Intellectuals and Race (13 page)

That the high rate of college dropouts found among black students in general is not as great at institutions where the racial mental test score gap is not as great is a
confirmation
of the mismatching hypothesis that Bowen and Bok claim to have
refuted
. The fact that access to their raw data has been refused to others
⁴⁴
suggests that the great praise showered on their book in the media may reflect agreement with its message and its vision, rather than a critical examination of its evidence and reasoning.

Although most controversies about racial differences in intelligence focus on
averages
, such as those of IQ scores, what is also relevant is the
range
of these scores. As already noted, much of what was said in the early twentieth century seemed to indicate a belief that there was some ceiling to intelligence that was lower for some races than for others. This was another way in which Professor Jensen differed from early twentieth century believers in genetic determinism, since he acknowledged that “as far as we know, the full range of human talents is represented in all the major races of man.”
⁴⁵

As for that supposed lower intellectual ceiling, among the “beaten men from beaten races” disdained during the Progressive era were Jews— who were later in the forefront of those whose scientific work made the United
States the first nuclear power, and Jews have been wholly disproportionately represented among Nobel laureates worldwide.
⁴⁶
International chess championships have been won by any number of members of another group of “beaten men from beaten races,” the Slavs— and the first human being to go into space was a Slav. The idea of an intellectual ceiling for particular races seems unsustainable, whatever might be said of intellectual averages.

There have been studies of blacks with IQs significantly above the national average, these studies having lower cutoff IQ scores of 120, 130, and 140.
⁴⁷
One of these studies turned up a nine-year-old girl “of apparently pure Negro stock” with an IQ of 143 on the Porteus mazes test, 180 on the Otis test and “approximately 200” on the Binet IQ test.
⁴⁸
If there is an intelligence
ceiling
for blacks, and it is up near an IQ of 200, then its practical significance would be wholly different from what was proclaimed by genetic determinists of the Progressive era, who depicted some races as being unfit for survival in any role above that of the proverbial “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” No one of course knows whether there is a racial ceiling on anyone’s IQ, much less what that ceiling might be.

Although the most common and most heated controversies about racial differences in IQ have centered on black and white Americans, the singling out of any given racial or ethnic group for comparison with the national average in any country creates an implication of uniqueness that is belied by empirical facts, since the national average itself is simply an amalgam of very different IQ levels among a variety of racial, social, regional and other groups.
*

There is nothing unique about the average black American IQ of 85, compared to a national average of 100. At various times and places, other racial or social groups have had very similar IQs. Studies during the era of mass immigration to the United States in the early twentieth century often found immigrant children from various countries with average IQs in the 80s. A 1923 survey of studies of Italian American IQs, for example, found their average IQ to be 85 in one study, 84 in three studies, 83 in another study and 77.5 in still another study. A 1926 survey of American IQ studies found median IQs of 85.6 for Slovaks, 83 for Greeks, 85 for Poles, 78 for Spaniards, and 84 for Portuguese.
⁴⁹

Similar IQs in the 80s have been found among people living in the Hebrides Islands off Scotland and in white mountaineer communities in the United States in the 1930s
⁵⁰
— both groups being of Nordic extraction, people who were supposed to be intellectually superior, according to Madison Grant and others. A 1962 study of the children of people from India tested in South Africa found them to have a mean IQ of 86.8, the same as that of African children there.
⁵¹

Although mental test pioneer Carl Brigham wrote in 1923 that the Army mental tests during the First World War provided an “inventory” of “mental capacity” with “a scientific basis,”
⁵²
in 1930 he recanted his earlier view that low mental test scores among various immigrant groups in the United States reflected low innate intelligence. He belatedly pointed out in 1930 that many of the immigrant men tested by the Army during the First World War were raised in homes where the language spoken was not English. Although Brigham said in his 1923 book that he and other testers had “demonstrated the accuracy of the combined scale as a measure of the intelligence of the groups under consideration,”
⁵³
he said candidly in his 1930 article that his previous conclusions were— in his own words— “without foundation.”
⁵⁴

For blacks who took those same tests, their very low level of literacy at the time was likewise a factor to be considered, though few commentators took that into account. One sign of that low level of literacy among black soldiers taking the Army mental tests, and how that affected the results, was that black soldiers were more often able to answer some of the more difficult
questions that did not require understanding the meaning of written words than they were able to answer much simpler questions that did.
*

In addition, one section of one of the Army tests required information such as the color of sapphires, the location of Cornell University, the profession of Alfred Noyes and the city in which the Pierce Arrow automobile was manufactured.
⁵⁵
Why blacks would have had any reason to know any of these things at that time is a mystery— and why such questions could be considered measures of either black or white innate intelligence is an even bigger mystery. But here, as in other very different contexts, statistical data that seemed to fit prevailing preconceptions among intellectuals have been accepted and proclaimed, with little or no critical examination.

During the Progressive era, one of the strongest arguments advanced for eugenics was that the tendency of people with lower IQs to have larger families would, over time, lead to a decline in the national IQ. But the later research of Professor James R. Flynn showed that, in more than a dozen countries around the world, the average performance on IQ tests
rose
substantially— by one standard deviation or more— in a generation or two.
⁵⁶
Only the fact that IQ tests are repeatedly renormed, in order to keep the average IQ at its definitional level of 100, as the average number of questions answered correctly increased, had concealed this rise— and only the fact that Professor Flynn went back to the original raw scores revealed the facts which the renorming had concealed.

Much has been made of the fact that the average IQ among blacks has remained at about 85 over the generations, suggesting that the tests are measuring an unchanging genetic potential. But the apparent permanence of the performance of black Americans on IQ tests is an artifact of the renorming of those tests. The average number of questions answered correctly on IQ tests by blacks in 2002 would have given them an average IQ of 104 by the norms used in 1947–1948, which is to say, slightly higher than the average performance of Americans in general during the earlier period.
⁵⁷
In short, the performances of blacks on IQ tests have risen significantly over time, just as the performances of other people in the United States and in other countries have, even though the renorming of those tests concealed these changes. While the persistence of a gap between blacks and whites in America on IQ tests leads some to conclude that genetic differences are the reason, the large changes in IQ test performance by both black and white Americans, as well as by the populations of other whole nations around the world, undermine the notion that IQ tests measure an unchanging genetic potential.

The fervor and persistence of the racial IQ debate cannot be assumed to be a measure of its practical implications,
*
as distinguished from its ideological importance for competing social visions. As already noted, even the leading advocate of genetic theories of IQ differences, Professor Arthur R. Jensen, has seen scholastic achievement as amenable to different teaching methods and has treated IQ differences as an over-estimate of differences in intelligence between children from lower socioeconomic classes and others. Since concrete capabilities matter much more in the real world than do abstract potentialities, educational outcomes are the practical issue, however much this practical issue has been overshadowed by ideological issues.

The leading scholar in the opposing, environmentalist school of thought, Professor James R. Flynn, expressed the narrowness of the practical issues in 2008:

          The race and IQ debate has raged for almost forty years. I have been entangled in it for thirty years. It has been a constant and unwelcome companion, rather like living with an uncongenial spouse from an arranged marriage. It has occupied the time of legions of scholars and laid waste acres of trees. Will we ever see the end of it? At least the debate is entering a new and more sophisticated stage. Given the relatively high values for black IQ in infancy and age 4, the focus should now be on whatever causes the decline of black IQ (compared to white) with age. If that can be settled, the main event will be over.
⁵⁸

Professor Flynn has argued that the culture in which most black Americans grow up has had a negative effect on their intellectual development. He pointed out that the offspring of black and white American soldiers, who fathered children with German women during the American occupation of Germany after the Second World War, had no such IQ differences as that among black and white children in the United States. Professor Flynn concluded that the reason for results being different in Germany was that the offspring of black soldiers in Germany “grew up in a nation with no black subculture.”
⁵⁹

There is other evidence that the black subculture has a negative effect on intellectual achievement. An empirical study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “a higher percentage of Black schoolmates has a strong adverse effect on achievement of Blacks and, moreover, that the effects are highly concentrated in the upper half of the ability distribution.”
⁶⁰
In other words, brighter black students do not perform as well in settings where there are many other black students around them, contrary to the theory that what is needed in educational institutions is some larger “critical mass” of black students, in order to make
them feel socially comfortable and thus able to do their best work academically. Yet the unsubstantiated “critical mass” theory has flourished from academic journals to Supreme Court briefs.
⁶¹

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: