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townhall.com
Thomas Sowell (back to story)
October 3, 2002
Race and IQ: Part III
I happened to run into
Charles Murray in Dulles International Airport while he and Richard Herrnstein
were writing "The Bell Curve." When I asked him what he was working on and he
summarized what he was writing, he could tell that I was concerned about him, so
I told him why: "Charles, no matter what you say, people will hear what they
want to hear."
That is one prediction that I wish had not come true, but it has. There are
people who have never read a single word of "The Bell Curve," but who are
convinced that they not only know what it says, but also know what the
motivation was for saying it.
Partly this is because there are increasing numbers of people for whom
indignation is a way of life. But that is not the sole reason. Historically,
blacks have been among the many peoples accused of being innately inferior,
especially in intelligence.
Back in the days of the Roman Empire, Cicero warned his fellow Romans not to
buy British slaves, because he found them hard to teach anything. A 10th-century
Moslem scholar noted that Europeans grew more pale the farther north they were
and that the "farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish
they are."
With our love of labels today, we might dismiss both these statements as
"racism." In reality, both statements were probably true, as of the time they
were made. At the very least, the people who said these things were
eyewitnesses, which we cannot possibly be.
Britain was a primitive, illiterate, tribal land at a time when the Roman
Empire was in its glory as one of the most advanced civilizations on earth. A
Briton transplanted to Rome in captivity must have found this complex
civilization completely baffling and was probably none too quick to understand
instructions on what to do and how to do it in such a wholly unfamiliar setting.
As of the 10th century, the Islamic world was more advanced than Europe in
general and far more advanced than the northern regions of Europe, which had for
centuries lagged behind Mediterranean Europe. The relative development of these
different regions of Europe, especially in economic terms, would be reversed in
later centuries, but what the Moslem scholar said in the 10th century was
probably still true then.
The point here is that there have always been gaps between the development of
one people and another, even if their relative positions did not remain the same
permanently, and even if their genes had nothing to do with it. In the case of
blacks in the United States, there was a special reason for particularly
negative pronouncements.
Although slavery existed all over the world for thousands of years, among
people of every race, it was considered a "peculiar institution" in the United
States because it was in complete contradiction to the principles on which the
country was founded. Slavery was controversial among Americans when it was still
accepted as just another fact of life in other countries.
Nowhere else in the world was such a literature of justification of slavery
produced as in the antebellum South, because nowhere else was slavery under such
sustained attack. An especially virulent racism arose to try to justify slavery,
and this racism lasted long after slavery itself was gone.
That history and its painful consequences are undeniable. But, in a world
where whole nations have in effect raised their IQs by 20 points in one
generation, it is time for black "leaders" and white "friends" to stop trying to
discredit the tests and get on with the job of improving the skills that the
tests measure.
A number of black schools, even in rundown ghettos, have already reached or
exceeded national norms on tests, so there is no question that it can be done.
The question is whether it will in fact be done, on a large enough scale to
change the abysmal educational results in too many predominantly black schools.
So long as demagogues are concentrating on demonizing anyone who points out
the problem, do not expect the kind of general improvement that is needed. This
demonization has made "The Bell Curve" one of the most misrepresented books of
our time. But such demagoguery has not helped one black child to get a better
education.
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©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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