, and job performance in the civil service and in the Air Force.21

  Nor is this pattern unique to American blacks. In the Philippines, for example, students from low-income and rural backgrounds have not only had lower than average test scores, but have also done worse academically at the University of the Philippines than other students with the same low test scores as themselves.22 In Indonesia, where men have averaged lower test scores than women, men with the same test scores as women have done poorer academic work than women at the University of Indonesia.23

  A long-range study by Lewis Terman, beginning in 1921, followed children with IQs of 140 and above in their later lives and found that those children who came from homes where the parents were less educated, and were from a lower socioeconomic level, did not achieve prominence in their own lives as often as other children in the same IQ range who had the further advantage of coming from homes with a higher cultural level.24 In short, other factors besides those captured by IQ tests affect performances in various endeavors— and affect them differently for different groups. But one cannot just arbitrarily wave test results aside, in order to get more demographic “representation” of racial or other groups with lower test scores as employees, students or in other contexts.

  A growing body of empirical data shows that black students mismatched with the particular colleges or universities they attend fail or drop out more often than other students at those institutions— and more often than black students with the same test scores or other academic qualifications as themselves who attend academic institutions where the other students are on a similar academic level.25 The problem is not that these black students are “unqualified” to be in a college or university. They may be highly qualified to be in some college or university, but are mismatched with the particular college or university that has admitted them for the sake of demographic “diversity” by disregarding test scores and other academic qualifications.