(c) 2021 by Barton Paul Levenson
An essay like this should not be necessary in America in the year 2021. Unfortunately, it is. Open racism has not been this popular in a long time. So, just for anyone who doesn't know, here's an explanation of why racist beliefs are wrong, evil, and stupid.
A basic survival trait is suspicion. The stranger may be dangerous, so be careful with strangers. Unfortunately, this has led to a world where every group thinks it is normal, and groups which differ from “us” are, therefore, abnormal. This easily leads from “my group is normal” to “my group is better than your group.”
Anthropology, literally “the study of people,” is a legitimate and important science. Unfortunately, its nineteenth-century origins were racist. Early anthropologists were on a quest to show which race was superior. And the conclusion was predefined: white Europeans were superior. A great deal of time was spent comparing traits such as the distance from the navel to the groin in various races, or the cranial capacity as measured by stuffing seeds into dried skulls. A good review of this sad and wasted effort can be found in the late Stephen Jay Gould’s book, The Mismeasure of Man (1980).
Modern scientific racism rests mostly on efforts to show that different races score differently on IQ tests, and therefore have different levels of intelligence. But before we delve into that, let’s discuss what a race is.
US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said that it was hard to define hard-core pornography, but “I know it when I see it.” The same could be said of race, except that you can’t always tell race when you see it, either. Allegedly, humans are divided into three main “races”–white, black, and yellow, or to use the old anthropological terms, Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Except that some anthropologists counted four races, with “Dravidian” for inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. And some counted five races, adding a category for Native Americans. Are Jews a race? Are Italians or Germans a race? It’s far from clear.
Where does “race” fall on the taxonomic scale, anyway? “Taxonomy” is how living organisms are classified. An animal has a domain (Eukarya), a kingdom (Animalia), a class, order, family, genus, and species. Humans are class Chordata (we have backbones), order Mammalia (we have hair and suckle our young), family Primates, genus Homo, species sapiens. Is race, then, the subspecies? No, the human subspecies is also called sapiens. Is it the sub-subspecies? No, there is no such category. Race is merely a cultural expression of the fact that some groups of people look different.
Species are defined (see chapter 54) by being unable to reproduce with other species; a species has its own gene pool. This clearly does not apply to race, as people reproduce across race boundaries all the time. In fact, they do that so often that there are no “pure” races any more. A Kalahari bushman is likely to have some white ancestry, and many an American neo-Nazi has been upset by applying to 23andMe or Ancestry.com and finding out they had some black or Jewish ancestors. An interesting fact is that the genetic difference between two individuals taken at random is almost always greater than the mean genetic difference between different races.
In fact, anthropologists no longer regard race as a useful category. The sea change from anthropology’s racist past came in the 1940s, when Nazi Germany took the concept of race so seriously that they tried to exterminate “inferior” races, and the United States felt it had to respond. Anthropologists like Ashley Montagu (1942) argued that race was a useless criterion, and Montagu offered a motion to that effect at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists during the war. The last anthropologist to take race seriously was Carleton S. Coon, who published his major work on the subject in 1962 and died in 1981.
Back to IQ tests. These were originally devised in 1882 by Alfred Binet to test for developmental disability in children, and were finalized as the Binet-Simon test in 1905. Binet warned that the test was not meant to be used for the population in general, but his warnings were ignored and the test was adopted by the US Army and many other government bodies. As a result of IQ test results which showed that more than 80% of Jews, Italians, and Russians entering the US at Ellis Island were “feeble-minded,” restrictions were put on immigration. The tests had been administered in English to frightened immigrants who often spoke no English.
Worse, a policy aimed at eugenic betterment of the population sterilized thousands of Americans, often without their knowledge or consent, based on IQ tests, from the 1920s to the 1970s. (You do it without a person’s knowledge by calling the sterilization procedure an emergency appendectomy.) The procedure was upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1927 decision Buck v. Bell, which decided the fate of a young lady named Carrie Buck. It is almost superfluous to say that later testing found Carrie was not feeble-minded after all, but that was after the operation had already been performed.
IQ tests are used to this day in American school systems to put children on fast or slow educational tracks, and some police departments don’t allow people with too high an IQ to join, on the theory that they might get bored with the job and quit.
What is an IQ test? The IQ part stands for “Intelligence Quotient,” originally your “mental age” divided by your chronological age. That part has been dropped, and the test now simply runs through questions meant to test your verbal and mathematical skills, your reasoning and language abilities, etc. Unfortunately, the tests don’t compensate for cultural biases, or for any of a number of factors known to affect test results, including motivation, emotional state when taking the test, and even whether you’ve had breakfast that morning. IQ tests don’t measure social functioning, even though interacting with other people can take some pretty sophisticated mental processing. They don’t measure creativity. There are any number of aspects of “intelligence” not captured by IQ tests. A psychologist once said “IQ tests measure your ability to do well on IQ tests.”
In Kenya, IQ scores of children rose 26 points on average between 1984 and 1998. This was not because Kenyans suddenly evolved to become smarter, but because the standard of living in Kenya improved, better nutrition was available, and more Kenyan parents became literate (Daley et al. 2003).
Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued in a 1994 book that low IQ was the main reason blacks in America experienced greater poverty, and therefore that efforts at bettering social conditions for black people were doomed to failure. They made much of the fact that IQ seemed to be highly heritable–if your parents had high IQs, you were also likely to have high IQs.
The fallacy there was that heritability doesn’t mean other factors can’t intervene. Height is a very heritable trait–tall parents have tall children, short parents have short children. But if an entire population has lived for generations in an area with poor farmland, and have been undernourished and stunted as a result, giving them a better diet can still see mean height rise rapidly. Taller parents will still have taller children, but the mean height will have increased dramatically. This is roughly what happened in Japan before and after World War II. Short “Japs” were an American stereotype. But when Japan’s economy improved and its diet along with it, Japan’s mean height shot up, and the Japanese are now among the tallest people in Asia.
In short, IQ may have some limited application in the educational sphere, but as an indicator that one race is superior to another, it is pretty much useless. There isn’t any known criterion by which one race is “better” than another.
Daley, T.C., Whaley, S.E., Sigman, M.D., Espinosa, M.P., Neumann, C. 2003. IQ on the rise–-the Flynn effect in rural Kenyan children. Psychological Science 14, 215-219.
Gould, S.J. 1980. The Mismeasure of Man. NY: W.W. Norton & Co.
Herrnstein, R.J., Murray, C. 1994. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. NY: Free Press.
Montagu, A. 1997 (1942). Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
| Page created: | 01/28/2021 |
| Last modified: | 01/28/2021 |
| Author: | BPL |