I was having lunch with a friend yesterday, a good woman who does a lot to try to make the lives of those around her better. We were talking, as we do, about the problems of the world, and she said she’d heard a talk by someone saying that Africans will never be able to live up to the standard we have because they are genetically less intelligent than we are.
I swallowed hard.
When I was a young professor just starting out in my university career, I was assigned as the dissertation adviser to a young student completing her senior thesis. She was Black and her name was Carol, and she wanted to write a thesis proving that the research supporting the argument that Blacks were less intelligent than Whites was wrong. I was too inexperienced then to know that this subject is far too complex for even a highly gifted and motivated student to tackle in a single senior thesis. Instead of suggesting that she tackle a small part of the question, I let her go ahead.
She wrote a poor thesis that, at best, deserved a C, but her board talked her into taking a pass/fail option and we gave her a pass. What I remember most about her defense was that, in the teeth of research results she could not explain, she simply sat there and said they were wrong. Why, we asked. “Because they are,” she said; ”I know they’re wrong.” Well, that’s not an approach that leads to a successful academic argument.
And yet, I thought Carol was right. History is filled with arrogant conclusions about European superiority. We’ve declared ourselves superior to the immigrants arriving on Ellis Island, to the Japanese after World War II, to the Aborigines in Australia, to the Indians in Central and South America, or the inhabitants of India and China. We even argue that Homo sapiens was smarter than Neanderthal man.
Carol couldn’t prove her view, she couldn’t even argue it persuasively. But I had a Ph.D., I was trained in research, and I was an academic, and I spent the next ten years immersing myself in the IQ controversy, studying the research and arguments and teaching courses on the subject. I am convinced that the research does not support the conclusion that Blacks or Africans are genetically less intelligent than Whites. James Watson, the scientist who unravelled the DNA spiral, recently said he thinks they are. I think he is too rigid to look at the data objectively. The evidence just isn’t there.
I know one of my few gifts is that I can often explain extremely complex issues in a way that makes them understandable to many people who otherwise find them baffling. And I’ve wondered, sometimes, if even now, I should not write about this controversy.
But most of all I think about Carol who never had the slightest inkling how much her stubborn insistence influenced the direction of my professional thinking. I still think, Carol, that you were right.
