14 Points

The Geneology of Contemporary Racism

Humans have short memories, especially when the events in question concern an injustice to a group that they don’t consider themselves a member of. When the wronged group is in the minority, the memories of the injustice often fade out of public view. Thankfully, in the case of the Holocaust and Anti-Semitism more broadly, Jewish survivors and refugees from Europe continue to inspire contemporary writers, researchers, and artists to revisit that horrible past and throw light on the odious ideologies that motivated people to commit some of the most methodical and far reaching crimes against the human race.

Similar work needs to be done with respect to crimes against African-Americans, including those of the 20^th Century. I used to think it was time to move on, that a consensus was reached, that the crimes against African-Americans were a heinous scar on America, but that the majority of whites were prepared to redeem themselves with some measure of political restitution -a more generous social safety net than they would otherwise support, if not affirmative action. I now see that I was wrong. Many whites seems prepared to move on, but only to leave many blacks out of the American capitalist mainstream, and some are prepared to move backwards, citing a genetic basis for social success.

The ideology that motivated Nazi perpetrators was not limited to an enclave of disgruntled fascists in Germany. Far from it. Around the world, Nazi ideas held sway in the minds of many people, including prominent politicians in America and some respected scientists, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in his history of the New Deal and Stephen Jay Gould documented and criticized in his classic book the “The Mismeasure of Man.”

At the pith of this ideology is a powerful metaphysical conceit and a logical fallacy: continental ancestry is correlated with differences in intelligence, and therefore the genes associated with that ancestry are casually responsible for intelligence. The implication is that nature has bestowed one race with powers that elevate it above all others. With this power would naturally come dominion, thus providing moral justifications for slavery, imperialism, and extraordinary brutality.

In America, prominent nationalist heroes such as Charles Lindberg joined Yale University’s America First Committee in vehemently arguing against intervention against Hitler. His private diary reveals how much he bought into the Nazi racial hierarchy and believed that the “inferior blood” of other races would dilute his fantasy of Anglo-Saxon purity. Novelist Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America uses actual history in re-imagining America with Lindberg replacing FDR as President in 1940 and reveals how plausible this scenario actually was.

Members of the scientific community explored these racial conceits in many ways; one such was the establishment of a center for Eugenic in Cold Spring Harbor. As Andrea Pitzer reports for USA Today, its leaders published books in the 1920s and 1930s calling for forced sterilization of poor people and warned that interracial breeding would cause great harm to the genes of the favored race. In 1948 James Watson, as a graduate student spent a summer conducting research at this genetics laboratory. He went on to be its director in 1968.

In more recent years, Watson has consistently made public remarks that devalue the lives and justify the discrimination against Jews, the Irish, African-Americans, and even obese people. In 2000, at UC Berkeley, in Esquire Magazine in January 2007, and in October of 2007, in The Times of London, he continued his perverse predilection for disparaging groups who lack power compared to Anglo-Saxons, especially blacks (in an ironic twist, his genome revealed that he had a very large percentage of DNA from a recent African ancestor).

Alarmingly, Watson is not alone. Just after his most recent comments, William Saletan of the reputable Slate.com Magazine wrote a three-part series defending Watson and claiming that blacks were probably fundamentally less intelligent than whites. The arguments he cited don’t hold up to scrutiny (e.g. most of the references suffer from simple omitted variables bias), and the chief researcher he cited, “psychologist” Phillip Rushton, is of very questionable sanity (he measures penis sizes and cranial capacity and tries to find an inverse relationship), and who is funded by an Anglo supremacy group that reputedly preaches the merits of segregation. Saletan’s work was received with such deserved scorn, that he felt compelled to issue an apology to Slate readers. If you are surprised he still has a job, consider Charles Murray, who advocated in The Bell Curve segregating those with low IQs from productive citizens. Far from destroying his career, it projected him to prominence. Though he is now at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute rather than a university, he is still published in the National Review and the Wall Street Journal. Recently Murray has surprised some by claiming that the SAT is biased in favor of the wealthy and should be replaced by an achievement test, but these ideas are still basically consistent with his previous arguments. Charles Murray, of course, is justly despised by millions, at least for the implications of that book.

More recently, Gregory Clark, an economic historian at UC Davis has written a book that tentatively (he says in an interview with Princeton University Press that he doesn’t quite believe it) advances the hypothesis that the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain because the English environment selected for genes that promoted peaceful commerce. As he told the genes-first science correspondent Nicholas Wade of the NY Times, “Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving.” He claims that these traits had a strong genetic origin in English society, where they were uniquely selected.

So, Clark’s explanation for poverty in the developing world: culture and genetic predispositions towards unproductive behavior. The evidence against this view is extraordinarily well established, and I won’t go into it (institutions and human capital are the leading empirical explanations, e.g Dani Rodrik et. al.). The evidence for it doesn’t exist, and Clark presents none. Clark says wealthy Englishmen had more surviving children than poor Englishmen, but the same mechanism was true in many, if not all, pre-industrial countries, especially polygamous ones, as economist Ed Glaeser points out in his critical review, and we know from the 1950s English mass genocide in Kenya, as well as their other violent colonial excesses, that modern Englishmen are no less violent than any other people (though they were a bit late to take on Hitler). Clark merely offers this thesis as a tentative hypothesis that warrants investigation. Even if economic theory didn’t already explain these questions, I’d say his hypothesis warrants, at best, dismissal. The basically irrefutable evidence against group differences in IQ, and presumably the other traits Clark favors for industrialism, is discussed below.

The white self-described conservative Atlantic Magazine blogger Andrew Sullivan was so fascinated by Clark’s hypothesis, which flatters his beloved Anglican race, that he wrote recently,

“It means that some populations may therefore have different skill-sets than others, and even different aptitudes with respect to complex systems like, er, liberal democracy, that require specific habits of mind and custom… these ideas also suggest, of course, that a place like, say, Iraq, will not soon muster anything like the skills and practices for a Western European democracy.”

Andrew Sullivan is taken very seriously by very many people. This is probably because he is one of the few representatives of conservative English politics writing in America. This combines a deep respect for liberty and small government, with overt cultural tolerance. He has gone so far as to endorse Barak Obama for President because of his conservative methods aimed at achieving liberal goals, and I must give him credit for his vigorous opposition to torture and conservative justifications for it, but he portrays the central tenant of conservatism as skepticism, and that is where I find his interpretation of conservatism most distasteful. My notion of conservatism includes a healthy respect for humanity’s moral heritage, which finds it apotheosis in the Golden Rule and the equality of humankind under God. I take this as carrying obligations to others that are fundamental, and only superficially distinct from obligations to oneself.

Sullivan, on the other hand, is so skeptical of human effort that he doubts that equality between races can ever be achieved. More abhorrently, he recently claimed that the race and IQ debate has yet to be decided and praised William Saletan for rehashing it. Later that week, on December 11, he leapt at the chance to interpret scientific findings that humans were still evolving as evidence that racism might have a legitimate basis (how else to interpret the statement that it “definitely impacts the race and IQ debate”). Yet, the research he cited was standard evolutionary theory. Scientists have known for a long time that things cited by the new research, like skin color, smallpox resistance, hair color, and lactose acceptance, have been evolving over the last few thousand years. Yet, none of these things are causally related to intelligence in any way. There is no paradigm shift afoot, as he claims, and there is no theoretical reason why intelligence would be more important to survival in European tribes and eventually kingdoms than in African kingdoms.

Ending the Debate:

A. IQ Scores Are a Function of Economic Development and Assimilation:

One fact almost ends the debate by itself, and it is very easy to understand. IQ scores have increased over time. It’s called the “Flynn Effect,” after researcher James Flynn. The reason is that IQ scores measure adaptation to the modern world, to borrow from Malcolm Gladwell, who deftly summarized the arguments against the racial explanation for intelligence for The New Yorker recently. As groups become better educated and assimilated, their IQ scores increase.

African-Americans were forcibly prevented from assimilating for most of American history, even in the north. Across the US, blacks were beaten and their homes were bombed by white terrorists when they attempted to move out of the ghetto into white neighborhoods. Take Chicago for example. Its neighborhoods on the edge of the ghetto were regulated by menacing white mobs, which frequently attacked blacks for decades. More than one bomb per month exploded at black homes from the spring of 1918 to the summer of 1919, as Thomas Lee Philpott calculated. Historian Arnold Hirsch found that between 1945 and 1950, 485 racial incidents officially reported to Chicago Committee on Human Relations. Many of these involved arson bombs directed at blacks homes resulting in the injury and death of many aspiring African Americans.

Finally in the late 1960s major changes were made and educational and employment opportunities were advanced because of victories of the Civil Rights movement. Not surprisingly, the gap between blacks and whites on IQ scores has decreased dramatically from about 1.0 standard deviations to about 0.6 or 0.7, according to research cited by Richard Nisbett. He and many others predict that this gap will continue to decrease as blacks are further integrated into society.

Berekely Economist Brad DeLong heard about Saletan’s articles and recalled the Bell-Curve Debate. He posted these findings that contradict Saletan’s invidious notions:

“The average IQ score of America’s "white" population today is 100. According to Ulric Neisser, America’s "white" children in 1932 had an average today’s-test IQ score of 80. Dutch army conscripts in 1952 scored 30 IQ points lower than conscripts in 1982. Dickens and Flynn (2006) estimate that the African-American IQ test average rose by 6 points relative to the "white" average between 1972 and 2002. According to Brierley (1970), in the 1960s African-Americans from Ohio had an average IQ score greater than that of whites from Arkansas by 10 points. Thomas Sowell reports that in Northern Ireland the Catholic average lags the Protestant average by 15 IQ point”

DeLong also pulled out a critical book review of Murray’s work by Thomas Sowell, who is a black conservative economist at Standford’s libertarian Hoover Institution. Sowell eviscerated The Bell Curve on substantial rather than moral grounds. His basic critique was that Murray and Herrnstein (the co-author who is deceased) ignored the Flynn Effect, which is the rise of IQ over time. For example, Russian Jews would be considered cognitive imbeciles by Murray and Herrnstein if they were writing in the 1920s, when the group first arrived to America. But as they became integrated and benefited, like all whites, from the New Deal and the upward mobility of free markets (which were closed to blacks), their test scores increased dramatically.

Here’s Sowell via DeLong:

“[T]he greatest black-white differences are not on the questions which presuppose middle-class vocabulary or experiences, but on abstract questions such as spatial perceptual ability…. [the] conclusion that this "phenomenon seems peculiarly concentrated in comparisons of ethnic groups" is simply wrong. When European immigrant groups in the United States scored below the national average on mental tests, they scored lowest on the abstract parts of those tests. So did white mountaineer children in the United States tested back in the early 1930s. So did canal boat children in Britain, and so did rural British children compared to their urban counterparts, at a time before Britain had any significant non-white population. So did Gaelic-speaking children as compared to English-speaking children in the Hebrides Islands. This is neither a racial nor an ethnic peculiarity. It is a characteristic found among low-scoring groups of European as well as African ancestry.

In short, groups outside the cultural mainstream of contemporary Western society tend to do their worst on abstract questions, whatever their race might be….”

B. IQ Differences are Zero at Infancy and Reach a Peak at Age 24, Reflecting Differences in Environmental Exposure to Cognitive Challenges.

Renowned economists Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago, who is white, and Roland Fryer of Harvard University, who is black, proved beyond reasonable doubt in one neat study that racial differences in IQ are not caused by racial differences in genetics. Blacks and whites have essentially no differences in test scores below the age of one, and absolutely no differences after controlling for environmental effects. Their article is published at the National Bureau of Economic Research website. Here is the abstract:

“On tests of intelligence, Blacks systematically score worse than Whites, whereas Asians frequently outperform Whites. Some have argued that genetic differences across races account for the gap. Using a newly available nationally representative data set that includes a test of mental function for children aged eight to twelve months, we find only minor racial differences in test outcomes (0.06 standard deviation units in the raw data) between Blacks and Whites that disappear with the inclusion of a limited set of controls. The only statistically significant racial difference is that Asian children score slightly worse than those of other races. To the extent that there are any genetically driven racial differences in intelligence, these gaps must either emerge after the age of one, or operate along dimensions not captured by this early test of mental cognition.”

On December 17, 2007 James Flynn was on the NPR show On Point, and he discussed this finding, which has been duplicated in other studies, and how it eliminates any genetic explanation for racial differences. He pointed out that IQ differences emerge over time and reach their peak long after puberty at age 24. The only explanation for this is the accumulation of environmental differences, and since most people are out of college by age 24, the gap stops there.

C. European Genes Don’t Raise Test Scores and Super-Smart Black Aren’t More Likely to have European Ancestry.

What Flynn takes as the most damning evidence against the genetic explanation for racial differences is the fact that blacks with significant recent European ancestry don’t score any higher than blacks without European ancestors. In one case, a sample of blacks in Chicago in the 1930s who were identified as well above average and even geniuses on IQ tests were actually less likely to have European ancestors than the average black student, as Nesbitt discusses here.

Finally, children of African-American US soldiers raised in Germany score just as high as whites on IQ scores.

The Absence of Genetic Evidence

The remarkable things about this putative debate is that one side (the genetic fundamentalists, as Gladwell calls them) have never, not once, presented evidence that the genetic variable race, which is a phenotype with some unknown genetic basis, has anything to do with intelligence. Rather they have only shown that the social variable “race” as a category of derision and exploitation correlates to lower performances on social outcomes (e.g. IQ exams). There is, in short, no genetic data used in the debate. What would truly be a remarkable feat of science, would be to find that a deprived population, which has been enslaved for hundreds of years, excluded from labor markets, quality education, land markets, social welfare (until the 1960s), all the while isolated in impoverished ghettos, would be economically and socially equal to a population that has been given every advantage offered by the most powerful country ever to exist on Earth.

To put this otherwise, what other “theories” have no scientific evidence but are taken as reasonable hypotheses. I can’t think of any.

It reminds me of the writing of the 17^th century philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, who posited the notion of “occasionalism,” which argued that humans would have no sensation if not for the occasion of divine intervention. (Malebranche wrote, “all beings are present to our mind because God … is present to it … [S]ensation is the modification of our soul, and it is God who causes it in us.” (p 398, from Search After Truth, in Ariew and Watkins, Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources).

People like Watson, Rushton, and Murray seem to think that no sensation is possible if DNA didn’t immediately occasion to cause it -that is, if someone is struck by an automobile, it must have been due to their DNA’s predisposition for careless street crossing.

But there is a darker side. This genetic occassionalism is a form of Nazi atavistism, even if the advocates are personally devoid of overt malice towards African-Americans. The reason these ideas are so dangerous and deserve to be denounced, despite protests of being “politically correct,” are their fundamental incompatibility with American ideals, Enlightenment ideals, and the constitutions of the great Monotheistic faiths.

Racial Equality and Liberal Political Philosophy

John Locke is one intellectual forefather of liberal democracy. His ideas, which were derived from Christian ethics, led directly to the ideological disposition of the Founding Fathers of the American republic. In Chapter II of his Second Treatise on Civil Government, written in 1690, he wrestles with the idea of the origin of political power:

“A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

Sec. 5.

This equality of men by nature, the judicious Hooker looks upon as so evident in itself, and beyond all question, that he makes it the foundation of that obligation to mutual love amongst men, on which he builds the duties they owe one another, and from whence he derives the great maxims of justice and charity.” [my emphasis added]

This quote should speak for itself. Notions of natural (or genetic) inequality between groups of people, with respect to any characteristic that matters to sovereignty, are incompatible with any established basis for political equality. All duties, including the obligation to count the vote of African-Americans as equivalent to that of everyone else, are derived from this basic notion. Those that try to remove this distinction with the fallacious logic of racism are attacking no less than the foundations of democracy.

Environmental Differences That Vary Across Race that Shape Intelligence and How to Change Them

James Flynn discussed why blacks have different cognitive environments despite living in the same country. He cites evidence that black mothers don’t gain as much as weight as white mothers while they are pregnant, due to undernourishment and a younger age of motherhood, but more importantly, 62% of black children are raised in single parent homes versus only 23% of white children. This means that, even if black and white incomes were equal, and black homes had just as many books, DVDs, tvs, radios, educated friends and neighbors, and other sources of cognitive stimulation, the homes of black children would still be less stimulating and less cognitively rich simply because they would have less interaction with adults.

This is not just speculation. Research by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley has shown that poor children are exposed to fewer stories and fewer words. According to a New York Times survey of their research, and environmental inequality more broadly, children in professional class households heard 4 times more utterances per hour than those from poor households. The City Journal coverage of the story points to this statistic: “In the first year of life, the average number of words heard per hour was 2,150 for professors’ kids, 1,250 for working-class children, and 620 for children in welfare families.”

To these factors, we could also add neighborhood effects, since blacks are far less likely to live near college graduates, due to a legacy of racial discrimination in housing markets, and blacks have disadvantages in nutrition and stimulating consumer products. The biggest problem, however, is that blacks are forced to attend schools of lesser quality, often with the worst teachers in the profession. As I discussed in a previous article, moving black students into better schools almost immediately reduces the achievement gap with whites, despite these underlying disadvantages. Allowing blacks to use publicly funded vouchers to attend regional schools of their choice could dramatically reduce inequality in human capital and incomes. There are other ways to dramatically reduce and even eliminate racial inequality. They include increased funding for Headstart Programs, publicly funded preschool and day care for black working parents.

These programs are necessary because blacks still live in ghettos that are segregated by human capital. There are many historical reasons for this, including the white directed land giveaway under the Homestead Act after the Civil War. In the 20^th Century, the Federal Housing Administration, which was set up in 1937, subsidized millions of white home ownership in white neighborhoods but has systematically refused to give loans or assistance to blacks until recently. Also, racial covenants were set up all around the country and restricted whites from selling or renting their homes to blacks in white neighborhoods. Today, zoning restrictions against affordable housing and publicly subsidized housing constriction in black neighborhoods continues to undermine residential integration.

Two Harvard economists, David Cutler and Ed Glaeser, have published an article called "Are Ghettos Good or Bad?" They find that they are bad, very bad for those that live in them. Neighborhoods effects alone explain 100% of the gap between young adult whites and blacks in high school graduation, employment status, and wages, and 2/3 of the gap in single parenthood. They use the most robust statistical techniques available to prove this conclusion, which stems from the fact that young blacks that live in integrated neighborhoods do just as well as whites. Their results even hold after accounting for reverse causality -that is the effect of sociological success on segregation -by using the variation in geographical barriers to integration to predict segregation. They also use data that tracks individuals over time to show that background characteristics don’t explain the variation in outcome -neighborhood effects do.

I don’t know how genetic fundamentalists could even begin to reconcile any of this with their ideology. But let us never forget their political genealogy. Scientific inquiry, with strong empirical foundations, on any subject, should be welcomed, debated, and treated with appropriate respect. Quasi-religious speculations about the origins of differences in group ability, based on blatantly biased correlations, should be met with enmity.