'Intelligence' and Race (was Re: Invention of the white race // Rakesh on eugenics)

[Jim heartfield]

In message <v03102802b19790da1413@[128.146.43.47]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
<furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>Further, why even _ask_ questions such as, 'Do different races have
>different levels of intelligence?' I think that racism is inherent in
>questions like the above.

I agree with Yoshie's general drift. Certainly 'intelligence quotient'
is a fetishised category (because it implies the sum of intelligence is
fixed from birth, whereas most pedagogy is premissed on the opposite
view, that intelligence is taught).

However, there is such a thing as intelligence and I do not think we
ought to be surprised that it is distributed differentially between
social classes and 'races'. It stands to reason that if you exercise
your wits they will get broader, and the conditions of wage slavery or
racial oppression are not the best conditions in which to acquire the
art of thinking. (That said, the bourgeoisie can be pretty stupid
because of the limits that their social position puts upon imagining any
order in which they are not kings).

There is a debate in Britain about testing in schools which teachers,
especially those in areas of high afro-carribean and Bengali intakes,
oppose. The teachers' want the test results to be 'weighted' - meaning
that before they are published the results are skewed in favour of those
schools with a high immigrant intake.

On the face of things the teachers are acting from good anti-racist
motivations. The weighted figures would, they say, show how children are
performing taking into account their dsadvantages. But to my mind it
seems that the effect is to minimise the way that schools are failing
black students. Supressing the record that some racial groups
underperform only has the effect of allowing the teaching profession to
pretend that they are doing right by these studnets when in fact they
are failing them.

Notably most asian (that's Indian and Pakistani in Britain) students
are, after doing badly in the seventies and early eighties, now
performing as well as or better than their white fellow students.
Testing IQ might be pseudo-science, but tests and certificates are a
necessary part of any education system.

In message <s57195e2.027 at ci.detroit.mi.us>, Charles Brown <charlesb at CNCL
.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes
>Although, in general these days I polemicize against structuralism and other 
>post-modernist critcisms of Marxism. have you heard of Levi-Strauss' _Les 
>Pensees Sauvage_ ? The salutory aspect of that book is its argument for the 
>rationality and intelligence of non-literate culture. It could probably 
>eventually be reduced to pencil and paper like dancing etc., but the burden of 
>the fact that it cannot be now should be borne by the measurers of intelligence.

I think this argument is just an evasion, really. It's a bit like where
my mother used to teach in Brixton (a relatively high concentration of
Afro-Carribean children). Parents' complained bitterly that teachers
only wanted to know their sons and daughters on sports day, and would
dragoon them into the steel band, on the (false) belief that they had
some sensuous 'concrete' abilities that white pupils lacked. Most black
mothers wanted their children to get a good qualification, but the
school's prejudice was that only white people had the abstract reasoning
to handle those skills.

The minute black students had any control over their own choices, when
they left school and went to sixth form college and chose their own
courses, they would all apply to do computing and accounting, however
furiously the carrers officer promoted art and community care.
-- 
Jim heartfield