Topics Race

Question Is it racist to believe that African Americans are less intelligent than Caucasians on the whole since scientific studies show that African Americans have lower IQs? Does not being racist presuppose the hypothesis that cultural biases predispose African Americans to have lower IQs? I mean do you have to believe that IQ differences are due to cultural differences to not be racist? Supposing that differences in IQ were due to biological differences would it be racist to suppose that African American tend to be less intelligent or would that assessment be unwarranted without an understanding of the relationship between intelligence and IQ? I mean you can be intelligent in ways that aren't measurable by IQ can't you? But if IQ differences are in fact biological what is the difference between being racist and scientific? Isn't the idea that some groups are statistically more likely to produce people who are less intelligent than another group one way which racism is defined? Or is that an incorrect definition of racism?

Accepted:
May 18, 2011

Comments

There are a lot of complicated issues here! But let me just address one.

Let's suppose it true that black Americans do, as a whole, have lower scores on IQ tests than do white Americans. To suggest that there might be a biological explanation for this fact is to suppose that African Americans are, as a group, (i) biologically different from white folks and (ii) in some relevant respect, biologically similar to each other. That is, there has to be some relevant biological feature that black people generally have that white people generally do not. That is not itself a racist idea, but it is, so far as anyone can tell, just plain false. Black people have various genetic features that causes them to have dark skin, but these genetic features are not significantly correlated with very much else. And, indeed, I recall reading a year or so ago a study someone did that suggested that the skin tone of the early migrants to Europe changed within a couple dozen generations.

Now, as I said, the idea that black people are biologically distinguished as a group, in ways that go beyond skin tone, is not itself racist. But it is at the root of much racist thinking. It was generally supposed in the 18th century, for example, and by folks as smart as Thomas Jefferson, that black people were fundamentally and importantly different from white people, and that was part of what justified their racism. But if the only thing black people have in common is dark skin and African ancestry, then it's hard to see what would justify treating such people in the ways racists would prefer.

There is much wisdom on such matters in work by Anthony Appiah.