Intellectuals and Race (11 page)

Widely available subsidies for individuals who are less successful economically— who, as a group, may average lower IQs than very successful individuals— can lead to an increase in the number of babies born to teenage dropouts, for example, while higher rates of taxation of individuals with higher levels of education and higher earnings can lead to the latter having fewer children than otherwise, as a result of their unwillingness to produce more offspring, whose chances of getting the amount and quality of education required to maintain the living standards into which they were born would be reduced if their parents’ income and time were spread out over a larger number of children. If both sets of individuals and families are of the same race, then the average intelligence of that race could be reduced— not only in the next generation, but in subsequent generations as well, since a larger portion of the offspring of that race would be supplied by the less successful members than if such policies of subsidies and taxes did not exist.

Even if races, as such, did not initially have different genetic potential, the fact that the genes of less successful members of a particular race become a growing proportion of all the genes passed on to subsequent generations can reduce the
average
hereditary potential of the race as a whole, in much the same way that environmental factors can reduce heights, not only in the next generation, but in subsequent generations as well. Two different kinds of environment can influence such an outcome: (1) an external environment which produces various activities of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations to subsidize a counterproductive lifestyle and (2) an internal culture in which large numbers of members of a particular racial or ethnic group are willing to live on the dole and spare themselves the efforts required to rise to economic independence.

This second requirement, without which the first may not do nearly as much damage, may be entirely environmental, but it can be no less damaging to the race and to the composition of its pool of genes. The same subsidies may be available to everyone below a specified income level but, if some racial or ethnic groups are from a culture that refuses to adopt a lifestyle of dependency, then these groups escape both the immediate and the longer-run consequences of that lifestyle. Here a crucial distinction must be made between environment conceived as the immediate surroundings and environment conceived as including a cultural heritage which can differ greatly between contemporary groups living at similar socioeconomic levels and facing the same objective opportunities in schools and in the economy.

Whether or not this hypothesis can be validated by empirical research, like the hypothesis about the heights of Frenchmen it demonstrates that heredity theories and environmental theories of group differences are not hermetically sealed off from one another, since environment can influence the survival rate of hereditary characteristics. Moreover, the question of
average
mental potential or average developed mental capabilities between races is different from the question whether some races have a limited
range
of mental abilities— a ceiling on their intellectual potential that is lower than for some other races, as implied by genetic determinists of the Progressive era.

While the average Frenchman may not be as tall as the average American, Charles DeGaulle was much taller than most Americans. There is similarly no reason why differences in average IQs between any two groups— racial or otherwise— need to imply that high IQs cannot be achieved by members of both groups. These are questions to be answered empirically. These are also questions relevant to assertions by people like Madison Grant and others in the Progressive era that whole races must be severely restricted in their reproduction or, in Sir Francis Galton’s words, require “the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”
¹

Heredity and environment can interact in many ways. For example, it is known that children who are the first born have on average higher IQs than their later born siblings.
²
Whatever the reasons for this, if families in group
A
have an average of two children and families in group
B
have an average
of six children, then the average IQ in group
A
is likely to be higher than in group
B
— even if the innate genetic potential of the two groups is the same— because half the people in group
A
are first-borns, while only one-sixth of those in group
B
are.

In some cultures, marriage between first cousins is acceptable, or even common, while in other cultures it is taboo. These differences existed long before science discovered the negative consequences of in-breeding— and in some cultures such patterns have continued long after these scientific discoveries. Races, classes or other social groups with very different incest taboos can therefore start out with identical genetic potential and yet end up with different capabilities. The point here is simply that there are too many variables involved for dogmatic pronouncements to be made on either side of the issue of innate equality or innate inequality of the races as they exist today.

Since there has been no method yet devised to measure the innate potential of individuals at the moment of conception, much less the innate potential of races at the dawn of the human species, the prospect of a definitive answer to the question of the relationship of race and innate mental ability seems remote, if possible at all.

Put differently, the utter certainty of many who have answered this question in one way or in the opposite way seems premature at best, when all that we have at this point, when it comes to race and intelligence, is a small island of knowledge in a vast sea of the unknown. However, neither certainty nor precision have been necessary for making practical decisions on many other questions, so there needs to be some assessment of the magnitude of what is in dispute and then some assessment of how the evidence bears on that practical question.

The genetic determinists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries asserted not merely that there were differences in the average mental capacity of different races, but also that these differences were of a
magnitude sufficient to make it urgent to at least reduce the reproduction of some races, as people like Margaret Sanger and Madison Grant suggested, or even to promote “the gradual extinction of an inferior race”
³
as Sir Francis Galton advocated. The mental test scores of that era, which seemed to support not merely a difference in intellectual capacity between races but a difference of a sufficient magnitude to make drastic actions advisable, have since then been shown empirically to be far from having the permanence that was once assumed.

Both the magnitude and the permanence of racial differences on mental tests have been undermined by later empirical research, quite aside from questions about the validity of such tests. As regards magnitude, Professor Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley, whose research published in 1969 reopened the question of racial differences in mental capacity and set off a storm of controversy,
⁴
provided an insight that is especially salient, since he has been prominent, if not pre-eminent, among contemporaries on the side of hereditary theories of intelligence:

          When I worked in a psychological clinic, I had to give individual intelligence tests to a variety of children, a good many of whom came from an impoverished background. Usually I felt these children were really brighter than their IQ would indicate. They often appeared inhibited in their responsiveness in the testing situation on their first visit to my office, and when this was the case I usually had them come in on two to four different days for half-hour sessions with me in a “play therapy” room, in which we did nothing more than get better acquainted by playing ball, using finger paints, drawing on the blackboard, making things out of clay, and so forth. As soon as the child seemed to be completely at home in this setting, I would retest him on a parallel form of the Stanford-Binet. A boost in IQ of 8 to 10 points or so was the rule; it rarely failed, but neither was the gain very often much above this.
⁵

Since “8 to 10 points” is more than half the average IQ difference of 15 points between black and white Americans, the disappearance of that much IQ differential from a simple change of immediate circumstances suggests that the magnitude of what is in question today is
not
whether some people are capable only of being “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Professor Jensen’s conclusions on a practical level are therefore very different from the conclusions of Margaret Sanger, Madison Grant or Sir Francis Galton in earlier years:

          
Whenever we select a person for some special educational purpose, whether for special instruction in a grade-school class for children with learning problems, or for a “gifted” class with an advanced curriculum, or for college attendance, or for admission to graduate training or a professional school, we are selecting an
individual
, and we are selecting him and dealing with him as an individual for reasons of his individuality. Similarly, when we employ someone, or promote someone in his occupation, or give some special award or honor to someone for his accomplishments, we are doing this to an individual. The variables of social class, race, and national origin are correlated so imperfectly with any of the valid criteria on which the above decisions should depend, or, for that matter, with any behavioral characteristic, that these background factors are irrelevant as a basis for dealing with individuals— as students, as employees, as neighbors. Furthermore, since, as far as we know, the full range of human talents is represented in all the major races of man and in all socioeconomic levels, it is unjust to allow the mere fact of an individual’s racial or social background to affect the treatment accorded to him.
⁶

Nor was Arthur R. Jensen as confident as the writers of the Progressive era had been about the meaning of a mental test score. Professor Jensen said he had “very little confidence in a single test score, especially if it is the child’s first test and more especially if the child is from a poor background and of a different race from the examiner.”
⁷
He also acknowledged the possible effect of home environment. Professor Jensen pointed out that “3 out of 4 Negroes failing the Armed Forces Qualification Test come from families of four or more children.”
⁸
In other words, he saw that more than race was involved.

Jensen’s article, which renewed a controversy that has since lasted for decades, was titled “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” His answer— long since lost in the storms of controversies that followed— was that scholastic achievement could be much improved by different teaching methods, but that these different teaching methods were not likely to change IQ scores much.
⁹

Far from concluding that lower IQ groups were not educable, Jensen said: “One of the great and relatively untapped reservoirs of mental ability in the disadvantaged, it appears from our research, is the basic ability to learn. We can do more to marshal this strength for educational purposes.”
¹⁰
He argued for educational reforms, saying that “scholastic performance— the
acquisition of the basic skills— can be boosted much more, at least in the early years, than can the IQ” and that, among “the disadvantaged,” there are “high school students who have failed to learn basic skills which they could easily have learned many years earlier” if taught in different ways.
¹¹

As someone writing against a later orthodoxy— one in which only such non-genetic factors as test bias and social environment were acceptable as factors behind racial differences in IQ scores— Jensen confronted not only opposing beliefs, but also a dogmatism about those beliefs reminiscent of the opposite dogmatism of genetic determinists of an earlier time. Professor Jensen wrote in 1969: “A preordained, doctrinaire stance with regard to this issue hinders the achievement of a scientific understanding of the problem. To rule out of court, so to speak, any reasonable hypotheses on purely ideological grounds is to argue that static ignorance is preferable to increasing our knowledge of reality.”
¹²

Jensen was also concerned with social consequences, as well as with questions of scientific findings. He pointed out that “Negro middle- and upper-class families have fewer children than their white counterparts, while Negro lower-class families have more,” and that these facts “have some relationship to intellectual ability,” as shown by the disproportionate representation of blacks from large families among those who failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test. He said that “current welfare policies”— presumably because they subsidized the birth of more children by black lower-class families— could lead to negative effects on black educational achievement. Jensen concluded that these welfare policies and “the possible consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be viewed by future generations as our society’s greatest injustice to Negro Americans.”
¹³

To argue, as Professor Jensen has, that environment can have detrimental effects on the
average
hereditary endowment of a race is not to say, as Madison Grant did, that “race is everything” or to say, as Francis Galton did, that “the gradual extinction of an inferior race” is the only solution for those races whose intellectual potential must be written off. Both Grant and Galton argued as if there is some inherent ceiling to the intelligence of some races— not simply that differential survival rates of people of the same race with different IQs can
statistically lower the average IQ, even though the IQ
range
for individuals of that race may go as high as that of other individuals from other races.