Is it racism?

[hongi]

Is it racism to say that African peoples are on average less intelligent than other peoples? How is this any different from saying that African peoples on average are darker in skin colour than Caucasians (on average)?

[The Grim Squeaker]

One has empircal, objective proof. Intelligence is harder to measure, and can be swayed by dodgy test results or education. You could compare brain sizes, or mental efficiency if you had the technology, but if something is subjective then it's not a good criteria.

[hongi]

The reason why I'm asking this is that a discussion has come up between an evolutionist who believes Africans on average have less intelligence than other races, and an intelligent designer. I don't agree with the evolutionist, simply because I haven't looked at the papers he's cited and I don't know, but the intelligent designer seems to have gotten it into his head that the evolutionist is racist - but I don't think so. Here's the link if you want to read through it for yourself.

If it was shown conclusively that Africans or any other race on average were less intelligent than other races, then how is it different to saying that Swedes are more lactose tolerant than other races? Intelligence is a physical attribute isn't it? It's not a moral judgement. So how is it racism to say that one race/group/community/peoples are different from another in quantifiable ways?

[The Grim Squeaker]

Intelligence is a physical attribute isn't it? It's not a moral judgement. So how is it racism to say that one race/group/community/peoples are different from another in quantifiable ways?

It's not racist if you can prove it quantifiably, but my whole fucking point was that there's no way (today) to quantitively prove intelligince to any degree of accuracy. Learn how to read.

[hongi]

It's not racist if you can prove it quantifiably, but my whole fucking point was that there's no way (today) to quantitively prove intelligince to any degree of accuracy. Learn how to read.

The evolutionist claims that he has scientific data backing him up, but I haven't studied the issue and I'm certainly not going to accept his conclusions just because he claims he has scientific data backing him up. There be creationist ways of thinking.

Hypothetically if it was shown that on average, the people of the African continent are less intelligent than other people on other continents, then it's not racism. I don't think so anyway.

[The Grim Squeaker]

It's not racist if you can prove it quantifiably, but my whole fucking point was that there's no way (today) to quantitively prove intelligince to any degree of accuracy. Learn how to read.

The evolutionist claims that he has scientific data backing him up, but I haven't studied the issue and I'm certainly not going to accept his conclusions just because he claims he has scientific data backing him up. There be creationist ways of thinking.

Hypothetically if it was shown that on average, the people of the African continent are less intelligent than other people on other continents, then it's not racism. I don't think so anyway.

Hypothetically, If you had objective, quantified true proof of such a thing, then it would not be racism. Racism involves subjectivism, and only acting on this knowledge in a prejudiced way would be racist.

Prejudice or discrimination based on an individual's race

So, if it were a fact, you could point it out and not be racist, but if you were to deny two equal applicants due to one being "more likely to be less intelligent" then that would be racism.
To go with the lactose example, you can state that europeans have better lactose tolerance, but going a step further and firing mexicans from your plant for fear of them suddenly puking due to less resistance would be racist/prejudiced. Clear?!

[Jaepheth]

I've only known a handful of people from Africa, and they seemed just as intelligent as anyone else I've ever known. I think the real problem with Africa is the heavily entrenched magical thinking and tribal customs. That and their apparent mistrust of outsiders due to bad history with colonialization makes it incredibly difficult to get education and critical thinking to take root.

In other words, I believe the problem is ignorance, not innate stupidity.

As has been said, we lack the technology to truly measure a person's actual potential for intelligence.

If you did have irrefutable, scientific evidence that native Africans had a lower potential for intelligence, then that would be a fact, independent of personal beliefs and therefore not racist.

However, I think westerners still falling for Nigerian scammers is fairly convincing evidence that we're no smarter than they are.

[Johonebesus]

One problem is that intelligence is not a single factor or small set of traits, like lactose tolerance or skin color. There isn't even absolute agreement on what exactly intelligence is. Do you mean ability to think in a logical, mechanical manner? Do you mean an ability to make sense of the physical environment? Do you mean an ability to understand others, sympathize with them, and predict their behavior? The brain is a very complex organ with many, many things going on at a given time. Unlike the traits you mentioned, there are a vast number of genes that work together to define how the brain develops, how it will work, and how it will adapt to the environment. It's difficult to imagine that something as complex and adaptive as "intelligence" could be easily limited in this or that race.

[hongi]

So, if it were a fact, you could point it out and not be racist, but if you were to deny two equal applicants due to one being "more likely to be less intelligent" then that would be racism.
To go with the lactose example, you can state that europeans have better lactose tolerance, but going a step further and firing mexicans from your plant for fear of them suddenly puking due to less resistance would be racist/prejudiced. Clear?!

Absolutely! I just needed a bit of perspective on this issue. I was sort of worried I had it all wrong and I actually was a racist.

I've only known a handful of people from Africa, and they seemed just as intelligent as anyone else I've ever known. I think the real problem with Africa is the heavily entrenched magical thinking and tribal customs. That and their apparent mistrust of outsiders due to bad history with colonialization makes it incredibly difficult to get education and critical thinking to take root.

In other words, I believe the problem is ignorance, not innate stupidity.

As has been said, we lack the technology to truly measure a person's actual potential for intelligence.

If you did have irrefutable, scientific evidence that native Africans had a lower potential for intelligence, then that would be a fact, independent of personal beliefs and therefore not racist.

However, I think westerners still falling for Nigerian scammers is fairly convincing evidence that we're no smarter than they are.

I also highly doubt the notion that Africans are on average innately dumber than everyone else, but as with everything concerning race and genetics, the topic is so big that I can't really make a definite statement. Best thing to do is to stay out of it.

One problem is that intelligence is not a single factor or small set of traits, like lactose tolerance or skin color. There isn't even absolute agreement on what exactly intelligence is. Do you mean ability to think in a logical, mechanical manner? Do you mean an ability to make sense of the physical environment? Do you mean an ability to understand others, sympathize with them, and predict their behavior? The brain is a very complex organ with many, many things going on at a given time. Unlike the traits you mentioned, there are a vast number of genes that work together to define how the brain develops, how it will work, and how it will adapt to the environment. It's difficult to imagine that something as complex and adaptive as "intelligence" could be easily limited in this or that race.

For this very reason, I doubt that some scientists have pinned down intelligence to genetics. Race and genetics is such a huge topic that I find it hard to believe that anyone can make a definite statement either way. They're having a hard time as it is with diseases that are more prevalent in certain racial groups, and those are only a handful of genes.

[Zixinus]

The reason why I'm asking this is that a discussion has come up between an evolutionist who believes Africans on average have less intelligence than other races, and an intelligent designer. I don't agree with the evolutionist, simply because I haven't looked at the papers he's cited and I don't know, but the intelligent designer seems to have gotten it into his head that the evolutionist is racist - but I don't think so. Here's the link if you want to read through it for yourself.

From a certain standpoint, it is racist. That standpoint is political correctness. Even to suggest that one group is more intelligent then the other, even trough there are proper, non-racist reasons why so, can sound racist.

[Aquatain]

In fact as one who believe intelligent design you yourself are in the same plight as many Africans.

They live in a world ruled by mysticism rather than reality and therefore might appear as of lesser intelligence to observers.

Intelligence is as a whole a measurement of a society's education - at least the kind of intelligence we can measure with some degree of accuracy at this point.

[madd0ct0r]

It sounds like your scientist is referring to the book The Bell Curve.

Apart from many, many quibbles about the validity of the data collection, processing and what IQ tests actually reveal about someone's intelligence, the conclusion is nowhere as bad as it sounds.

Basically it ran along the lines of: both racial groups (black and white) showed a very similar normal distribution of test results.
The average for the white group was slightly higher then that of the black group - ie the bell curve of the white guys was very slightly further along the horizontal axis. This effectivley means that the vast majority of the population overlap completely, with a tiny racial margin at either extreme.
Of course, once you get into the extreme ends of a bell curve, single individuals have a disproportianate effect on the results.

Another way of describing the results is: the most intelligent among the white group was slightly more intelligent then his(her?) black counterpart and visa versa amongst the gormless at the other end.

Not so scary now is it?

A further nice twist to the racism argument is that the Asian bell curve (possibly especially SE Asians, but I'm biased) have the same relationship to the white group as the whitey boys do the black.
Pointing this out to white supremacists never gets old.

[The Spartan]

Another way of describing the results is: the most intelligent among the white group was slightly more intelligent then his(her?) black counterpart and visa versa amongst the gormless at the other end.

How much would poverty and the resulting lack of education be skewing those results?

I can't speak for Africa itself but I know that a disproportionate number of blacks in America are near or below the poverty line and, at least partly due to this, have a substandard level of education.

So I have to wonder how and if they accounted for this.

[Coyote]

For a long time, Darwin's Theory of Evolution was used by racists to prop up their theories, and they used examples such as European technological domination and empire-building as proof (conveniently forgetting this would put Europeans in the #2 slot behind Asians, and that it was actually proto-Arabic/Semitic people who started farming, animal domestication, and piling rocks atop one another).

Part of the problem is that when intelligence tests are done, at least in Western societies, they are typically tests designed by white people which are administered to black people, and based off of what a typical white can reasonably be expected to know. But since black schools aren't funded or given resources on the same level as most white schools (rural and inner-city notwithstanding) then the black kids end up not knowing this stuff out of omission, rather than out of an innate stupidity. So they don't perform on the test as well as the whites, the white administrators shrug and say, "huh, they must be stupid," and decide it's not worth the money to fund the schools as well. Ta-daa! Instant cycle.

[Rye]

If it was shown conclusively that Africans or any other race on average were less intelligent than other races, then how is it different to saying that Swedes are more lactose tolerant than other races? Intelligence is a physical attribute isn't it? It's not a moral judgement. So how is it racism to say that one race/group/community/peoples are different from another in quantifiable ways?

Something can be racist or sexist and also be true. Women tend to be safer drivers than men, men are more violent, blacks tend on average to score lower on IQ tests (IIRC, even when economic equivalence is taken into account). It's not popular to say it, of course, and for good reason, namely the associations with the extreme right wing.

[Kanastrous]

A long time ago I read that Koko (the gorilla who communicates via ASL) was administered an IQ test (presumably ported into gorilla-friendly symbols from a test designed for humans).

I don't remember her score, but I do recall that she was docked points after being shown a picture of a house, and of a tree, and asked "which is a place to live?" and picking the tree. Which high-lit the prejudices built into this kind of test by the people who write them...

I also found it odd that a gorilla would pick a tree as a place to live. Aren't gorillas primarily ground-dwellers?

[madd0ct0r]

If a gorilla I'd rather have foliage then barren brick.

At the Spartan: Where I used the the words 'more intelligent' it should strictly have been 'better at scoring on an IQ test'.

Should have qualified it properly the first time.

[Rye]

Scoring better on IQ tests does correlate to higher intelligence, though, as far as trends go. To my knowledge, there's never been a study done that goes "high IQ test scores are not representative of high intellectual aptitude," or similar. I mean I'm not exactly what you'd call an IQ fanatic and I'm not a fan of getting the mean of different intellectual capabilities and boiling them down to a single unit (I personally think an array of aptitudes would show the more representative picture), but they do offer decent predictions, so they can't be dismissed as easily as some ideologues hope.

[Straha]

Depending on how you view the data, it could be either racist or not.

For instance, it's wouldn't be racist to say African-American children in New York schools have lower test scores and grades, it's a quantifiable fact. No more racist than saying Asians tend to score higher on the SAT (IIRC.) Now I'd consider it racist if you say it's because they're of darker skin and therefore inherently inferior and less intelligent.

The fact of the matter is (as many people have pointed out here) that testing for intelligence ignores a whole slew of factors, some of which we know very little about. To take an example off the top of my head: The Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect is a general trend along most countries for the average IQ to raise by about 2-3 points every decade. This produces some interesting lines of thought both on its ramifications for understanding human history (I.E. Using the on hand data and extrapolating backwards 100 years to 1908 the average IQ would have been around 70-80. This goes a long way to explaining World War I :p , but also shows how extrapolating the data could be taken too far if, say, you go back three hundred years.) but also for the cause. One of the leading theories for this is that better nutrition and health care add up to smarter kids and brighter people, and that having smarter parents leads to having smarter children which rolls on through history. So here's one perfectly valid explanation of why Africans and African-Americans have tested relatively worse on the SATs. Their living conditions have only really been improving compared to the pre-industrial era in the past forty years and sixty years (a conservative gesture) respectively. So because they tend to be economically disadvantaged, and come from less intelligent parents (due to the economic disadvantage) they have less intelligent kids. It says nothing about their potential (exceptions abound, Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, etc. etc.) just their situation.

[Akhlut]

There's also the fact that poor black children in US cities tend to be in areas with older housing and higher pollution. So, if the children are in areas where there are relatively high concentrations of heavy metals, they will be less intelligent because their brains have been partially destroyed by lead or mercury, for instance.

[Mayabird]

The fact of the matter is (as many people have pointed out here) that testing for intelligence ignores a whole slew of factors, some of which we know very little about. To take an example off the top of my head: The Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect is a general trend along most countries for the average IQ to raise by about 2-3 points every decade. This produces some interesting lines of thought both on its ramifications for understanding human history (I.E. Using the on hand data and extrapolating backwards 100 years to 1908 the average IQ would have been around 70-80. This goes a long way to explaining World War I :p , but also shows how extrapolating the data could be taken too far if, say, you go back three hundred years.) but also for the cause. One of the leading theories for this is that better nutrition and health care add up to smarter kids and brighter people, and that having smarter parents leads to having smarter children which rolls on through history. So here's one perfectly valid explanation of why Africans and African-Americans have tested relatively worse on the SATs. Their living conditions have only really been improving compared to the pre-industrial era in the past forty years and sixty years (a conservative gesture) respectively. So because they tend to be economically disadvantaged, and come from less intelligent parents (due to the economic disadvantage) they have less intelligent kids. It says nothing about their potential (exceptions abound, Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, etc. etc.) just their situation.

Important part highlighted. The Flynn effect is paralleled by increases in the average height, also due to better nutrition. This was actually what I was going to mention: it IS possible that, averaged out, Africans have lower IQs than people in first world countries. They also live in a region far more prone to famine. Children growing up without proper nutrition, always on the verge of starvation, won't get the nutrients needed to properly develop their brains (they also probably won't be able to get enough of an education to learn to use what they do have, since they'd be too worried about not starving to death). But since we're talking evolution vs. cretinism here, somebody's probably trying to imply that it's because of genetic reasons, when it's more an issue of public health and economics.


And while I'm here, there are also social effects that can effect test scores. Given two groups of black children who get an IQ test, if one is told that they're getting an IQ test, and the other is told that this is a game, the group that is told that they're playing a game always scores much higher. Take some Asian women, split them in two groups, and give them a test. If you tell one group that Asian people do really well, they do really well; if you tell them that women do badly on the test, they do badly, even if it's the same test.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Not to mention that because of socioeconomic factors, the minorities being tested simply did not have access to the same quality of education.

[Metatwaddle]

A few years after The Bell Curve got its publicity, the American Psychological Association put together a task force to study intelligence and produce a report on it. Their findings can be read here. The parts about group difference start in section V ("Cultural Differences").

The authors actually reject the idea that test bias is the only contributor to the lower score among African Americans, based on the fact that an IQ test's purpose is partly to predict academic performance, and the tests do not underpredict black students' success in school. Of course, that doesn't really show anything except that the American education system is stacked against black students, just as much as the tests are.

But they aren't satisfied with the genetic explanation, either: "It is sometimes suggested that the Black/White differential in psychometric intelligence is partly due to genetic differences (Jensen, 1972). There is not much direct evidence on this point, but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis."

It's an interesting and fairly comprehensive report, and I recommend that everyone interested in the topic should read it.

[Korto]

Another problem with IQ tests is cultural bias, the unconscious assumption of knowledge basic to our culture, but possibly not theirs. If a tribesman was given a western IQ test, he would likely go quite badly (mouse is to computer as steering wheel is to .....?); while it has been tried, to a greater or lesser extent, to translate, the bias would be extremely hard to eradicate.
Imagine the tribesman making us a test ..."If you saw this animal mark on the ground, which way would you travel for water?" Uh... towards the tap?

[Straha]

Of course, that doesn't really show anything except that the American education system is stacked against black students, just as much as the tests are.

Not necessarily. The average white family is more economically advantaged and better educated than an African-American family. So the average white family can take more time to help their kids with their school work, or to take them to educational trips (I.E. Museums) or, heck, even to the doctor. Same reason why white families from economically disadvantaged areas (I.E. West Virginia off the top of my head) tend to score low on test scores also.