Update: Added a couple sentences to clarify that I’m not attacking psychology or psychometrics, but rather the simple-minded attempts distort these fields to justify racism. Also revised my statements about Derbyshire’s particular claims, to be more explicit about the flaws in his “intelligence = IQ” argument.
Pretty much the entire internet is outraged, rightly, at a recent post by the odious National Review columnist John Derbyshire, who a few days ago penned a remarkably racist screed in Taki’s Magazine titled “The Talk: Nonblack version”.
Some background: in the aftermath of the truly appalling and unjustified murder of Trayvon Martin, a young black man, many black parents have revived “The Talk“. A practice that goes back to the Civil War era, “The Talk” might be summarized as explaining to a black man that: “At any time, I could encounter a stranger who believes he knows me, knows my character, and my motives, based on my appearance alone”. It is a sad reminder that African-Americans must take extra care in their interactions with others, especially armed authority figures.
This idea set off Derbyshire, who came up with the “Nonblack version” of “The Talk”, which includes such blatantly racist nuggets as:
(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).
There’s plenty to be said about such idiocy, but what really concerns me is the following:
(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”
There it is: Derbyshire really thinks that black people are simply dumber than white people.
Plenty of folks are shredding Derbyshire’s idiocy: for instance, see Angry Black Lady’s post on Raw Story savaging him. But I want to take another tack here, and point out that the sort of pseudoscientific tripe that he’s peddling about black intelligence has been around, and criticized, for a long, long, long time. To demonstrate this, I want to take a look at a paper that was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London way back in eighteen-hundred-and-fucking-thirty-six, and whose author demonstrated better science, intelligence and morality than Derbyshire ever will. The paper, by Friedrich Tiedemann, is titled, “On the Brain of the Negro, Compared with That of the European and the Orang-Outang,” and argues against the prevailing view of the time that blacks are inherently unintelligent and much more kin with apes.
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Skulls in the Stars 