Intellectuals and Race (15 page)
Just as Franz Boas had to argue against the
dogmatism
of the prevailing vision of race among the Progressives in the 1920s, in order to get his empirical evidence to the contrary even considered, so the authors of
The Bell Curve
have had to do the same in a later and supposedly more enlightened time. Even being agnostic about ultimate answers to the very complex questions that they explored was not enough to save them from the wrath of those whose social vision and agenda they undermined.
In an all too familiar pattern, the analysis and evidence in
The Bell Curve
were often side-stepped by critics, who instead attacked its authors as people with unworthy motives. John B. Judis of
The New Republic
dismissed
The Bell Curve
as “a combination of bigotry and of metaphysics,” using “linguistic legerdemain.”
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Michael Lind of
Harper’s
magazine called it part of an “astonishing legitimation” of “a body of racialist pseudoscience” representing “a right-wing backlash,” and “covert appeals to racial resentments on the part of white Americans.”
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Time
magazine called the book a work of “dubious premises and toxic conclusions.”
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Such arguments without arguments were not confined to the media, but were also used by academics, including a number of well-known Harvard professors.
Professor Randall Kennedy, for example, declared that Herrnstein and Murray were “bankrolled by wealthy supporters of right wing reaction,”
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as if large-scale research projects of all sorts— including those at Harvard— are not bankrolled by somebody and, more fundamentally, as if an arbitrary characterization of those who financed the research says anything about the validity or lack of validity of the work itself. Professor Stephen Jay Gould depicted Herrnstein and Murray as promoting “anachronistic social Darwinism” and “a manifesto of conservative ideology.”
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Professor Henry Louis Gates said that the “most pernicious aspect of Murray and Herrnstein’s dismissal of the role of environment” is the implication that social programs to advance blacks are futile,
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though Professor Gates did not quote anything from
The Bell Curve
to substantiate this claim.
Professor Nathan Glazer likewise questioned “the motivations of the authors”
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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.”
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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,
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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.
__________
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
No issue in American society in recent times has generated more pious rhetoric, unctuousness, and sheer hypocrisy than race relations and racial problems.
Paul Hollander
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B
etween 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.
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 that 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.