“Something I thought I would never see in print:
“(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.””
Actually there’s a whole book that goes into great details documenting this. “The Bell Curve” - I highly recommend it. (I’m sure that’s how derbyshire came up with that paragraph). It explains the reality we experience every day better than anything else I’ve come across. The authors were demonized and made persona non grata in any social or academic setting. But time is vindicating them.
The critics didn’t so much argue with the data as with the causes. They said that blacks didn’t do as well in IQ tests as whites (or other races) because of historical and cultural reasons. So affirmative action, preferential treatments and integration were instituted to supposedly remedy these historical and cultural disadvantages.
Fifty years of this have made little or no impact, in fact the IQ distribution difference has not changed (it probably has gotten worse due to the lower end of the distribution reproducing faster as a result of programs rewarding mothers that have kids with additional welfare payments.)
The race problem is a huge problem. It has been relatively dormant during the past 50 years mainly because of the appeasement programs mentioned above. We’ve gotten to the point now where it is obvious even to the most rabid apologist, and to the blacks themselves that despite all the preferential treatment and the countless billions spent on “remedying” the differences, in the “test of life” blacks on the average just don’t do as well.
This is a tragedy of incredible proportions, with very nasty consequences (as we’re beginning to see). “The Bell Curve” suggested some solutions that would solve the problem, but politically and ethically they would be next to impossible to implement.
There are tests which dispute the “cultural bias” excuse, because IQ tests have shown that blacks have done better on the parts of the test which might be shown to have “cultural bias” and worse on those parts which measure abstract cognitive ability. So is they would only look at these results, they would see that blacks’ exposure to the culture actually helps them do better on those parts. But they’ll never acknowledge this, as they then would have to also admit that the do worse on the parts which show sheer cognitive ability. Can’t have anything that smacks of the truth no matter how much a whole society must be damaged in order to coddle their feelings of inferiority.
Studies are aslo showing that black males from upper socioeconomic levels still have lower SAT scores, higher drop-out rates, and higher crime rates, even hough raised in upper middle class to wealthy families, with both parents having degrees. The negative indicators for the black kids from these well-off families are higher than those from poorer white families, in that the poorer white kids commit less crime, drop out less, have higher SAT scores, etc,
The black kids also do worse than their parents in testing-”regression to the mean”. Google it, it’s explains a lot, especially as concerns “white flight” from neighborhoods.
ping for later
One problem with the critics' assumption is that the average SAT scores for blacks whose parents were in the $80-$100K income range was LOWER that that for white kids at the "<10K" poverty level (see this article, Table 2: 1996 Mean SAT Scores by Race and Family Income.
In other words, high income black kids, presumably enrolled in excellent middle-class schools and having all the advantages of good nutrition, access to books, growing up in an integrated environment where they hung out with fellow middle-class white kids and away from gangs and drugs, etc, STILL scored lower, and dramatically lower than kids of their own socioeconomic class.
Meanwhile, the children of Vietnamese boat people wo arrived here with nothing, grew up to be valedictorians.
Citizenship and human rights don't depend on scoring well on "the bell curve", do they? Rights are a question of equity, not ability. Certainly people with 150 IQ's are going to receive better life chances; but do, or should, people with lower IQ's be treated differently by Government because they got GED's instead of advanced degrees?
I think the Left has been playing political games with native differences in ability, just as they do with everything else. Using people's IQ's in a giant sorting scheme similar to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World stinks of Leftist instrumentalism and dystopian dreams foreseen by Huxley and Orwell. So does using them as a political lever in left-wing identity-political campaigns.