I generally lean to the left side of things in my views but when my friends and acquaintances of similar bent express the idea that all races are equal I say nothing. I've had to learn not to. Now then, I've known many black people (notice I don't capitalize the 'b'. 'white' is usually spelled without a capital letter, so let's be consistent.). I've known several smarter than I. There are competent and intelligent blacks in every field you can think of. But according to the best research I've seen, if these people are not exceptions or outliers they are, at the least, untypical.The average IQ if people of African descent is 80. That's a cold fact proven by unprejudiced research. I remember that an IQ test I took as as a teenager asked the question "Who wrote Faust?" Well, I knew the answer but how is that knowledge a sign of intelligence? You've either learned that fact or you haven't and lack of education is not lack of intelligence. The tests for the conclusion I'm referencing are not like that.There are IQ tests that measure raw native ability apart from the influence of education level or cultural acquisition and these types of tests, over multiple instances and years, consistently show African-Americans are, on average, less intelligent than most of the rest of the people (races?) on the planet. What are the implications of this very unpopular conclusion? For one, it implies that in an economy which no longer has enough factory work which could employ the less intelligent, there must be a somewhat permanent large body of unemployed and dependent people. Many present day jobs can simply not be done by the unintelligent. I can think of nothing to remedy this except to bring manufacturing back to the country but is this likely? All in all, my conclusions make me sad. I wish things were different and that all races really were equal in potential but that is not the case. Am I a racist? Let me know what you think.
Heck, there are some that think that wife and I are somewhat racists. That is, even though we love Motown music, Earth-Wind & Fire and Kool and the Gang bands. Chuck Berry, Jimmy Hendrix and some other black rock stars. And, even though there are actors/actresses that are black that we love. And, even though there were blacks that lived around us, that we knew, when we lived in Jacksonville, FL.. And, even though, my EMT partner was black and from Compton, CA. But, sometimes you just can't stop a person from what they think.
I'm not an expert, and I don't even play one on TV, but my inclination is to believe that the tests are culturally or situationally biased in some way. Personal experiences don't suggest that there is anything inherently inferior about black people. I've never lived in a predominantly black community and I had no exposure to black people throughout my elementary and high school days. However, I had a black roommate in college and he was at least as intelligent as I was, if not more so. I have worked with black people at various jobs, I have had black students while I was teaching emergency medical technology. My son-in-law and two of my grandchildren are black, and there were certainly enough black people around me when I lived in Fayetteville. As personal experiences, this is anecdotal evidence, I am aware, but I just haven't seen anything to suggest that white people are intellectually superior to black people. I am not one to defer to the experts when the experts are telling me something that doesn't make sense to me and, given that experts have come up with a whole lot of crazy things over the years, I don't think that's a bad policy. So, I'm not buying it. I believe that there has been testing that indicates this, but I don't believe that it's an accurate reflection of the intellectual capabilities of black people.
Who cares what IQ is for anyone particular race? I base things on the Person... Their demeanor, how they behave, the aurora around them even. I know a few close to geniuses...would not wee on them in a forest fire. Are you racist? I don't know, but appartantly you have things your trying to work out...least your trying to perhaps correct some wayward thoughts.
I think that both races are alike in that some of us are super intelligent and others not so much. Not all of us can be college material, black or white. Contrary to the popular saying, all men are not created equal. Having said that, I mentored fifth and sixth grade children for a couple of years. These were the ones who were falling behind. They were black. I found that some of them were just not capable of learning the lessons. Some of them just needed a little extra attention to do well. In my opinion, our education system is failing those who are not capable of book learning. They are able to do other things very well. Teach them what they need to be able to do to earn a good living and teach others what they need for advanced education. Does that make me racist?
There is a complete difference between thinking that people of different cultures have different IQ’s on an administrated test; and thinking that one human life is worth less than another human life, which is the essence of racism. In every race, there are great differences of intelligence within that same race, and some people learn different things than people who live in another part of the world, but that does not make their education worth more or less than the other person’s ; so segregating people by intelligence makes no sense. Every human life has the same value, regardless of the nationality of the person. If someone was trapped in a burning vehicle, we would rush to help them escape to safety, and not give any thought at all to what color their skin was or what language they spoke.
Ken, I'm not an expert either and I don't automatically accept what people who style themselves that say. In the case of racial differences in intelligence I would be content to be proven wrong. As I said, it is a sad fact to me. Wikipedia has a good long article (Race and intelligence) that gives an good overview of the subject although I don't agree with many of the things said. I think that 'race' is a valid concept and not just a social construct. One line in the Wikipedia article says "Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters." Well I think this is nonsense. How would Africans have have gained their distinctly different color, different from all others in the world, if they were not a "distinct continental type"? Human beings just did not mix equally throughout the world. They did not share all their characteristics with each other. Some groups, relatively isolated from other groups were bound to evolve different attributes. It would be an act of magic if all of the relatively separate groups in the world would just happen to evolve with the exact same level of intelligence. As far as experience of these issues go, I grew up in Cambridge, MD, in the 60s a hotbed of racial strife. I was sitting in the pool hall one night when there was a loud thud which rattled the windows. Several of us ran two blocks to the source of the noise and saw a corner of the courthouse blown out and smoke pouring from it. One of H. Rap Brown's followers had exploded a bomb in a bathroom. In earlier years than this I'd attend gatherings at the courthouse lawn. I heard JFK speak. I heard the KKK speak. I heard the black activists and church choirs sing and speak. At night in bed I'd hear gunshots not that far away. During the day it was hard to stay outside sometimes because the teargas going off uptown drifted into my neighborhood. Even at a young age I was sympathetic to the blacks seeking their equal rights and disgusted with the many racists in my town. When they integrated the schools I'd see white people sitting on their porches with guns, pointing them at the black kids who were walking home from the new white school. I'm saying all this because I thought it might be interesting to others and not because my young life showed me any evidence of black inferiority. My experiences in Cambridge and my later education pointed me in the opposite direction in fact - a wish for equality among people. I don't know if I should speculate on possible reasons for differences in intelligence among races but I will, just a little. Was life in Africa simply easier and not so demanding of high intelligence? Were northern Europeans( or others around the globe ) who were faced with a harsher environment and more difficult life have more need for higher intelligence to survive? I'm guessing here and my speculations could be nonsense. Anyway, Ken, maybe you could answer the question I posed in my topic. Do you think I'm a racist?
IQ tests do not necessarily measure knowledge or wisdom. I have known folks with high IQs who were hemmed in by tunnel vision in one area only. So, I don't give much credence to them regardless of race.
I suppose that if you truly believe that all races are not equal in potential, then you might be a racist. I believe only you can answer that question, however. As a child of the deep south back in the days of racial inequality, I was bothered by the hate and disregard for the feelings of black people. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. I don't consider myself a racist, but I suppose we all would like to believe that we are above it. Oh, and as for the menial jobs "for the unintelligent," most of those are done by undocumented aliens these days.
That's not for me to decide. The word has been so misused in recent years that it's hard to tell what it's supposed to mean anymore. However, I don't suppose it's unreasonable to consider that believing that white people are smarter than black people has some racist tones to it.
Ken, thanks for your answer, even though it's not one I particularly wanted to hear. However, I wouldn't have asked if I didn't want to know.
I didn't mean it in the way that it might have sounded, Dwight. My conclusion was based on the following definition of the word. By that definition, a belief that black people are inclined to be less intelligent than white people would be defined as racism. However, the word has come to mean a lot of other things, particularly hatred or contempt of people of another race, and an acceptance that the studies that you referred to are true does not necessarily imply that you hold to these negative opinions or that you are recruitment material for the KKK. By that same definition, a belief that black people are more naturally athletic than white people would also have to be termed racism. Over the past several decades, we have been conditioned to believe everything the experts tell us, whatever the subject might be. If you were to read through posts in this forum, you would see that this is something that I view as a significant reason why society is going to hell, using the phrase figuratively. In the 1930s, the experts came to some pretty horrible conclusions about Jewish people, and I'm not just talking about Germany. Because people accepted these studies as fact, even when they contradicted everything they had previously known about their Jewish friends, co-workers, fellow students, and neighbors, the consequences were devastating. Germany got most of its eugenics philosophy from US eugenicists, who also promoted the inferiority of black people, and some of these eugenicists, such as Margaret Sanger, are still revered by many. I believe that we are being programmed to surrender our thought processes to the experts so that we will believe whatever we're told, and I think that this is very dangerous. For this reason, I am not so willing to believe a study that indicates that black people are inclined to be intellectually inferior. If indeed, black people tend to be less educated than people of some other races, I believe the reasons are not inherent, and probably have more to do with culture, poverty, growing up in single-parent homes, or without the same support structure that others are more likely to have. I don't know, and I am not in a position to solve the problems, but there is probably a whole host of them. I don't think that they are related to racial inferiority, however. My cat is probably physically and intellectually capable of performing some amazing tricks, but the only way to train a cat to do tricks is if the cat thinks of it first. Children growing up in some homes are not encouraged to succeed educationally. This is not at all restricted to any one race, but it might be that black people are less likely to have an effective educational support system in place, not because of race, but due to other factors. I raised a (white) nephew who suffered from reactive attachment disorder. Without going into details about RAD, one of the characteristics of the disorder was that he was not at all interested in pleasing his parents or anyone who was trying to parent him. He got over that, but it was a very difficult time. He was a bright kid but you wouldn't know it from his academic performance. Before we decided to homeschool him, one of his public school teachers showed us a test that he had failed. There were 100 questions. He answered the first 50 correctly, then just checked off the rest of the answers randomly, as if he didn't even bother reading the questions. It wasn't that he didn't have time either, because he was one of the first to finish the test, according to his teacher. Getting a good grade just wasn't important to him. He preferred to fail. There are just so many other factors to consider, and I have a hard time believing that racial inferiority plays into it at all.
Ken, you make very good points. My beliefs in this area are not something I'm proud of and I certainly don't spend time proselytizing anyone to accept them. My posts about this here were not intended to sway others to my conclusions but merely an attempt to elicit others',views, which I'm very curious about. Thanks again for your replies.