Blacks can't be said to be more than a little bit genetically inferior--leading sociologists conclude

[Rakesh Bhandari]

In the Black White Test Score Gap (Brookings, 1998) Christopher Jencks and
Meredith Phillips, heroes of the respectable liberal left at Dissent and
The American Prospect,  will only go so far as to say: "Snyderman and
Rothman asked a sample of over 1000 psychologists, sociologist, and
educational researchers, 'Which of the following  best characterizes your
opinion of the heritability of black white differences in IQ?' Of the 661
'experts' who returned a questionaire, 14 percent declined to answer this
particular question, 24 precent said the data were insufficient, 1 percent
thought the gap was 'due entirely to genetic variation,' 15 percent
entirely to environmental variation, and 45 percent thought it was a
'product of both genetic and environmental variation.' It is not clear how
many of those gave the 'both' response would accept our conclusion that
genes do not play a *large* role in the black-white gap."

Of course this implies that it is reasonable alas to assume that blacks are
somewhat genetically inferior--as if the ruling out of the ideology of any
deep racial difference (as John Vandermeer refers to it) is not the only
reasonable thing to do based on actual biological knowledge (Lewontin and
Cavalli Sforza are not discussed in this volume) and the strictest scrutiny
that must be applied to any hypothesis challenging our common humanity.

 No, they seem to think their scientific ethos would be compromised by a
dismissal in unequivocal terms of *any* heritable racial difference in
terms of the pseudo entity of intelligence. That this would be the only
reasonable conclusion to reach scientifically--the refusal to even consider
the hypothesis of any heritable racial differences in intelligence in
terms of insufficient evidence to accept the existence of the posited
entities of deeply differentiated races with concordant variations and the
factor analytic derived entity of g--seems to be beyond the pale of
acceptable social science in this country.  That is, one should not even be
able to formulate the hyothesis of whether there are genetically determined
IQ differences between the races--even to reject it. It's no less absurd
that doing a few regressions to reject the hypothesis of whether witchcraft
has brought misfortune.

By the way Jensen the psychologist is referred to five times in this
volume, Lewontin, the world famous geneticist and author of Education and
Class, is not mentioned once. This should give some indication of how deep
anti marxism runs through the respectable academy. Truly frightening.  Not
surprisingly there is no nuanced discussion of what heritability even means
(see Stephen Rose, Sahotra Sarkar, Richard Lewontin, etc).

I don't know whether the circulation of such opinion among the intellectual
class meets some criterion for a genocidal environment in a country. It
certainly seems to be something NATO should investigate, but the US would
have to sign on to the relevant genocide treaties first.

I am sorry to have brought up such a depressing topic.

yours, rakesh