Neuroscientist Steven Rose says no.
Psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams say yes.
What do you think?
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This is the class blog for the Spring 2009 session of Philosophy of Race at Rhodes College.
The anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races. -- Barack Obama
Dr. J's PHIL 250
This is the class blog for the Spring 2009 session of Philosophy of Race at Rhodes College.
Blog Archive
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2009
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February
(22)
- Black in America
- Mugabe vows to continue land seizures from white f...
- Fanon's Racism
- My realizations--apparently I have a lot to say
- Race at Rhodes
- The Dichotomy of Race
- Race versus Racism in Modern Movies
- Meditation on the origin and entrenchment of the t...
- Dr. Michael Honey Lecture: MLK and Memphis in the ...
- Should Scientists Study Possible Links Between "Ra...
- To What Extent Is "Race" Essential to One's Identity?
- My Race is My Identity
- Du Bois on the "Talented Tenth"
- Idea of Talented 10th
- What is Racism?
- Groups and Race
- The Inconsistency of "Race"
- Does locating race in a common history work the wa...
- Downfall of Du Bois
- Racial Solidarity and Color-Blindness
- Well Im not a communist...but read this anyway
- The Anthropological Concept of Race versus Locke’s...
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February
(22)
Texts For This Course
- Anti-semite and Jew, by Jean-Paul Sartre
- Blackness Visible, by Charles Mills
- Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, by Mahmood Mamdani
- Racism: A Short History, by George Frederickson
- The Colonizer and the Colonized, by Albert Memmi
- The Human Stain, by Philip Roth
- The Idea of Race, by Robert Bernasconi (Ed.)
- Whitewashing Race, by Michael Brown
I don't think there is any legitimate connection between IQ and race. Both could be scientifically proven but race and IQ are two unrelated aspects of humanity. Even though certain races like Chinese may be known to be good at math sterotypically, and they may have highger IQ in that subject, all chinese people are not necessarily talented in the same area. IQ doesn't prove anything about race, for example Albert Einstein is thought of by many as one of the smartest men in history and he is white but as we said in class, the privilege of being white is that one person can not represent all white people. Hence, just because Einstein was smart says nothing about the white race as a whole. Therefore, IQ can not determine the intelligence of a race as a whole. So in my opinion there is no correlation between race and IQ.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with Manali here, I do not think that even if there was some correlation, its coming to light may hurt us more than that information could help, but perhaps that is an empirical problem, which could be objected to or defended.
ReplyDeleteHaven't they already tried to study this? When Binet created the first form of an IQ test in France the government actually went back and told him to create questions that would allow boys to score higher than girls. This is because when the test was initially released girls were almost always getting higher scores. I know that this only applies to gender but let me continue.
ReplyDeleteAs the test began to gain popularity with different countries (including the United States), the concept of Eugenics came into play. Different scientists around the world would again manipulate questions that would relate better to different cultural aspects of people (that they determined and divided into races) so certain groups would score higher and boast their racial "superiority" in light of this test.
Due to the IQ tests foundations in racial and culural bigotry, I have trouble seeing how scientists today would be able to test people of different colors with a completley unbiased test with no advatage to atleast some cultural aspects of a certain person, or gender.
Your last sentence seems to be the most promising; the fact is that even when a trend from iq differences is found, there is no single cause. It could be due to environmental stressors, cultural differences, or the fact that one group has not had access to the educational privilege of the other. Race does not concern itself with biological differences so much as cultural, and it seems that IQ must be placed in the same light.
ReplyDeleteI, for one think that the very idea an intelligence quotient test is ridiculous in the first place, as it attempts to quantify something that doesn't really exist. The defense will naturally be that the test is standardized, but if races consistently score differently, then clearly the test is not sufficiently standardized. The question, I guess, is what accounts for the differences in scores? If white people, black people, and Asian people all score differently on a standardized test, then there must necessarily be some difference in them, but the accusation that that these differences are accounted for by the fact that a certain race is innately smarter (a dangerous and tempting fallacy given the purported immutability of test scores) presupposes the validity of the test and precludes any talk of cultural differences (the nurture as opposed to the nature). What I am trying to say, is that if the scores for different races come out differently in the first place, the test, which is supposed to be standardized for all people and unbiased is not doing what it is supposed to be doing, and the results should not be indications of racial deficiencies, but of deficiencies within the test itself. Ultimately, I think, it will be impossible to achieve a single test that will yield a single number that will accurately quantify the mental capacity of a person on a basis that is universally standardized, at least in the case of norm referenced score interpretations.
ReplyDeleteNo, I do not think there should be research to show a link between race and IQ. First of all, I think this research would have no validity in its results. Second, I feel that this only feeds the fire of stereotyping different races. For example, out of this random sampling of people, one race may have a much higher IQ score than the other. However, that does not mean that the race as a whole can be seen as smarter or dumber based on one test. How many times have we heard, "Statistics show..." or "Research says that..." Just because there has been research does not make the results factual in a general sense. However, many people take these to be factual and therefore can create a stereotype of a race's IQ from the results of this test. Doing this research on the link between race and IQ is unnecessary and a step backwards for humankind in the goal to eliminate racism.
ReplyDelete