No reputable scientific evidence? Dr Miles Jackson, Professor of Sociology, has not read NYU Prof of Sociology Dalton Conley's analysis of high school test data controlled for parental wealth? Conley attributes the surprising smallness of the differential given the massive differences in advantages to a minority culture of high educational valuation or a belief in education as a ticket out of poverty. Of course this was all talked about on Michael Perelman's pen-l discussion group two years before Conley's findings were published in 1999 and before Conley won the highest accolades for the book. The turning point was of course before that--Oliver and Shapiro's findings about the magnitude of the racial gap in wealth, later confimred by Edward Wolff. Abu Hartal
abu hartal wrote:
> Once controls for racial inequalities in parents' wealth (blacks have
> a little more than 1/10th as whites), the correlated inequalities in
> school quality, differences in parents' educational attainment,
> differences in teachers' subconscious expectations, the effect of
> racist peer expectation in segregated schools, differences in peer
> groups which result from the post WWII residential segregation (most
> so called middle class black kids attending segregated schools in
> which there is a heavy concentration of poor kids and children of
> functionally illiterate parents--again the result of a few hundred
> years of racism), internalized racism and self doubt--once all this
> is taken into account--blacks clearly outperform whites on so called
> intellectual tests.
Honestly, I wish this were true. I know of no reputable scientific evidence that supports this claim. The sociostructural factors explain a lot of the interracial gap in IQ scores, but not all of it. Again though, I want to reiterate Woj's point: so what? IQ tests measure some rarified academic skills, not intelligence or success in real-life contexts.
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