Reacting to "Sex, Race and IQ: Off Limit"

Viban Viban NGO, PhD


I cannot say how much I enjoyed reading the appended article on this interminable IQ subject matter that often makes African Americans and continental Africans sad and some Caucasians happy for nature having apparently endowed American Caucasians with such “advantage” over others! If the Caucasians’ IQ is higher than those of Africans Americans as alleged, is it something to celebrate today? Could we insinuate that there is some celebration here as Caucasians made good use of it in the past by enslaving those considered inferior or having low IQ? If you believe in the economic performances of peoples differently, based on their race and IQ disparity, do you have a solution for this or should it be used as justification each time African Americans are at the trough of economic developments and those responsible do not want to accept that they are that way because they are discriminated against? The fact remains that if everyone, irrespective of his or her race could have the same IQ, the global productivity could be increased phenomenally. Then, we have to make sure that what is responsible for this are the discrepancies in scores of such a thing called IQ? Could that be possible? From my perspective, the IQ question often brought by Caucasian pseudo scientists is their rationale for their subtle discrimination based on race as you cannot have objective scientific results from IQ tests designed to test different ethnic groups with different backgrounds. The subjects have to be under the same conditions if objected results are to be obtained. That is what I feel we need to address for us and for the next generations of an apparently global village that is attempting to break its racial barriers.


In the past when Africans were generally referred to in Western literature as primitive, some Caucasians actually believed in the survival of the fittest doctrine as promoted by Charles Darwin and phrenologists (1840s) who put the Caucasian as the prototype to be emulated. Who told them that the Caucasian was the role model? Was it Jesus Christ most Westerners follow? No!Why did they not believe that the pygmy in the Ituri Forest in the Congo or the Chinese could have been the role model? I did not or do not see any advantage in such studies other than them stirring fragmentation of our apparently disjointed world for their advantage. Such studies were Caucasians of the past ways of justifying slavery and slave trade that southern USA Caucasians, Europeans, Persians and Arabs enormously befitted from. Some equated Africans to uncouth animals. If a full-blooded African was equated to an animal as the English slave owner from the Caribbean known as Jamie Lynch preached, it was easier to treat him (African) as such and consider him as commodity. Coupled with this, those false scientists had to employ psychological tactics to underpin their pseudo analyzes or theories.


What I believe in is environmental determinism. What would make a man growing up in the tropics to invent simple winter jackets people in the north hemisphere take for granted? What would make a Tuaregs in the Sahara think of building a submarine or even build a well insulated house that would keep him comfortable in winter when in a thousand years he had never experienced winter and had never seen a sea? Don’t you see that if winter comes and you do not have a good home in Siberia or Canada you will not live to meet another winter? What do we learn? Persons living under these hash environments would have to think harder and as such we have more inventions coming from the Northern hemisphere of extreme climatic conditions where Caucasians inhabited than say in the tropics.


Further, when it is winter you are forced to be in sedentry and that gives you reasons to think and do things people in the warm climates do not bother considering. Would it surprise you that we have more books published in the temperate lands that from the tropics? Tropical inhabitants of the past often live off the land and went about stack naked and could survive year in year out. They could still do so as some inhabitants of the rain forests in the Amazon and central Africa. You cannot do that in Siberia or Alaska.


If Africans do follow that life style fashioned by their weather would you really consider then inferior to you and their IQ lower than yours? Is it by virtue of that that the Caucasians appear better than mahogany skinned tropical inhabitants? Do you think they are better people intellectually than Africans and their recent descendants? I do not think so. Also if they are setting their IQ to make them feel comfortable over their achievements, they set them based on what they have in their localities and what they have been used to. Even if they include African Americans or Africans, they are new comers whose history and ways of lives had been thwarted by Caucasian slaver owners of the past. It will take time for them to adjust. Remember that in the Sixties Africans were still discriminated against by the whites when the whites where having the whole world for themselves and had no economic or other racial barriers. Why would Caucasians not excel when marks are compared with those scored by Africans and African American or even Latinos?


If the Latinos and East Indians or Chinese do better in that IQ set by Caucasians who had all and excluded Africans or other so called races in the past, it is because these groups were never ever enslaved and have no 'slavery paradigm' in their genes that is still affecting them hitherto. The environments have catapulted Europeans, Caucasians to their lofty position in the world. They will do well in their IQ tests for the fact that they were the ones who designed all for their benefits first without taking into consideration other so call races, whom I call their brothers and sisters. Therefore, they will do well in their environments, and IQ tests set by them for their good than for those they had suppressed as the Egyptians suppressed the Jews, the Chosen People in Egypt for donkey years. When are we going to have a true comprehensive IQ test for all? It can only be when African and African Americans will be included in the new inclusive paradigm of the future and that is a long way to come so long are racial discrimination is still practiced.


Leave Africans in that Caucasian environments and they will do as well and even excel if you do not confine them there as slaves and feel nervous all the time that their false sex drive is going to bring about the debasement of the white population as Hitler did for the Jews. That fear made mad Caucasians like Adolf Hitler thought before setting to massacre millions of Jews. The race phobia has done plenty of irreparable damages in the world. That race fear made the Hutus to massacre the Tutsis as recently as 1994. That fear made the Caucasians in South Africa to suppress Africans who had allowed them to come back to mother Africa and settle as lost brothers and sisters with apartheid. They started this in 1910 and they brought in this apartheid that hurt so many Africans until 1994 when Nelson Mandela their leader was released from having served 27 years in prison just to let Caucasians and Africans share the wealth of their nation state. Now the problem of race is that of the Caucasians and not of the other races they derogatorily or mistakenly call colored peoples. When you see the authors of controversial race treatises or scientific research, they are mostly whites who want to justify their dark past of slavery and discrimination. Why?


Personally, we have to be very careful when talking of IQ among the African Americans as the paradigm of slavery of syndrome is still with them and it might take a while to be erased. Modern Caucasians have to be sympathetic and not live on the shadow of old beliefs when their apparently pure sciences were still inchoate.


There are some Americans who believe that President Barack Obama the 44th president of the USA is a maverick and that was why he was doing well. Do you buy this? I do not. He is doing well, if not better because he had been given opportunities that were denied many of his kinds in the past. If racial barriers, I talk of in my forth coming book are dismantled, the USA and the entire world would be better off for doors would be opened to educate Africans and African Americans and others just as Caucasians. If Africans Americans attain a better standard of education as they are assured of jobs after their graduation, get better jobs, you will not have thousands of them languishing in prisons all over the USA but they will be in factories, offices or setting up their businesses and stop depending on whites as they were programmed to do in the past.


It is the shame of Caucasians of the past and a few today for they are responsible for African Americans being in prisons in droves because of their belief in their low IQ hence when it come to looking for jobs generally owned by Caucasians who were blessed in the past, they are dismissed without even considering their CVs just because they are swarthy or just from their names. Now, what would happen when their children will never be educated or have the same amenities because their parents cannot afford owing to the institutionalized racism? If these trends continue unaddressed, America would be banking their problems for the future and America will not make strikes in many fields if they continue to secretly exclude African Americans and African or Latinos and other ethnic minorities from having sound education, good jobs and mingling with whites so to say.


Continental Africans and African American in the USA, who are directors, medical doctors, computer programmers, nurses, economists, university professors, researchers, etc, are not mavericks. They are truly intelligent people from minority groups as Caucasians and IQ tests that are mostly designed by the whites for the whites in the white environments should not be used as the sole criteria for the determination of intelligence of men of all races and colors. In this case unique case studies has to come in.


The article below has rightly put it that males and females have the same IQ and if there were differences in the past they were due to where subjects were raised and the fact that they were not raised under the same conditions. Remember that boys are given boys' toys and girls given girls' toys. I remember in England mothers would openly tell the boys did not to cry as it was not manly to do so. The reverse was true of the girls. They allowed girls to cry because the society deems if fitting for them to do so but would not even allow these very girls to climb trees or take part in certain sports or jobs as they thought that they were exclusively for boys. When the Second World War came and there was shortage of manpower in those industries in Europe and North America that in the past were exclusively for men, what did women do who were employed? They supported war machinery as never before and some worked even harder. What happened when African Americans were employed in the armed forces who were grudgingly employed in the days of Jim Crow in the south? They did so well and even better. They had proved to be a formidable force during the American civil war and could not be left behind indefinitely for spurious reasons. Where were the inferiority of woman and African Americans during this the World War (1939-1945)?

I remember in my high school days, girls did not take up physics, mathematics, elementary mechanical engineering and chemistry as they sincerely believed that they were boys' subjects. Has such a unfounded statement got a place in the 21st century? You will see that where natural sciences were opened to all as in the former USSR women proved men awry. There are more female scientists in Russia to day than we have in North America. The myth about girls not doing well in those pure sciences was dismissed and girls proved that given opportunities, they could do well and if not better than men. African men and women have similarly demonstrated that they could do as well as Caucasians. Do not try to bring in the sports where African Americans cannot be excluded by any other tactics. Back on sciences, I will tell you that there are 30,000 Nigerians medical doctors in record in the USA. Are they there because they are mavericks? Are some Caucasians not envious of them because they could command better salaries?


The writer Sharon, will not tell me that an elephant is better biologically than a rat or that a Caucasian is better as phrenologists in 1840s once wanted to prove by comparing the physical differences of a Caucasian who was their prototype and then dismissing the African who did not look like a white as trash. Were they right? If a Caucasian had a flatter derriere and an African had a protruding derriere, those pseudo scientists concluded that a Caucasians were more or a person than an African. A crippled born Caucasian was therefore not a person according them? Will you accept that today? Remember when some used to put sand grains in the skulls of dead Africans and measure it to draw their conclusion. If a skull contained more sand, it was not a normal person. Can you buy that today? Go to you major libraries and read journals old anthropologists published on these silly studies. What sort of science was that? That was one of their laboratory study from which they drew their conclusions. Would you buy that today even if you were drunk? But that was what was used to suppress African Americans and Africans. You know that it was all bunkum and no one with his right frame of mind buys that.


Then, the irony is that Caucasian scientists all agree that the first man on earth lived in Africa. If that were the case, as it is accepted now by archeologists and historians, then all of us emanated from the Africans. You with your translucent (rosy) red skin and I with my mahogany skinned complexion is your brother. Owing to the fact that we drifted away for reasons we do not want to dwell into, we were shaped by different factors to look different just as most dogs look different but they all have one parentage. If the German shepherd dog is more alert than others, does it make it a better dog than the others? I see that African sisters who had lived in the northern hemisphere turn fair skinned in winter and swarthier in summer. That is nature’s way of keeping her alive as it makes the original African who wondered to the north to have a lighter skin to get in more sun shine that he was deprived for months in the winter months for uncountable years. I have looked at the ptarmigan and some foxes that literally change their colors in winter to white as their protective coloration and know what it means for a Caucasians who had to change to live in the tropics. I will take you to the sub Indian continent. He gets swarthier than his cousin in the Tundra. Have we ever seen a blond born in the Mediterranean but we have many from the Scandinavians. Why? The environmental factors we alluded to above are responsible.


When we look at the great Wold Wars having been caused principally by differences in the color of the skin and shapes and lots of African brothers and sisters being left out because of the color they are born with, the flat noses and protruding derrieres not of their making but those of the environment and the IQ nonsense of Dr. James Watson that we debated a year ago, I feel that we better just transfer this subject matter to our footnotes and laugh with scorn at the idiocy of our past that caused and still cause so much pains the moment it is exhumed. If Caucasians are remorseful, they better in honestly consider doing something about slavery reparations. I believe many would not like to start the debate for they feel that it was their grand parents who benefited from slave trade and slavery and not them. Are they sure when financial institutions that abated them are still burgeoning? Who gave them those financial bases? Slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. What became of the money those parents banked with their banks and other investments they still benefit from hitherto?

Check my forthcoming WHO IS AFRICAN AMERICAN? CROSSING RACIAL BARRIERS with Bianco@belnet.ca publishing house for a comprehensive discussion of this sticky subject matter.

Dr. Viban Viban NGO is the author of Before you Leave For Europe and North America: A Rough Companion Guide For (African) Students; Shadows of Fire, etc.



SEX, RACE, AND IQ: Off Limit

by Sharon Begley


Granted, the study of racial and sex differences in intelligence has not exactly covered itself in glory. There was that unfortunate incident in the mid-20th century, when British psychologist Cyril Burt apparently made up data to "prove" that genes make blacks and the poor innately less intelligent than whites and the wealthy. Later studies reaching similar conclusions were based on statistics that would have done Mark Twain ("lies, damned lies …") proud. But does this sorry record warrant the scientific equivalent of the death penalty for such research? That's what some scientists are arguing. In a heated debate that began in the journal Nature and spread online, they are calling for an end to research on possible links between race, gender and intelligence. "Stupid science" and "evil science" are the more polite terms being hurled. But the arguments for and against the research are not what you'd expect.

Political correctness—as in, it's offensive and destructive to even ask if women as a group, say, are less intelligent than men—doesn't merit more than a brief nod, thank goodness. Instead, argues neuroscientist Steven Rose of Britain's Open University, the problem is that both race and IQ are slippery concepts. Standard measures of intelligence are ridiculously flexible. In the 1930s and 1940s, for instance, when girls kept outscoring boys, IQ tests were repeatedly adjusted to make the results turn out "right." That calls into question what studies of intelligence actually measure, and whether it's too easy to choose and massage data to produce desired results. Worse, "race" in the sense of Caucasian, Asian and African is too broad to capture anything biological, including genetic differences. Only smaller groupings based on geographic ancestry (Basque, !Kung, Inuit …) do. Since each "race" is a hodgepodge of ancestries, it's as hard to draw meaningful conclusions about how it relates to intelligence as it is to draw meaningful conclusions about food and allergies by studying a stew with 27 ingredients.

As for sex, there are indeed structural and biochemical differences between male and female brains. But since boys and girls, and men and women, live very different lives and are treated differently first by parents and then by society, it's impossible to attribute those differences to innate biology rather than experience. That is especially true now that discoveries in neuroplasticity have shown that brains of any age can change their structure and function in response to experience. Even the visual cortex, which you'd think is pretty hard-wired, can switch from processing sight to processing touch if you are blindfolded for just five days.

Kudos to defenders of studies of how intelligence varies by race or sex for basing their case on something other than the obvious grounds of academic freedom. Instead, they argue, the studies must continue because of the wealth of important knowledge they produce. In the 1960s, for instance, psychologist Arthur Jensen presented evidence that African-Americans are inferior in intellect due to inherited genes. That prompted psychologist James Flynn of the University of Otago, New Zealand, to examine decades of IQ data from dozens of countries, something he never would have done without Jensen's work to goad him. He discovered what is now called the Flynn effect. One of the most fascinating phenomena in psychology, the Flynn effect is the increase in IQ scores over the last 70 or so years. The increase, of about .3 points per year and as much as 25 points in some countries, reflects generational improvements in abstract problem solving, a product of a more complex, mentally stimulating modern world. The Flynn effect "shows that substantial increases in IQ can and have occurred over a short period of time," says psychologist Wendy Williams of Cornell University. "Genetics cannot explain such changes. Thus we look to environment … As experiences [for blacks] improve, so can and does IQ." That has already happened: one quarter of the IQ gap between black and white Americans has been erased in 30 years (it's now 10 to 15 points). Cultural effects are more powerful than we thought, says Williams, a conclusion that would have remained undiscovered if race and IQ were off limits.

There has been a parallel increase in understanding sex differences in IQ. Boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1 in the top .01 percent of U.S. math scores 30 years ago; now that's down to 2.8 to 1, providing more evidence for culture's effect on intelligence, in this case evolving beliefs about what girls can be good at. The fact that experience shapes the brain, and that girls' and boys' experiences are different so their brain differences might be the result of different experiences, seems less like an argument against studying sex and IQ than a fascinating research project: how do sex-specific experiences leave a footprint in the folds of the cortex?

If race-IQ studies are viewed as the third rail of psychology, many scientists who might answer questions like that will stay away from them. That will leave the field to those whose agenda is to prove women and blacks intellectually inferior. If that happens, warns Flynn, they will win the debate "because the rest of us have all adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament." On this fraught issue, science must not give up without a fight.


FORWARDED ON 12/04/09