Black Intelligence

Righty: We have to face the music at some point: black people just aren’t quite as sharp as the rest of us. Look at their chronic poverty everywhere in the world, their abysmal academic performance, their substandard results on SATs and IQ tests. I get tired of hearing that their intellectual shortcomings are due to their history of slavery and victimization. Come on, blacks have been free for 140 years now, and they’ve enjoyed equal rights since the 1960s. And we’re still leaving them in the dust. Sure, there are individual blacks who are pretty smart. (Most of them have at least a few drops of white blood, of course.) But the majority of blacks simply can’t compete at our level. That’s probably because they were left behind in Africa and never had the opportunity to evolve along with whites and Asians. Native black African cultures show no appreciable evidence of technology, learning or civilized arts. Why is it that even the children of black professionals score relatively low on intelligence tests? Why are there so few black mathematicians and physicists? You can’t tell me that racism has anything to do with it. The sooner we have the courage to face the truth, the sooner we can help blacks find their proper niche in society -- even if it means that the majority of them will be steered toward vocational school rather than college. It beats prison, where a third of black men are ending up these days.

Lefty: I hate to keep saying you’ve outdone yourself, Righty. But you’ve REALLY outdone yourself this time. Your comments amount to hate speech -- that’s how vile they are. You’re spewing RACIST GARBAGE, plain and simple. If this were my website, I’d ban you. But we’ve come here to debate, so let me demolish your arguments rationally. First, you can’t equate test results with actual intelligence. These tests are devised by white academics who use cultural references that totally discount the black experience. If you took a test devised by blacks, based on black culture and experience, you’d undoubtedly score even lower than you would on a white-designed test. Second, slavery and racism have left their lingering and insidious traces upon the psyches of today’s blacks. It doesn’t matter how far in the past those injustices occurred (and believe me, they’re still occurring today). All black people grow up with the notion that they’re second-class citizens, so they perform according to our expectations (and the expectations they’ve internalized). Take away the legacy of racism, and blacks would be performing at the same level as everyone else. Third: You cite the lack of "technology, learning or civilized arts" (whatever that means) in Africa. But you conveniently forget that sub-Saharan Africa was totally isolated from other world cultures until the age of colonization. Europe and Asia continually exchanged ideas via trade routes and warfare, so they grew and prospered. Even in isolation, black civilizations created remarkable monuments, and black scholars were highly esteemed in the ancient and medieval worlds. As for your implication that blacks are less "evolved," you can take that notion and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Race has been proven to be an artificial construct -- or have you had trouble keeping up with your reading, Righty? Still moving our lips, are we?

The New Moderate:

Yes, the cold statistics lean toward Righty’s observation that black IQs, on average, lag behind those of whites and Asians (the median for African Americans is around 85). By the time you reach 100, the bell curve for blacks is already flattening out. And nobody needs to be reminded that blacks have struggled (and are still struggling) to compete academically. African American dropout rates are pretty hefty compared to those of whites and Asians. A significant slice of the black population is functionally illiterate. Why? This is a troubling and almost taboo topic, but we can’t simply shove it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Are the standardized tests subtly biased against blacks? Probably, but not significantly enough to skew the results to the degree that we’ve seen. Mathematics is culturally neutral, yet the math scores of black students tend to lag just as depressingly as their reading comprehension scores. What to make of the disparity, then? You can cite the often brutal anti-intellectual atmosphere that prevails in so many black neighborhoods -- but why are black neighborhoods anti-intellectual in the first place? Could there be a grain of truth to the racist stereotyping of black intelligence? After all, blacks languish even in Africa, where they enjoy self-rule. What if, God forbid, all those millennia of adapting to cold climates really did enhance the minds of whites and Asians?

I suggest that we tackle this hypersensitive topic from a less inflammatory perspective. We’ve all read about left-brained and right-brained individuals. Left-brained people have well-developed logical skills; they excel at abstract reasoning, reading comprehension, math and science. Right-brained people are more intuitive in their thinking: less rigidly logical, more creative and expressive. Neither style is more or less "intelligent" than the other, though Western society disproportionately rewards left-brained skills.

Are you beginning to see the picture? My hypothesis (and I wish I could see it tested by actual scientists) is that blacks, on average, are more right-brained than the rest of us. Think of the undeniable black genius for improvisation and innovation in music, language and culture in general. This is right-brained thinking par excellence, and I defy anyone to disagree with me.

Along the same lines, one could argue that adapting to inhospitable climates in Europe and Asia favored left-brained individuals -- those who could devise logical solutions to environmental challenges (though the Huns, Vikings and medieval serfs don't exactly impress us as formidable logicians). Maybe left-brained thinking was an aberration at first, a mutation that aided survival in the glacial north. And maybe those left-brained survivors lost something of their ancestors' spontaneity and creativity until they became the accountants and computer programmers of today.

An important question: can we learn to be left-brained, or are we born that way? In other words, are we talking about inherited or cultural traits? I seriously doubt if blacks are hard-wired to think solely with their right hemispheres (how to explain all the black lawyers out there?), but I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually discovered a hereditary component. I have to wonder if it will ever happen, given the taboo status of the topic. But the sooner we unlock the mystery of subpar black academic achievement, the sooner we’ll be able to close the gap.

For example, if we discovered that blacks are more right-brained than whites or Asians, our school systems could devise special teaching methods to reach young black minds (and, for that matter, right-brained students regardless of race). We might even shed the antiquated belief that IQ is an adequate measure of intelligence. Do you see the possibilities for academic progress here?

My hypothesis makes abundant use of generalizations, and of course we should never use generalizations to apply to individuals within a group. Certainly not all blacks are right-brained, just as not all whites and Asians are left-brained. But we can no longer ignore this particular elephant in the room. As affluent whites and Asians continue to provide all manner of intellectual nurturing for their offspring, black children will lag further behind unless our teachers can connect with them. It's highly unlikely that black kids are less intelligent, but it's possible that they’re differently intelligent. Let's find out for sure by opening our minds and doing the research.

Summary: Despite lower test scores and academic failures, blacks most likely aren’t any less intelligent than whites or Asians; they simply might be more right-brained. This information, if borne out by scientific studies, would help us close the achievement gap in schools. Let’s override our PC inhibitions and do the research!