3 Hacks for Killing Critical Conversations

  • by Benjamin Doxtdator

    • Reflections on Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, & Sonya R. Porter.

    Far too many scientists and researchers with mainstream credibility endorse the idea that there are racial disparities in IQ. The supposedly neutral data puts the average I.Q. for Black people in the U.S. 15 points, or one standard-deviation, below the white norm of 100. Writing in The Blank Slate (2002), Steven Pinker outlines his view:

    “My own view, incidentally, is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference — the black-white IQ gap in the United States — the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation. Thomas Sowell has documented that in most of the twentieth century and throughout the world, ethnic differences in IQ were the rule, not the exception. Members of minority groups who were out of the cultural mainstream commonly had average IQs that fell below that of the majority, including immigrants to the United States from southern and eastern Europe, the children of white mountaineers in the United States, children who grew up on canal boats in Britain, and Gaelic-speaking children in the Hebrides. The differences were at least as large as the current black-white gap but disappeared within a few generations. For many reasons, the experience of African Americans in the United States under slavery and segregation is not comparable to those of immigrants or rural isolates, and their transition to mainstream cultural patterns could easily take longer.” (Page 144, emphasis mine)

    Elsewhere, Pinker happily contemplates different hypothesis about the genetics of intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews, whose “average IQ has been measured at 108 to 115, one-half to one standard deviation above the mean.” I wonder how Pinker would feel about the speculative link between genetics and IQ in Ashkenazi Jews if the sociopolitcal situation were different. According to Allan Chase, before 1973, Jewish people were reported to have lower I.Q.s, which was explicitly used against them by anti-semites in the advocacy for immigration policy in the United States. The strong institutional racism in the U.S. doesn’t need IQ tests to perpetuate itself, but those tests play a role in ‘scientifically’ reinforcing the idea that certain groups are inferior, whether the causes are genetic or not.

    No one can deny the inequality in outcome for many people of color in the U.S., but many deny that there’s any inequality of opportunity, or that white privilege and structural racism exist. If the U.S. then functions as a meritocracy of sorts, any inequality is supposed to spring from something else, such as lower I.Q.s. A recent study (summary), brilliantly covered by the NYT, documents the impact of structural racism on economic opportunity and concludes “The gap in incomes between blacks and American Indians relative to whites is thus likely to persistent indefinitely without changes in their rates of intergenerational mobility.” In particular, Black men are disproportionately impacted:

    “… when we compare the outcomes of black and white men who grow up in two-parent families with similar levels of income, wealth, and education, we continue to find that the black men still have substantially lower incomes in adulthood. Hence, differences in these family characteristics play a limited role in explaining the gap.

    Perhaps most controversially, some have proposed that racial disparities might be due to differences in innate ability. This hypothesis does not explain why there are black-white intergenerational gaps for men but not women. Moreover, black- white gaps in test scores – which have been the basis for most prior arguments for ability differences – are substantial for both men and women. The fact that black women have outcomes comparable to white women conditional on parental income despite having much lower test scores suggests that standardized tests do not provide accurate measures of differences in ability (insofar as it is relevant for earnings) by race, perhaps because of stereotype anxiety or racial biases in tests.”

    Claude Steele’s research on stereotype anxiety takes account of the “full scope of racial devaluation in our society” and its impact on the performance of Black people on tests. Most of the non-genetic explanations for the so-called Black / white I.Q. gap take the results as valid, and then propose some kind of deficit theory to explain them, such as appealing to problems with Black society that would, in Pinker’s words, hamper “their transition to mainstream cultural patterns.” Steele’s work completely upends these deficit theories.

    “… survey after survey shows that even poor black Americans value education highly, often more than whites.

    …

    Neither is the problem fully explained, as one might assume, by deficits in skill or preparation which blacks might suffer because of background disadvantages. I first doubted that such a connection existed when I saw flunk-out rates for black and white students at a large, prestigious university. … whereas only two percent to 11 percent of the whites flunked out, 18 percent to 33 percent of the blacks flunked out, even at the highest levels of preparation (combined SATs of 1,400). Dinesh D’Souza has argued recently that college affirmative-action programs cause failure and high dropout rates among black students by recruiting them to levels of college work for which they are inadequately prepared. That was clearly not the case at this school; black students flunked out in large numbers even with preparation well above average.”

    Here’s the part that’s especially relevant to educators. Steele found that the “root of black achievement problems is failure of American schooling to meet this simple condition for many of its black students”: “treatment as a valued person with good prospects.”

    “Like anyone, blacks risk devaluation for a particular incompetence, such as a failed test or a flubbed pronunciation. But they further risk that such performances will confirm the broader, racial inferiority they are suspected of. Thus, from the first grade through graduate school, blacks have the extra fear that in the eyes of those around them their full humanity could fall with a poor answer or a mistaken stroke of the pen.”

    The deficit theories that place Black intelligence below whites, whether the cause is believed to be genetic or not, creates a harmful stereotype that negatively impacts the performance of Black people on tests when the tests are framed as being about ability. As soon as tests are framed that way, a burden is placed on Black students that hampers their performance. The I.Q. gap is not real, and the differences in performance disappear when tests are re-framed as not measuring ability, which makes the stereotype irrelevant. Steel explains how the negative stereotype affects performance:

    “When we’re at risk of confirming a stereotype that we don’t like, and it’s about something we care about, our minds race. They’re probably doing all sorts of things: arguing against the stereotype; denying its applicability to us; disparaging anyone who could ever think that of us; feeling sorry for ourselves; trying to buck ourselves up to disprove the stereotype. We are defending ourselves and coping with the threat of being stereotyped. … a mind trying to defeat a stereotype leaves little mental capacity free for anything else we’re doing.”

    In her analysis of white privilege, Peggy McIntosh (1997) notes that race is never made an issue for white people in the same way it is for Black people: “I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.” We might as well add to her list: I am never asked to prove the intelligence of my racial group by taking a test. I am never asked to choose between bad genes or bad culture as an explanation for the performance of my racial group. While this most recent study on economic opportunity finds disparate impacts on Black men, as good intersectionalists, we must never lose sight of the “full scope of racial devaluation in our society” as it impacts women and non-binary people of color. I almost didn’t write that last sentence, thinking to myself, surely it goes without saying. Yet there is far too much that gets forgotten and pushed aside in the not saying. To paraphrase Ijeoma Oluo, so many issues were made about race a long time ago when whiteness was centered as the norm, and through talking about the impact of racism, people of color are often trying to get issues to a place where it is not about race (27:00). Listening has never been more important.

     

    More about me.

    Note (added 23:26 CST): I regret not foregrounding the erasure of Black women from the very first sentence of what I wrote.

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