Blacks and IQ, Part 3
It took me a long time to complete this series because I actually got burnt out on the topic over at Roissy’s. For a while the comments section to every post, no matter what the topic, would get diverted into a discussion about blacks and IQ, and I’d end up debating the topic so much over there that I’d be in no mood to go back over to my own blog and return to the topic. But I know there are people who want to read the final part, so let’s get started.
In the first parts, I discussed why I thought discussion of Blacks and IQ was a waste of time when discussing public policy proposals:
Blacks and IQ, Part 1 Blacks and IQ, Part 2 Blacks and IQ, Part 2.5I discussed Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel, and the environmental explanations it gave for IQ differentials by race. Another thing to keep in mind is that among American slave populations, there probably were not many selection pressures that encouraged high intelligence. In fact, high intelligence was penalized. A smart slave was a dangerous slave, so slave owners deliberately did what they could to keep slaves ignorant. If you read the Slave Codes from different US states and colonies, the illegality of slave literacy was a common theme. Slaves who showed initiative in trying to teach themselves to read or get smarter were severely punished. It was not an environment conducive to intellectualism. In fact, openly showing high intellectual potential would be more likely to get you killed and your genes weeded out of existence.
I think rather than outright intellectualism, the mental skills slavery selected for were a high-level cunning. We still see this manifested in many aspects of modern black life such as creating slangs that nonblacks can’t understand, being extremely street smart, mastering high level con games, highly improvisational cognitive skills that can be seen in everything from off the cuff banter to improvisational jazz to freestyle rapping. Pimping “by the book” is another example of high level cunning.
I don’t think IQ tests can properly test for these, but I think they’re very valid cognitive abilities. For example one can claim that I’m being an apologist making weak excuses and that being high IQ is automatically better than any of these high cunning examples I’m giving, but is that really true? I’ve seen plenty of high IQ people who are useless in a situation that requires street smart and ability to recognize when they’re being hustled. I’ve see socially inept high IQ people who would kill to be able to game women like many black players and pimps can. A great fictional example of this dynamic can be seen in season 5 finale episode of the Shield called “Postpartum,” where high IQ genius and social misfit Dutch gets advice from a lowlife pimp he arrests on how manipulate and game a hot female rookie that he’s unable to figure out how to get with. The pimp gives him the advice, Dutch puts it to use and it works perfectly.
Back to my original point, I think the existence of this cunning, or “hustle mindset,” had much of its origin in American slavery. Even if a slave was very smart in terms of IQ, it had to be coupled with the cunning to use it to fullest advantage while simultaneously downplaying it and flying under the radar. You can see this in the life of Harriet Tubman, an escaped illiterate slave who returned to the south repeatedly to sneak out hundreds of slaves and transport them up north to freedom via her Underground Railroad, which was very dangerous and required a high amount of cunning and good instincts to carry out. Or take into account how Frederick Douglass learned to read:
Upon Frederick’s arrival at the Auld Home, his only duties were to run errands and care for the Auld’s infant son, Tommy. Frederick enjoyed the work and grew to love the child. Sophia Auld was a religious woman and frequently read aloud from the Bible. Frederick asked his mistress to teach him to read and she readily consented. He soon learned the alphabet and a few simple words. Sophia Auld was very excited about Fredericks progress and told her husband what she had done. Hugh Auld became furious at this because it was unlawful to teach a slave to read. Hugh Auld believed that if a slave knew how to read and write that it would make him unfit for a slave. A slave that could read and write would no longer obey his master without question or thought, or even worse could forge papers that said he was free and thus escape to a northern state where slavery was outlawed. Hugh Auld then instructed Sophia to stop the lessons at once! Frederick learned from Hugh Auld’s outburst that if learning how to read and write was his pathway to freedom, then gaining this knowledge was to become his goal. Frederick gained command of the alphabet on his own and made friends with poor white children he met on errands and used them as teachers. He paid for his reading lessons with pieces of bread. At home Frederick read parts of books and newspapers when he could, but he had to constantly be on guard against his mistress. Sophia Auld screamed whenever she caught Frederick reading. Sophia Auld’s attitude toward Frederick had changed, she no longer regarded him as any other child, but as a piece of property. However, Frederick gradually learned to read and write. With a little money he had earned doing errands, he bought a copy of The Columbian Orator, a collection of speeches and essays dealing with liberty, democracy, and courage.
Also see this interview with a great-grandson of Frederick Douglass who describes how Douglass had to trick white kids into teaching him to read without knowing it:
[Jacquie]
I remember, I read some stories about Frederick Douglass, I remember one, I guess he would do things for some of the white kids on the street in return for them teaching him how to read.[Fred]
Well, actually, he says many times that he had to steal his education, and so what would happen is many times, he never spent a day of his live in a classroom. But when the white boys would come home from school he would ask them questions like “Well, I bet you can’t tell me what comes after P” and they would mock him and make fun of him and call him ignorant and stupid and so on an so forth. And they’d say “Anybody knows, anybody who went to school would know that Q comes after P.” And so he would say “Well, then tell me, since you know so much then, what comes after W? And again they would mock him they’d say “Everybody who goes to school knows that X comes after W, don’t you know that you idiot, you dummy?” He would not say anything, but he
would think, “Well, I do now.” And so that’s what he would have to do, he’d have to trick people into giving him his education.[Jacquie]
Cause they couldn’t have told him that without him …[Fred]
Well they wouldn’t have told him that. They were not interested in his education so that’s why he had to involve … he had to think up situations to challenge people and extract the kind of information
he wanted out of them because, he could just not simply go to them and say “I want you to teach me this”. They simply wouldn’t have done that because they had picked up the prejudices and views of the day, so, no, that’s not something they would have done. But, if he challenged them as
he did, then they would reveal information, and so he would piece this together. After a period of time he was able, if he finished his work early, he might earn a few pennies and nickels doing some jobs for somebody he’d meet, or he might find some coins. And when he was able to get enough money together, he went and purchased a copy of the “Columbian Orator”. And that was really the
beginning of his formal education. Self taught! Self-made man! But he was determined.
These stories illustrate how important was to many slave states to stamp out any form of intellectualism they found. Being discovered to have a strong drive to improve oneself intellectually was a great way to get yourself punished or killed. Not only was extreme cunningness a more important survival skill than intellectualism for a slave, the more intellectual a slave actually was, the more important cunning became as it became imperative to hide these smarts and desire to learn.
So during the duration of slavery, we’ve established there were many factors that would weed out intellectualism and make it counterproductive as a survival strategy. After slavery, there was rampant discrimination and segregation that played a big part in keeping black intellectualism low, and kept the IQ gap from getting significantly closer to getting bridged. Even then, despite the discrimination, blacks were improving their social situation and starting a long, uphill climb and showing much potential, as shown in this Sowell article. And then came the last blow that truly derailed any chance of bridging the achievement gap in the 20th century, the Great Society welfare state. A great post illustrating some of the ways in which the Great Society derailed black achievement can be found here.
Here are the things I feel need to be done to help bridge the achievement gap between whites and blacks. First, get rid of affirmative action, hiring quotas, diversity initiatives. For a black person to achieve the same thing as a white person, they would have to have the same credentials. They would need to have the same grades as white kids to get admitted to the same schools. They would need the same experience and credentials and transcript grades as a white person to get the same jobs. The flipside to this is that in addition to removing this diversity initiatives that promote blacks, a serious attempt has to be taken to curtail things that unfairly work against blacks as well, such as racial discrimination that may hurt qualified black applicants and legacy admissions that help substandard white students.
At first this will probably lead to less blacks in Ivy Leagues and top schools, but this will just mean that more of them will instead attend schools and get jobs that are more appropriate to their academic and employment track records. Studies find that putting black applicants into schools and career tracks they are underqualified for actually hurts them more than it helps them. Richard Sander has a 117-page in-depth study of how affirmative action hurts black lawyers that is very worthwhile reading for example. Not only do these policies routinely put blacks into situations they are unprepared for, the ensuing frustration often wreaks havoc on their self-esteem and emotional being, as described in Ellis Cose’s book The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Do Prosperous Blacks Still Have the Blues?
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The black students who aren’t ready for top four year colleges, rather than attending and dropping out or barely graduating, can enter the workforce, go to vocational school to learn a marketable trade, or they can go to a community college that will inexpensively give them the tools to compete in 4-year college they didn’t receive in high school. Black students who aren’t good enough to get into Ivy Leagues will instead attend respectable four year schools they are better suited for, where they will perform better. The only blacks who will get into Ivy League schools or white-shoe law firms or top investment banks will be the ones who could get in strictly on the basis of their credentials regardless of their race.
In the short run we will see less blacks in high profile schools and jobs, but they will be performing better because they will be in the environments they are qualified to be in based on their credentials. And with time, as blacks adjust to the new standards expected of them, they will start adjusting themselves to meet them. Think of all the industries where blacks outperform whites, and what do they have in common? They never had an affirmative action program in place for them. Entertainment and sports, in those fields blacks faced rampant discrimination, segregation and financial exploitation, and in the short run the early people who dealt with that system suffered. But they adapted to those obstacles, and when they realized they had to be better than whites to compete in those same fields, they worked harder. There were no programs that allowed them to have less skills yet get the same as white athletes. They couldn’t even get a break if they were equally skilled. So they resolved to be better singers, comedians, and athletes than whites, to the point where white bosses couldn’t ignore them anymore because they didn’t want to leave that money on the table and they didn’t want to pass up these gifted people and give their competitors a chance to profit. After getting exploited for a few generations, how often do we hear nowadays of a hot black entertainer or athlete getting exploited financially? They don’t. They’ve adapted accordingly thanks to what happened to the early pioneers. Now we hear about poor mothers of high school NBA phenoms successfully being financially savvy in negotiations with the top colleges and big teams and hiring the necessary agents and lawyers to guard against any possible exploitation. You take away the affirmative action we give blacks in intellectual endeavors and with time the younger generations will be raised to adapt accordingly as well.
Another step I’d recommend is taking away any scholarships that are given just for being poor and/or black. I’m all for poverty-based financial aid if and only if the applicant is qualified, and regardless of race. if a black student is poor but has the right grades, it would be a shame for him to miss out on an education just because of money reasons. But if someone is poor and woefully underqualified, to give him a scholarship to a school that’s beyond his abilities in hopes that you can bridge the gap after he arrives is doing him no favors.
Something else I support, but which some find pretty controversial, is to incentivize academic accomplishments for black children. Make the rewards instantly tangible for them. A similar program was suggested for New York by Michael Bloomberg (who as a successful business owner understands market forces and incentives much better than our usual policymakers, lawyers) and was immediately shot down:
Pop quiz: Why do you really show up at work every day? 1) They couldn’t do it without me; 2) I enjoy the abuse; 3) I need the money to support my addictions, like wearing clothes, keeping a roof over my head and eating once in a while.
If your answer included the word ?money,? then you might appreciate New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to pay certain low- income students between $5 and $10 for taking a test and even more ? $25 to $50 ? for scoring top grades on them. Under the plan, which will begin this fall, older students can earn a maximum of $500 while participating schools receive $5,000.
Bloomberg, who sees the program as a way to motivate public schoolers, is no stranger to making money. Local government’s only billionaire, Bloomberg is a businessman who is using his own money and donations from others in the private sector to pay the students. Why would businesses support paying people to excel? Maybe because that’s what private enterprise already does. At least, the best companies reward employees for exceptional performance.
Many of the same people who support giving kids free scholarship money when they haven’t done anything academic to earn it somehow were outraged at the idea of paying kids for tangible achievement, and I don’t really understand why. As I’ve stated in this post, human nature responds much better to the Earn-Reward method than the Reward-Earn method.
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Simple reason for folks to prefer reward-earn: it means performance gets ignored. The vast majority of proponents of reward-earn are those who don’t want their own achievements, which in an earn-reward scenario would be rapidly eclipsed, in any way to come under fire.
Earn-reward is a much harsher system. Anything productive is likely to be.
The dynamic of the “slave hustler” appears in all societies that had slavery, you will find.
For instance, ancient Roman comedies — including the one on which A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was based — included many instances of clever slaves outwitting and manipulating their masters.
It’s the inevitable result of the power dynamics of a society based on slavery, which all the ancient Mediterranean societies were.
I remember the first evolution-related hypothesis I ever had, back when I was a teen, was that slavery selected against black IQ. I didn’t know enough to fill in the details back then, though — Douglass had to trick white kids into teaching him the ABC’s??!!! Holy shit.
So I agree that a combination of the original selection of slaves (West African elites tended to sell the slaves, rather than become them…) and the punishment and killing of visibly intellectual blacks thinned the right IQ tail of the African-American population. On the other hand, there is a control for the slavery “experiment” — blacks in Africa — and it makes me skeptical of your claim that slavery significantly enhanced cunning. I think the cunning was there all along.
sigh.
As for paying students for earning good grades, I can think of reasons why it’s a suboptimal policy, but there is no question in my mind that it should at least be tried. Maybe not all over NYC to start, but certainly some pilot programs. And I’m pretty sure that it is a big improvement over the clusterfuck of an inner city school system we have right now.
But I’m afraid there are too many entrenched interests that don’t want to see such a program succeed. Sound arguments alone may not be enough to defeat them; some credible threat of force in the event of continued intransigence may be necessary as well.
I’m not saying that US slavery created the lower average IQ of American blacks, but rather that the institution’s selection pressures working against high IQ played a big role in keeping American blacks from bridging that IQ gap even after centuries of exposure to Western achievement. The average IQ of American blacks is higher than that of blacks in Africa, so it is evident that exposure to Western culture did have an effect, but it would likely have been much more pronounced without these anti-intellectual selection pressures.
In previous installments in this series I discuss why the average IQs in Africa are significantly lower.
When reading West African folklore, it does indeed seem that cunning was highly valued in their culture, such as in the trickster fables involving Anansi and other tricksters, a tradition that you can see continued in the South in the Br’er Rabbit trickster folk tales. However the fact they had a predisposition to cunning carried over from Africa does not invalidate my theory that US slavery intensified selection pressures for cunning and made this trait even more pronounced in American blacks.
High-level cunning … I like that term, and also believe that its value has been greatly underrated.
It often seems like many people with very high IQ scores are noticeably lacking in high-level cunning. They display a certain naive character that doesn’t help one in life.
Actually, cunning is at least in part cultural. It is a method of thought more than capability of thought.
A high IQ person (defining IQ as the ability to think quickly and clearly) brought up in that environment is going to focus on very concrete rapid thought rather than more sedately paced abstract thought.
I’ve known one very cunning high IQ person. I give him a wide berth whenever possible. I can hold my own against a person with high IQ, or against a cunning person of average IQ, but a guy with that kind of focus and speed is like the Jet Li of con / mind games.
I’m convinced Russian people are the ultimate example of the high IQ AND cunning combo.
The thing is, low cunning high IQ people tend to work very well with each other; they are just relatively easy to take advantage of by others. Cunning tends to involve getting the best in zero-sum games, while IQ tends to be more useful for making the pie bigger for everyone (there are exceptions to both tendencies, but the overall pattern seems clear to me)… which is why a high cunning low IQ man can easily get the best of a low cunning high IQ man one-on-one, but a low cunning high IQ society beats the living shit out of the reverse.
Great, GREAT insight Chris. Never thought of that before but it makes sense. It also explains why so many alpha dog criminals who are great at one-on-one dominance flail when they try to enter the “square world” and try to get a legit job. A “square” legit job demands the ability to excel in a low cunning high IQ society though.
By the way, do you agree that high cunning, high IQ people are on a whole other level?
Fabulous series. Do you define cunning as highly developed social intelligence? Cunning is a much “older” skill as it were than high IQ reasoning, and I think that in any given society a preference for the latter over the former develops over time. I’ve never thought of it before, but I now believe that a particular talent for cunning among African Americans is responsible the high levels of drama and distrust in black life. I think this lack of social cohesion and social capitol is a huge problem that holds many blacks back.
That said, schools would probably get more out of black kids if they could incorporate cunning in lessons, but moralistic liberal educators would surely find that deplorable. SWPL culture isn’t a huge fan of cunning. If you could think of a nuanced and positive way that cunning could be “sold” to educators you’d be doing black kids a great service. And I do believe that many whites have a little fear of cunning black people.
We still see this [cunning] manifested in many aspects of modern black life such as creating slangs that nonblacks can?t understand.
Lots of groups have their own “slang.” Doctors, soldiers, physicists, World of Warcraft players… they all have their own vocabulary that outsiders may not understand.
I think rather than outright intellectualism, the mental skills slavery selected for were a high-level cunning.
One could argue that the next step is to see if these skills can be useful and harnessed in making blacks in America richer, otherwise, it’s nothing more than a cheap trick. I’m not downplaying the usefulness as detailed by your description of how Frederick Douglass learned how to read, but I still fail to see how it can lift up the black community from it’s weakened economic state.
A great post illustrating some of the ways in which the Great Society derailed black achievement can be found here.
A cursory reading of that post does bring up some interesting points because admittedly, low-wage powered single motherhood only exacerbates the poverty statistics. Mind you, I’ve also viewed the de-industrialization of urban cores as part of the problem as it removed relatively decent paying jobs for men and replaced them with service sector work that never paid as well and offered less opportunities for advancement. Plus, even though immigrants form a small number of the black population in the States, I wonder if the initial income levels of immigrants are skewing the statistics.
At first this will probably lead to less blacks in Ivy Leagues and top schools
Some would argue that’s a problem because it leads to less blacks in high ranking institutions that are opened up via Ivy League or high ranking private schools. One’s response to such a statement depends on whether having the most qualified black people possible is better than just simply having as many black people graduating as possible.
Mind you, given how IQ plays out, regardless of whatever hard work black students put into doing well in school, will we ever have a sizable number of high IQ black people in high ranking positions without affirmative action?
What makes you think we have a sizable number of high IQ non-black people in high ranking positions now?
T,
As always, excellent commentary and analysis. I too have ben thinking about this issue, and I think a big part of the reason why there’s such a hew and cry over it is because…
A lot of high IQ guys are seriously pissed that they can’t get laid.
Sounds simple I know, but so often we miss the obvious for other ish.
I think we as a society really need to think, hard, about this problem. At the end of the day, the really smart guys of whatever background, ain’t busting the nuts needed to make more really smart people. Methinks a great deal of this IQ Debate is a proxy for all of that.
Comments?
Salaam
Mu
The data from the Sanders paper were very eye opening. I spent a couple hours reading through this paper and data like this is more of what we need in the public discourse to clarify, cut-through, and capture the fact basis need to make accurate public policy decisions.
First, I was shocked at the “premium” given to black law students on the basis of their race. I’ve always been in support of affirmative action, but only on condition that it were only used when academic qualifications are very similar. The tie-breaker principle.
As it turns out, after reading this paper, this tie-breaker principle isn’t really used for admissions. However the schools want to describe their admission evaluation criteria, black students are in effect given a quantifiable “premium” if you look at the outcome on matriculation. If you put academic qualifications of accepted law student on a 0 to 10 scale, black students get a premium of anywhere between 1.7 to 2 points at ALL levels of school prestige. So if your median white Harvard/Yale/Columbia Law Student had GPA/LSAT index of 8.7, the median Black student had index of 7.0. A similar gap also held for lower tier schools.
There are some important implications from this:
1. Black students as a whole are at a substantial academic disadvantage when they attend schools that used preferences to admit them. Close to half of black students end up in the bottom tenth of their classes. Read that again. This is shocking to me.
2. Black students ended up failing out of law school at higher rates due to this clustering at the bottom of the grade distribution. Part of this is due to academically strong black students who would have easily graduated from a less competitive school. Removing affirmative action puts this group into a more appropriate school and thus more likely to graduate. Another reason for this high failure rate is due to academically weak students who shouldn’t even have been accepted to even the lowest tier school. Removing affirmative action stops this group from pursuing the legal profession in the first place.
3. The higher a law student’s grades are, the higher the probability of passing the bar. It follows then, that if black students at higher tier schools that were ‘underqualified’ go to a school more appropriately matched to their academic ability, they get higher grades, and have a higher probability of passing the bar. Simplified, but there’s data in the paper to support this assertion.
4. Sanders shows data that makes the plausible argument that there would be MORE black lawyers in the absence of race-preferences. This stems from the argument above. While there would be fewer black students that get accepted into lawschools under this system, the bar passage rate would increase at least 20% for black law school graduates.
5. Most black law grads, with the exception of those from the most elite schools (H/Y/C), would be better paid under a system with no affirmative action. Law school racial preferences give blacks fancier degrees, but also systematically lower their GPAs. And employers put a big weight on GPAs when determining starting salaries and job offers.
‘Nuff said. Caveat: I’m black and went to one of these so called elite schools in undergrad. I wouldn’t have agreed with these assertions I just wrote until I saw the data. Thanks for the info T.
Believe it or not, I was in prison in the eighties. I wont bore you with details but I remained there, in San Quentin, for nearly the entire decade. My cell, for quite some time, was right next to the cell of a man by the name of Huey Newton.
For those of you who don?t know, he was the Black Militant guy that started the Black Panthers.
An awful lot of prison time is spent locked inside the cell, especially during times of upheaval or ?war?.
Anyhow, I have spent many, many, hours talking with Huey Newton. We talked of politics, family, social evolution, the past, the future, and so on. I have rarely had conversation with the level of sheer intellect that I had with this man. I consider myself to be an above average, even exceptional, at times, conversationalist. I am well read, educated, curious, and I was blown away at this guy. The crimes he was convicted of ,were brutal and frightening, no doubt, but, from his perspective, cunningly planned, and justified. A brilliant guy trapped in a very reactive, violent life.
I just thought I?d share that with you. Your articles brought it to mind. I was made a better human being by knowing that guy.
I have read nearly everything in your archives now, over a period of about three months. I do believe sir, that you too, have had a desirous effect. Peace.
[...] Blacks and IQ, Part 3 [...]
“Multiple intelligence” theory has been considered and discarded – there is, in the end, only one underlying factor, g, which accounts for ALL kinds of cognitive functioning.
What you are describing above are not cognitive skills but personality traits – it might be that black slaves have evolved the personality trait to make maximum use of the intelligence they have.
While intelligence is always the same, a persons performance in life is always an interaction between his personality and his intelligence.
Consider Asians – they seem to score higher than whites yet to this day people talk of a “creativity gap” between the West and Asia. Asians dominate the Ivy Leages yet the top scholars, the pioneers and inventors, the Nobel Prize winners, tend to be white.
Why has this pattern endured for over 150 years (interestingly, Japan and Germany became industrialised nations at the same time. Yet look at the contributions to modern technology in terms of new inventions and theories of both), in and out of Asia, and even among Asians born in the West ? One likely explanation is simply that Asians lack the genetic makeup to channel their high intelligence into creative endeavors. In other words they lack boldness and independence, necessary traits for creativity.
Now imagine someone with the black personality traits described in the above article – improvisation, ability to make the best use of one’s intellectual resources, etc, combined with white peoples ability to think boldly and independently and penchant for exploration, with Asians high intelligence – now THAT would be a real man!