Race' and 'IQ'
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Description
Here is a fact few knowledgeable people dispute: take a random sample of African Americans and a random sample of “white” Americans and give them all some standard American IQ test. If the sample is large enough, the probability is very high that the average IQ of the first group will be about 15 points lower than that of the second— an amount that makes the average African-American’s score equivalent to the score of a white American one standard deviation below the white mean. Since IQ measures are designed to fit a standard symmetrical “bell curve”—and, on that curve, about a third of the population lies within a standard deviation on either side of the mean— it follows that just over four-fifths of whites score higher than the average African-American. This fact is central to much debate about race and about intelligence in our society, and so I propose to give it a name: I shall call it “the central datum.” The central datum is that what we in America call the black and white populations differ by about one standard deviation in average IQ. Since Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton published his Hereditary Genius in 1869, the idea that intelligence is measurable, heritable and differentially distributed, has become a commonplace; and the scientific study of races was nurtured by many of Darwin’s intellectual heirs. For more than a century, then, a significant proportion of Western intellectuals have taken it for granted that facts such as the central datum confirm the view that races differ in intelligence and that the black race is hereditarily less well endowed with intellectual gifts than the white. A good number of people, not all of them intellectuals, believe (or, at any rate, suspect), even today, that the explanation of the central datum is that Negroes—members of the black race—are, on average, hereditarily inferior to Caucasians—members of the white race—in respect of intelligence. I myself doubt that the central datum supports this “racialist conclusion” as I will call it: the racialist conclusion is the judgment that the explanation for the central datum is a hereditary difference between the black and the white races. In this chapter I want to map out three points at which the racialist conclusion can be challenged; and then go on to make some suggestions about how to make research on genetics and intelligence more intellectually profitable. I take this project to be one in applied philosophy of science. Understanding the conceptual issues can help make better science.
Source Publication
Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities Through African Perspectives
Source Editors/Authors
Helen Lauer, Kofi Anyidoho
Publication Date
2012
Volume Number
1
Recommended Citation
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, "Race' and 'IQ'" (2012). Faculty Chapters. 148.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/148
