Intellectuals and Race (14 page)

          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 southern 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.