![]() ![]() ![]() Salt of the EarthĬonsider that in 1924, the United States closed another 15-point IQ gap with a single, cheap step: we added iodine to salt. This bleak prospect is not supported by the facts. In tones of infinite regret, their screeds and interviews insist that devoting resources to closing it would be a Quixotic and irresponsibly expensive task: the racial IQ gap is impervious to treatment and here to stay. After all, hereditarians argue, nothing can be done to correct the “innate,” genetically dictated, lower-IQ status of African Americans. And the sniping between hereditarians and their critics has accomplished nothing except a great deal of harping on the prohibitive expense and futility of intervening to close the gap. Much hand-wringing ensues: What can be done? Are interventions futile? In the end, this very public and very political drama drives a false perception of genetics as the chief factor determining IQ. The headlines, and too much of the scientific discourse, dwell on the 15-point gap between the average scores of U.S. Accusations of “racism” and “political correctness” fly in reaction to each provocative new publication on race and IQ. Today, the hereditarian agenda still drives fevered debate about intelligence, or to be more precise, about IQ. Guthrie, as well as a slew of more recent works. So, too, have Even the Rat Was White, first published in 1976, by the late psychologist Robert V. ![]() In 1981, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man documented the long history of painstaking but rigged data collection and analysis enlisted to support the cherished belief in the innate intellectual inferiority of blacks. Thereafter, freedom was held to be detrimental to African Americans’ mental health. Nisbett, author of Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, writes, “The Moors speculated that Europeans might be congenitally incapable of abstract thought.” 2īut no Moors practiced science in the United States, and in 1840 the government falsified census data to support enslavement with the spurious claim that slaves enjoyed much better mental health than freedmen. Although we focus on European claims that Africans and their descendants are relatively unintelligent, some people of the African diaspora, including the scientifically adept and accomplished Moors, have returned the favor. ![]() The question of whether innate differences in intelligence exist between blacks and whites goes back more than a thousand years, to the time when the Moors invaded Europe. Their assertions were preceded by a long, data-free history of speculation by Europeans on the lower intelligence of Africans and their descendants, speculation that had traditionally supplied a rationale for enslavement. Long before William Shockley’s 1971 assertion that the intelligence of Americans is innate, inherited, and permanently stratified by race, the nineteenth-century scientists known as the American School of Ethnology had trumpeted the same belief, sans statistics. W ILLIAM S HOCKLEY, “M ODELS, M ATHEMATICS, AND THE M ORAL O BLIGATION TO D IAGNOSE THE O RIGIN OF N EGRO IQ D EFICITS,” R EVIEW OF E DUCATIONAL R ESEARCH 1 Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectually rewarding and effective lives can easily be made. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as chief agents influencing intelligence to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected - and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem. She takes apart the spurious notion of intelligence as an inherited trait, using copious data that instead point to a different cause of the reported African American-white IQ gap: environmental racism – a confluence of racism and other institutional factors that relegate marginalized communities to living and working near sites of toxic waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. The 1994 publication of The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. ![]()
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