Intellectuals, IQ, race, and multiculturalism

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One day when I was in the seventh or eight grade in the small one room country school that I attended we were told that all of the students were going to be given IQ tests. This was the first time I had heard of IQ and IQ tests. When I found out what the idea of IQ was and what the tests were I was shocked and outraged! This was something that was absolutely wrong! No one had any business in doing a thing like that! I didn’t believe in the validity of the idea or the possibility of measuring such a thing and doing it was like putting a measure of worth on a person. No one has any business in doing a thing like that! What kind of people are they who stand in positions of power over us?! Learning of this practice gave me a very bad opinion of people and of society in general. I did come up with a way to deal with it. When given the test I treated it with scorn. I played games with the test. I started at the bottom of the test and worked up, giving wrong answers on a number of questions and then one or two right answers, then more wrong answers, working in patterns, making sure that the vast majority of the answers were wrong to insure some ridiculously low score on the test.

Now, looking back on this, I think I was right. IQ tests are morally wrong. The idea is invalid and the idea of giving people IQ tests is wrong! How did I know all this? Simple instinct and intuition. I believe that my instinct and intuition has served me better than all of the scholarly studying has for all of the renowned academics in our elite universities! I do believe in the foolishness of the human mind! Some eggheaded intellectual with many degrees and little common sense proposes some new, exotic idea and then the idea gets batted around in that echo chamber of foolish ideas called academia by highly educated, inane minds for years.

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Intellectuals and Society. Part VII: Intellectuals and Race.

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The Progressive era in early twentieth century America was perhaps the high-water mark of “scientific” theories of racial differences. The increasing immigration from Europe, especially the shift in its origins from Northern and Western Europe to Eastern and Southern Europe, raised questions about the racial quality of the new people flooding into the country. The beginning of the mass migrations of American Blacks from the South to the Northern cities, and their concentration in ghettos there, raised similar questions during the same era. Empirical data on group differences in crime rates, disease rates, mental test scores, and school performance fed all these concerns.

Two huge compilations of empirical data in early twentieth century America stand out particularly. One was the huge, multi-volume report of the federal immigration commission headed by Senator William P. Dillingham and published in 1911. This report showed, among other things, that with children who attended elementary school three-quarters of the school days or more, 30 percent of native-born white children had been denied promotion to their next grade, compared to 61 percent of native-born black children and 67 percent of the children of immigrant Polish Jews. The other huge source of data about differences among racial or ethnic groups during this period was the mental testing of more than 100,000 soldiers by the U. S. Army during the First World War. The proportions of soldiers with different ancestries who exceeded the American national norms on mental tests were as follows:

English 67 percent

German 49 percent

Irish 26 percent

Russian 19 percent

Italian 14 percent

Polish 12 percent

Men from Italy, Poland and Russia scored consistently at or near the bottom among immigrants from Europe on various mental tests, with American blacks scoring at the bottom among soldiers as a whole, through scoring only marginally lower than these Southern and Eastern European immigrants on these tests. Among the civilian population, the same groups scored at or near the bottom in mental test scores, though in a slightly different order.

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Again, none of this was simply a matter of “perceptions,” “stereotypes,” or “prejudices.” Differences among racial, ethnic and regional groups were very real, sometimes very large and very consequential. What was at issue were the reasons for these differences. Moreover, the reasons for such differences that were acceptable to intellectuals changed radically over the generations, much as their support for the First World War and their later pacifism marked drastic changes on that subject.

During the early twentieth century, demonstrable differences among groups were largely attributed to heredity and, during the late twentieth century, these differences were largely — if not solely — attributed to environment, including an environment of discrimination. Nevertheless, the same general vision of society prevailed among those who called themselves Progressives at the beginning of the twentieth century and those who called themselves liberals later in that century, however disparate their views on race were between these two eras. Theirs was the vision of the anointed as surrogate decision-makers in both periods, along with such corollaries as an expanded role for government and an expanded role for judges to re-interpret the Constitution, so as to loosen its restrictions on the powers of government.

Progressive-era intellectuals took a largely negative view of the new immigrants from Southern ad Eastern Europe, as well as of American blacks in general. Because such a high proportion of the immigrants from Poland and Russia were Jews during this era, Carl Brigham — a leading authority on mental tests, and creator of the College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Test — asserted that Army test results tended to “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.” H. H. Goddard, who had administered mental tests to immigrant children on Ellis Island, declared: “These people cannot handle abstractions.” Another giant of the mental-testing profession, L. M. Terman, author of the Standford-Binet I.Q. test and creator of a decades-long study of people with I.Q.s of 140 and above, likewise concluded from his study of racial minorities in the Southwest that children from such groups “cannot master abstractions.” It was widely accepted as more or less a matter of course during this era that blacks were incapable of mental performances comparable to whites, and the Army mental test results were taken as confirmation.

The Progressive era was also the heyday of eugenics, the attempt to prevent excessive breeding of the “wrong” kind of people — including , though not limited to, particular races. Eugenicists feared that people of lower mental capacity would reproduce on a larger scale than others, and thus over time bring about a decline in the average I.Q. in the nation. The New Republic lamented “the multiplication of the unfit, the production of a horde of unwanted souls.”

In Britain, as in the United States, leaders and supporters of the eugenics movement included people on the left, such as John Maynard Keynes, who helped create the Cambridge Eugenics Society, as well as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, Sidney Webb and Julian Huxley. Sidney Webb said, “as a nation we are breeding largely from our inferior stocks.” But eugenics was by no means exclusively a movement on the left, nor one without opponents on the left. Supporters of eugenics also included conservatives, among them both Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.

In America, among those to whom pioneer birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger took her message was the Ku Klux Klan. Madison Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race, expressing fears of a loss of hegemony by whites in general and Nordics in particular, was a landmark book of the era. It was not only a best seller in the United States, it was translated into French, Norwegian and — most fatefully — German. Hitler called it his “Bible.”

Despite its international influence, The Passing of the Great Race offered extremely little evidence for its sweeping conclusions. The great bulk of the book was a historical account of Alpine, Mediterranean and Nordic peoples in Europe and of the Aryan languages. Yet most of Madison Grant’s sweeping conclusions and the policies he recommended were about America — about the “inferior races among our immigrants,” about the need for eugenics and for “laws against miscegenation.” He asserted that “Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within.” Yet, as Grant himself said, “the three main European races are the subject of this book,” which contained virtually no factual information about blacks, but only opaque pronouncements. Even Grant’s rankings of European groups are essentially pronouncements, with little or no empirical evidence or analysis, despite an abundance of miscellaneous and often arcane information.

What The Passing of the Great Race did have was a great display of erudition, or apparent erudition, using numerous technical terms unfamiliar to most people — “brachycephalic skulls, “Armenoids,” “Paleolithic man,” the “Massagetae,” “Zendavesta,” the “Aryan Tokharian language,” and the “Miocene” and “Pliocene” eras, as well such statements as “The Upper Paleolithic embraces all the postglacial stages down to the Neolithic and includes the subdivisions of the Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian and Azilian.” But all this served as an impressive backdrop for unrelated conclusions.

Among Madison Grant’s conclusions were that “race lies at the base of all the manifestation of modern society.” He also deplored “a sentimental belief in the sanctity of life,” when that is used “to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community.” He feared “the resurgence of the lower races at the expense of the Nordics” and the “prevailing lack of true race consciousness” among the later. He saw immigrants arriving in America as the “sweepings” of the “jails and asylums” of Europe. More generally, he said:

There exists to-day a widespread and fatuous belief in the powers of environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in its turn from the loose thinkers of the French revolution and their American mimics.

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The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.

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We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss.

That The Passing of the Great Race was taken seriously says much about the times. But Madison Grant was by no means a fringe crank or an ignorant redneck. He was born into a wealthy family in New York City and was educated at Yale and Columbia University law school. He was a member of numerous exclusive social clubs. Politically, he was a Progressive and an activist on issues important to Progressives, such as conservation, endangered species, municipal reform and the creation of national parks, as well as being a driving force behind the creation of the world’s largest zoo in the Bronx. The Passing of the Great Race was recommended not only in a popular publication like The Saturday Evening Post but was also reviewed in Science.

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While Madison Grant was not an academic scholar, he moved among prominent members of the intelligentsia. His closest friends included George Bird Grennell, editor of the elite sportsman’s magazine Forest and Stream, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, a world-renowned paleontologist who coined the term “tyrannosaurus rex.” Osborn said, in the wake of mass mental testing, “We have learned once and for all that the negro is not like us.”

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Madison Grant also moved in socially elite and politically Progressive circles. Theodore Roosevelt welcomed Grant’s entry into an exclusive social club that TR had founded. Later, Grant became friends for a time with Franklin D. Roosevelt, addressing him in letters as “My dear Frank,” while FDR reciprocated by addressing him as “My dear Madison.” The two men met while serving on a commission as civic-minded citizens, and the fact that both suffered crippling illnesses during the 1920s created a personal bond. But Madison Grant’s ideas moved far beyond such genteel circles in America. They were avidly seized upon in Nazi Germany, though Grant’s death in 1937 spared him from learning of the ultimate consequences of such ideas, which culminated in the Holocaust.

The Liberal Vision

Despite these developments in both beliefs and methods, however, it was the Second World War that marked a decisive turning point in American intellectuals’ views of race relations. If there is a single book that might be said to mark that turning point in thinking about race among the intelligentsia, it would be An American Dilemma by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, published in 1944. It was a massive study — more than a thousand pages long — of the many aspects of black-white relations in the United States, and its thesis was that American racial policies, especially in the South, marked a glaring contradiction between the nation’s fundamental founding principles of freedom and equality and its actual practices as regards blacks. How to resolve that contradiction was the dilemma posed by Myrdal.

By this time, Progressives had begun calling themselves liberals, so this now became the prevailing liberal vision, as it evolved in the second half of the twentieth century.

Broadly speaking, while in the Progressive era socioeconomic differences between the races were attributed to race — genetics — in the liberal era such differences between races were often attributed to racism. In neither era were alternative explanations taken seriously by much of the intelligentsia. In the liberal era, attributing any part of the differences between blacks and whites in incomes, crime, education, etc., to internal causes — even if social or cultural, rather than genetic — was often dismissed as “blaming the victim,” a phrase preempting the issue rather than debating it.

If heredity was the reigning orthodoxy of the Progressive era, environment became the reigning orthodoxy of the liberal era. Moreover, “environment” usually meant the external contemporary environment, rather than including the internal cultural environment of minorities themselves. If minorities were seen as the problem before, the majority was seen as the problem now.

These premises were stated quite clearly in the introduction to An American Dilemma, where that dilemma was described as “a white man’s problem” and Myrdal added, “little, if anything, could be scientifically explained in terms of the peculiarities of the Negroes themselves.” Despite the invocation of science, so reminiscent of the earlier Progressive era intellectuals, this was an arbitrary premise which, if followed consistently, would treat black Americans as simply abstract people with darker complections, who were victims of what Myrdal called “confused and contradictory attitudes” in the minds of white Americans. Yet Myrdal’s own massive study brought out many behavioral and attitudinal differences between blacks and whites, though in the end none of this changes the basic premise of An American Dilemma, which remained the central premise of liberal intellectuals for decades thereafter.

This premise — that the racial problem was essentially one inside the minds of white people — greatly simplified the task of those among the intelligentsia who did not have to research the many behavioral differences between blacks and whites in America — or the many comparable or larger differences between other groups in other countries around the world — that have led to other intergroup complications, frictions and polarizations, which were in many other cases at least as great as those between black and white Americans. Nor did intellectuals have to confront the constraints, costs, and dangers inherent in group differences in behavior and values. To the intelligentsia of this later period, racial problems could be reduced to problems inside people’s minds, and especially to racism, not only simplifying problems but enabling intellectuals to assume their familiar stance of being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil — and morally superior to the society in which they lived.

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Gunnar Myrdal’s basic premise — that racial problems in America were fundamentally problems inside the heads of white people, and that the resulting discrimination or neglect explained black-white differences in economic and other outcomes — was to remain the fundamental assumption of liberal thinking and policies for decades thereafter.

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Racism and Causation

At the heart of the prevailing liberal vision of race today is the notion of “racism” — a concept with multiple, elusive and sometimes mutually contradictory meanings. Sometimes the term refers simply to any adverse opinion about any racially different group, whether a minority in a given society or a group that may be a majority in some other society. This immediately transforms any adverse judgment of any aspect of a different racial group into an indictment of whoever expressed that adverse judgment, without any need to assess the evidence or analysis behind it. In short, this approach joins the long list of arguments without arguments.

At other times, the term “racism” refers more specifically to an adverse conclusion based on a belief that the genetic endowment of a particular racial group limits their potential. Other meanings include a preference for advancing the interests of one race over another, with or without any genetic theories or even any adverse assessment of the behavior, performance or potential of the group to be disfavored. For example, an argument has been made in various countries around the world for policies preferring one group over another on the ground that the group to be discriminated against is too formidable for others to compete against on even terms. This argument has been made in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Malaysia, in India’s states of Assam and Andhra Pradesh, and even in early twentieth century America, where Japanese immigrants were feared on grounds that their high capacity and lower standard of living would permit them to undercut he prices charged by white American farmers, workers, or commercial business owners.

In other words, racism defined as a preference for one race over another need not depend upon any belief that the group to be discriminated against is inferior in performance or potential, and at various times and places has been based on the opposite belief that the group that is to be discriminated against was too proficient for others to compete with on equal terms, for whatever reason. A book advocating group preferences for Malays in Malaysia put it, “Whatever the Malays could do, the Chinese could do better and more cheaply.” A leader in a campaign for preferential policies in India’s state of Andhra Pradish said, “Are we not entitled to jobs just because we are not as qualified?” In Nigeria, an advocate of group representation policies deplored what he called “the tyranny of skills.”

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Beginning at the beginning, African slaves were brought into American society at the bottom, and concentrated in the South — a region with its own cultural handicaps that produced marked differences between the white populations of the North and South that many observers noted during the antebellum era. This meant that those blacks who came out of the South to live in Northern cities would be very different in many ways from the white populations of those cities. The visible racial differences made blacks easy to identify and restrict.

During the course of the nineteenth century, however, over a period of generations Northern blacks tended to acquire more of the culture of the surrounding white population of the North, just as other groups often have when surrounded by a vastly larger population with a different culture and a higher socioeconomic level. By the end of the nineteenth century, this cultural assimilation had reached the point where racial barriers eased considerably in the Northern cities, where the black populations of these cities were now predominantly native-born residents, rather than migrants from the South.

This situation changed drastically, however, and within a relatively few years, with the mass migrations of millions of blacks out of the South, beginning in the early twentieth century. This not only greatly multiplied the black populations living in many Northern cities, the newcomers were seen by both the pre-existing black populations and the white populations of these cities as creating greatly increased social problems such as crime, violence and offensive behavior in general.

If these were mere “prejudices,” “perceptions’ or “stereotypes” in the minds of white people, as so many adverse judgments have been automatically characterized, why did the very same views appear among Northern-born blacks at the same time?

Where hard data are available, these data substantiate the pattern of behavioral differences between the pre-existing Northern black populations and the newcomers from the South. In early twentieth-century Pennsylvania, for example, the rate of violent crimes among blacks from the South was nearly five times that among blacks born in Pennsylvania. In Washington D.C., where the influx from the south occurred decades earlier, the effect of the Southerners’ arrival could be seen decades earlier. For example, out of wedlock births were just under 10 percent of all births among blacks in Washington in 1878, but this more than doubled by 1881, following a large influx of Southern blacks, and remained high for years thereafter.

The new majorities of Southern blacks in the northern urban communities were sufficiently large, and their culture sufficiently reinforced by continuing new arrivals from the South, that their rate of assimilation to the cultural norms of the surrounding white society was neither as rapid nor as complete as that of the much smaller numbers of blacks who had preceded them in these cities in the nineteenth century. Moreover, as late as 1944, Guna Myrdal’s An American Dilemma pointed out that the majority of blacks living in the North at that time had been born in the South.

During the early days of mass migration of blacks out of the South, many Northern-born blacks condemned the Southern newcomers, and saw in them a danger that the white population would put up new barriers against all blacks — which in fact is what happened. After the massive inflow of Southern blacks into Northern cities in which small black populations had once lived in predominately white neighborhoods, these now became cities in which blacks were prevented from living in white neighborhoods by methods ranging from legal prohibitions and restrictive covenants to outright violence. All this happened within a very few years of the mass migrations of Southern blacks to Northern cities.

The massive black ghettos which became common in the twentieth century were just one aspect of a more general retrogression in race relations, in which various public accommodations once open to blacks were now closed to them, and black children who had once gone to schools with white children in Northern cities were now segregated into different schools.

The conclusion that this change was a reaction to a mass in-migration of less acculturated blacks from the South is reinforced by the history of cities on the west coast, where this mass in-migration from the South took place decades later, largely during the Second World War, and was likewise followed by retrogressions in race relations there at this later time. A similar pattern had already unfolded among the Jews in the United States in the late nineteenth century, when the highly acculturated German Jews lost much of the social acceptance which they had already achieved, after larger masses of much less acculturated Jews from Eastern Europe arrived, followed by new barriers against Jews in general. To say that this retrogression was caused by anti-Semitism would likewise be to transform a characterization into a causal explanation, implicitly treating those adversely affected as abstract people whose problems originated solely in other people’s minds.

Whether among blacks, Jews or others, leaders within these groups themselves saw behavioral problems among some of their own people as creating backlashes in the larger society around them, from which the entire group suffered. As a result, organized social uplift groups, both secular and religious, arose within the black community, the Jewish community, as well as within other communities, aimed at changing the behavior of members of their own respective groups, in order to facilitate the advancement of these groups as a whole.

Among Jews, during the era of mass immigration from Eastern Europe, the already acculturated German Jews living in America took the lead in seeking to acculturate the Jewish newcomers from Eastern Europe. A German Jewish publication of that era described the Eastern European Jews as “slovenly in dress, loud in manners, and vulgar in discourse.” As a leading study of American Jews noted: “The Germans found it hard to understand what could better serve their ill-mannered cousins than rapid lessons in civics, English, and the use of soap.” Such problems were not peculiar to Jews but were common among the Irish immigrants before them and to blacks after them.

During the mass migrations of blacks out of the South during the early twentieth century, both the Chicago Defender (a black newspaper) and the Urban League offered such published advice as:

DON’T USE VILE LANGUAGE IN PUBLIC PLACES

DON’T THROW GARBAGE IN THE BACKYARD OR ALLEY OR KEEP DIRTY FRONT YARDS

DO NOT CARRY ON LOUD CONVERSATIONS IN STREET CARS AND PUBLIC PLACES

Although these efforts produced positive results over the years, whether among blacks, Jews or others, that whole approach was antithetical to a new social philosophy that emerged in the late twentieth century — multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism involves more than a simple recognition of differences in cultures among different groups. It is an insistence, a priori, that the effects of these differences are on net balance positive and that the particular cultures found among less fortunate groups are not to be blamed for disparities in income, education, crime rates, or family disintegration, lest observers be guilty of “blaming the victim” instead of indicting society. Given that premise, it was consistent for multiculturalists to decry educators who sought to get black youngsters to speak standard English or to force Hispanic students to speak English rather than Spanish in school. An all too typical example was an author who referred to “the white Harlem schoolmarm who carps over her students’ speaking differently from herself.”

More generally, trying to get minority groups to acculturate to the social, linguistic and other norms of the larger society around them has been viewed negatively by multiculturalists as a form of cultural imperialism.

The key word among advocates of multiculturalism became “diversity.” Sweeping claims for the benefits of demographic and cultural diversity in innumerable institutions and circumstances have prevailed without a speck of evidence being asked for or given. It is one of the purest examples of arguments without arguments, and of the force of sheer repetition, insistence and intimidation.

Among many multiculturalists, saying the word “diversity” trumps mundane concerns about empirical consequences and converts preferential treatment by race — the principle fought against so long by liberals — into “social justice” when the preferences are for those minorities currently in favor among the intelligentsia. That preferential college admissions of blacks and Hispanics may have a negative effect on the admissions of Asian Americans, not to mention whites, is something usually ignored or brushed aside. Treating races as intertemporal abstractions enables those with this vision to treat discrimination against contemporary whites as somehow offsetting discrimination against blacks in the past.

Cultural changes

If, instead of judging beliefs about cultures and identities by how well they fit the prevailing multicultural vision, we treat these issues in terms of how well they fit the facts, we reach very different conclusions. David Hume’s urging of his fellow Scots to learn the English language, and the remarkable rise of the Scots as a result of moving into a wider world of cultural possibilities by acquiring the knowledge and skills available in the English language, have been noted in Chapter 16. Something very similar happened in nineteenth century Japan, a technologically and economically backward country at one time, and one very painfully aware of its backwardness and publically lamenting its lag behind countries like the United States.

Not only did Japan import Western technology on a massive scale, it imported European and American technological experts and sent its promising young people to Western nations to study Western technology and organizational methods. During this era, nineteenth-century Japan engaged in one of the most remarkable public denigrations of its own culture ever seen in a major nation, extolling the United States as an “earthly paradise” as part of a general depiction of Western peoples as enviable, beautiful, and great. Government-issued textbooks in Japan held up Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin as models to be imitated, even more so than Japanese heros. Not only was the English language introduced into Japanese secondary schools, it was for a time even suggested that English become the national language of Japan.

If this kind of behavior, which has often been dismissed as a “cultural cringe” is compared in its consequences to what has been extolled as the pride of “identity,” it is by no means clear that what intellectuals extol has a better record than what they deplore.

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8 Feb 2024