Okay. I’m sorry I misunderstood you, but your post wasn’t very clear.
I don’t know if anyone has made this point already (didn’t read every post), but what often tends to be glossed over is that income is a marker for class but it is not the sole determinant. The proportion of blacks who are one or two generations removed from poverty is inarguably higher than whites. Education levels of white and black parents are also different. A kid who grows up knowing that college is not only accessible to them but also expected will have academic habits that more than likely differ from the kid whose family is mostly made up non-college grads who see college as an option but not a requirement.
Comparing racial groups by income is useful but incomplete. Having the same income doesn’'t mean experiences, values, and cultural biases are the same. It’s like expecting the nouveau rich to behave the same way that old money does just because they are both wealthy. Relative to whites, the black middle class is nouveau middle class.
I’ve heard about this firsthand (well, from an academically successful black student). We both went to an academically oriented private high school, and during our freshman year, a group of us were talking about our middle schools, and he mentioned that he didn’t tell people from his middle school that he goes to the high school that he does.
So I asked why, and he explained that they’d try to pull him down and belittle him for being somehow uppity and trying to act like he’s white because he’s going to a predominantly white school that’s academically oriented. The general concept was one of “why do you have to go to the white school? Is the black one not good enough for you?”
This, as you can imagine, baffled me. My friends(white, hispanic) from the public middle school I’d gone to were impressed and very supportive of me getting into our high school, rather than resentful and hostile.
I think that has a lot to do with it- the concept of “being black” seems to be a powerful driver of many attitudes and behaviors, much as “not being white trash” is among middle-class whites.
I don’t think we can explain intelligence by race if we can not genetically define race. Half of this thread is just of folks going back and forth about this topic. Geneticists have been saying for over half a decade there is no genetic basis for race as most of us define it. I don’t quite understand what the argument here is…
Also, the only measures of intelligence linked to in this thread are of standardized test scores, which are poor measures of intelligence, IMO. Particularly the SAT. I think that, as you with the face said, there are more factors impacting “intelligence” despite equal economic class. From my experience, black students doing worse than white students has more to do with motivation issues and than a lack of being capable.
Hypothetically, if one were to dig up the data and it showed a similar black/white gap even if one looks at, for example, just southeastern states or just big cities, would you conclude that maybe the difference is due in part to genetics? Or would you move on to another possible explanation?
I would say it is cultural, as many have said.
The same thing happens in Appalachia, where in the late thirties and early forties, my grandfather wouldn’t let my dad, and many of his siblings go to school, it there was any sort of work to do. It was an unnecessary waste of time, so he thought.
Why would a person need school?
This is a good point. I can truthfully say that I grew up in a lower-income single-parent home. But I was in a very different situation from many other kids in lower-income single-parent homes, because my single parent was a grad student and part time research/teaching assistant. I never had any doubt that I would someday go to college. My mother and father and even all my grandparents had gone to college (I think one grandmother never finished her degree), and what’s more I was hearing all about college classes and professors and research at home from a fairly young age. There was nothing especially mysterious or intimidating for me about the idea of post-secondary education.
I don’t think I fully realized until I was in grad school that, although I’d grown up with a lot less money than many of my college classmates, I’d still had a huge advantage over a lot of kids. There were probably plenty of kids whose families had as much or even more money than mine but who’d grown up thinking that people like them didn’t go to college, or who perhaps wanted to go to college but didn’t really understand how to go about getting there.
I heard this, or something like it, more than once. “Why do I need school? I am going to be a farmer.”
I’d say that “meaningless” is somewhat hyperbole but otherwise I agree, which is why I said “genetic groups.” But if we pretended that we could reliably divide humans into races I don’t think we could separate intelligence from environment.
If this were GQ, I think that would be the answer.
Disparities in income, educational opportunities, attitudes, etc, don’t disappear over just one generation. If your parents are college-educated and earn well, but your grandparents didn’t graduate high school, your Grandparents influence you too, especially if you spend a lot of time with them while your parents get their college degrees and then work to support you while you’re a child, leaving you with your grandparents. Even the physical aspects of poverty take a couple of generations (at least) to disappear.
This also ties in with the peer pressure hypothesis; if your parents grew up poor but then became more affluent as adults, they’re still more likely to live in a less wealthy area, and you’re more likely to go to school with kids whose parents don’t care much about education.
In essence, it’s not just about your parents’ income, but their parents’ income, and your classmates’ parents’ income. Though I’d say educational accomplishment was a more significant factor than income, and the two are not always related.
Wading into this late. One thing that’s been mentioned only slightly is the imperfection of the tools used to “measure” intelligence. If you read the works of Stephen Jay Gould, or Roger Sanjek, or Nicholas Lehman, you’ll know that the way that intelligence is measured is mired in racism. More importantly, the people doing the measuring typically have a vested interest in seeing their particular population represented on the right tail of the distribution.
Let’s go a little further and discuss the implications of being schooled in U.S. society. My first day of kindergarten, I immediately noticed two things: one, I was the only Black kid in the morning class, and two, we had a poster of the presidents in the front of the classroom. I noticed that none of them were Black like me either (although Teddy Roosevelt for some reason was quite swarthy). Probably about a week or so in, a kid called me “nigger” - I don’t think the kid knew what it meant, and neither did I, but we both knew it was not a good thing and it had to do with the fact I was Black.
Case I’m making here is that there is a cultural milieu in which kids are educated. And for me, these are my earliest schooling memories. I have always loved school; that’s probably why I’m an academic. But if I was inclined to not like it, those experiences and others like it could turn me off the whole enterprise.
We need to also examine the impact of some of the psychological research by Claude Steele on stereotype threat. In essence, if members of a population in the cultural and/or numerical minority - Black males in an algebra class, women in the sciences, White males on a track team - are told that people of their particular identity group perform poorly on metrics compared to the majority group before being tested on that metric, they perform much worse than they do when that message is not conveyed. The punch line here is that stereotype threat is meted out in far more subtler ways than the research design demonstrates. Walking into a classroom where you are the only woman, and sensing that (some of) the men don’t think you belong, is a more likely manifestation. Some folks think that the opposite effect is true: being the only one inspires you to go out and prove everybody wrong. In fact, carrying the extra baggage in your mind simply means that you’re distracted from the metric, which is taking the damn test.
There’s also the issue of differential item functioning. On standardized tests, some questions are answered incorrectly far more frequently by Blacks, women, and poor students. In more recent iterations of the SAT, questions with high levels of DIF are rejected. But as DIF is a relatively new line of research, and not every test tests for this, it’s hard to know what tests are reliable.
To those who think there’s a cultural issue going on, I taught in a school in Houston’s Fifth Ward neighborhood. Very Black (the school demographically was 98% Black) and very poor. But do you know what was the absolute worst insult that any kid could say to another, the one that was guaranteed to start a fight? It wasn’t “yo mama” jokes, calling someone poor, or making fun of their clothes. It was calling someone “dumb.”
Think about this particular community. Before integration, it was known as a hotbed of Black talent in Houston. Lawyers and politicians (Barbara Jordan, f’rex) were educated there. After integration, the Black educators who were principals and administrators disappeared, as well as many of the senior teachers. They were replaced by White teachers and administrators, who often brought deficit thinking to classrooms. So those students dealt with racism and discrimination from teachers - and passed along those experiences to their kids. Often, kids started school with an oppositional mindset, because their parents told them not to take crap from teachers… and many teachers assess students subjectively. A kid who is cooperative and polite gets breaks. A kid who has parents with considerable social capital gets breaks. A kid whose parents aren’t able (or willing) to visit school may not get the breaks.
If you don’t believe me, talk to a teacher about how kids get in honors classes. In most schools, it’s about grades, teacher recommendations, board scores, and behavior. But there’s the kid who’s in the class because his parents threatened to sue the school, or harassed the teacher into allowing their kid into class. That kid might not be the brightest, but he’s getting challenged in the honors course, and may even become a star after some experience in those classes.
I personally experienced a lot of razzing from Black kids about being in honors classes in high school (though one advantage of going to a high school with lots of minority kids is that you’re never the only one in the class). I certainly wasn’t cool in the traditional sense - sucked at sports, not particularly conversant in slang, didn’t have the cool haircut or clothes. But my peers outside of my honors classes were invested in excelling in other arenas - talking to girls, demonstrating prowess in sports, even being able to make a profit with drugs. The point I’m making is that they found venues in which they had to be “smart.” You know what’s weird, though? Most of those kids were incredibly gracious and supportive towards graduation when they heard about my scholarship and senior awards. For whatever reason I didn’t much care, or more appropriately, I knew I was never going to fit in with that crowd, so I didn’t try very hard. But a lot of kids can fit in with some effort and choose to expend their energies in that manner.
I think this is a Faustian choice that a lot of Black kids have to make. Being smart is something that all kids want to be. However, there’s stereotypically nerdy smart - think Urkel - to street smart (think about the antiheroes from The Wire). When I speak to groups of kids today, as a college professor with degrees from Harvard, I’m cool to them… but I would have never been cool to them as a peer.
I think the key is to demonstrate that there’s more than one way to be smart. That there’s a diversity of smart people out there… not just street hoods, but pharmacists, lawyers, and poets. Truth be told, I think hip-hop is a huge boon here, because there are tons of role models out there that demonstrate wordplay and a love for language. (Of course it helps to know who these artists are, and expose kids to something besides Li’l Wayne.)
(bolding mine)
I don’t understand why you have claimed you would see the racial hierarchy of blacks underperforming mixed raced students underperforming white students holding true across “every country and every culture”, and then when faced with a contradictory statistic, make the perfectly valid point about the self-selecting process of immigration producing particularly bright persons. If the latter is true - which it seems fair to assume it is - how can the former be tested? In many societies, much of the ethnic minority population comes from recent immigration.
you with the face, well put.
You are right; “every” is overly broad.
I should have said, “nearly every.” The smaller the sample of a broad cohort, the less likely it will be reflective of the total cohort. And that is why, of course, I can beat a given black guy on the basketball court and any given black can kick my a$$ in calculus. And why it’s foolish to judge any individual by the color of their skin.
As with any broadly-enough defined cohort, you can select out a small-enough sub-group which defies the norm for the average of the larger group. There are certainly sub-populations of whites inherently less (innately) intellectually capable than sub-populations of blacks. (I can think of a couple of families down the street that make the point well 
) And congrats for that group of immigrants in the UK, btw. (What would be your thinking on how wretchedly their male counterparts do? Is it your thinking that circumstances are markedly worse for male Caribbean immigrants than females, or would you consider that the circumstances are similar but there are substantial innate differences between male and female Caribbean immigrants that yield such a huge difference for the females?)
When I looked at the GCSE data for the UK, I was struck with how well the Chinese did and how unlikely it is that factors other than innate ability is a likely explanation for their extraordinary success.
As I have said many times, I have no axe to grind. Should the UK population of Caribbean immigrants outscore any (or all) white (or any other) population, my conclusion will be that they are brighter. More capable. Smarter. No big deal, and I don’t think anyone should care. It’s kind of irrelevant and pointless. It’s not some sort of contest.
What I wouldn’t conclude, a priori, is that innate differences could not be a reason for performance differences.
One more quick thing: It’s not clear to me if the GCSE scores reflect absolutely standard exams for exactly the same topics, or simply grades in GCSE coursework (or subjectively-graded exams). I think there are lots of various GCSE courses, are there not? I am aware that there is some criticism of the GCSE process in general.
Here in the US, grades and curriculums are extremely variable from school to school, even if the courses have similar names. For this reason there has been an historic reliance on our SAT and ACT as a mechanism of figuring out if those grades and curriculum are as rigorous at one school as they are at another.
Without an entire country taking the exact same standardized exam, it’s very problematic to score across schools.
I want to thank tomndebb, Marley23 and others for doing the heavy lifting here. I bowed out of the original thread when it started to move in this direction, because while I had spent hours and hours reading the threads devoted to this subject a number of years ago, and understood that there really is no basis for linking race and intelligence, or even race and athletic ability, I didn’t think I could make the arguments accurately enough.
But this new thread gives me the opportunity to pose the question that I was left with from the old thread, where I was accused of being unwilling to accept any evidence that might be uncovered.
Aside from superficial physical characteristics, such as skin color, hair type, and eye shape, and disease resistance/susceptibility that can be traced to certain geographical locations, is there any trait that has been genetically linked to a particular population – any element of intelligence, personality, behavior, etc.? I think that would be the first step to accepting the possibility that such links exist, but I am unaware of any such evidence at all.
Aren’t most black people (in the USA) actually of mixed race? In the same way, most “white” people are mixtures of different national goups.
So I would ascribe mst of the differences to cultural issues.
I doubt it. Chalking them up to culture makes a lot more sense and it’s hard to separate the two.
You’ve probably heard that song before, throughout in this thread.
There are different GCSE subjects, and there are a couple of different exam boards, but pretty much all secondary school children take the same exam from the same board and complete the same coursework in each subject.
There is room for some variation in the choice of some texts for coursework, but that coursework has to meet precisely-defined standards in order to get specific grades. Coursework isn’t really subjectively graded, either - you mark it by affirming that it meets certain critera. It’s no more subjectively marked than any exams are, except multiple-choice exams perhaps, but they’re not the best test of skills, intelligence, knowledge or anything much really.
The National Curriculum means that there really isn’t that much variation from one school to another.
There is criticism of the GCSE process, but some of the criticism is that it’s too inflexible and standardised across the country.
Thanks. That’s my answer to the question about evidence. If geneticists (not social scientists) come up with any evidence of a trait linked to the physical characteristics by which we define race, I’ll take a good hard look at it, and maybe consider the possibility that other traits could be racially linked. Until then, that idea is going back in the box with the moon landing hoax and the 9/11 conspiracies.
I think the short answer is that there are candidate genes for many phenotypic expressions. Think Down syndrome; think schizophrenia. I look at my own set of siblings, see a very similar nurturing and five different children and it seems self-evident that it is our five sets of genes which make the difference.
More importantly, though, we should recognize the genome is only just starting to be unravelled. So while those of us who think it’s obvious the sorts of traits you mention are genetically determined may yet receive our comeuppance, I would caution (again) not to be hasty to assume the genes won’t be linked–and linked positively and predictively–to all that we are as humans. An assumption it’s not genes, if proved wrong as the genome is deciphered, would be a more difficult paradigm shift for those whose values have been built upon the presumption it’s Nurture.