I kind of miss the old days

As far back as the 1960s you could have an honest debate about race with racists. They would come on TV and say that black people were racially inferior and had to be segregated. They didn't pull any punches about it. You could discuss it with them and try to change their minds. Eventually enough minds were changed that it was no longer acceptable to say such things in public. Of course the opposite has been happening with homosexuality, but that's another story, maybe for another diary.

This is about racism, and how racists are now shouted down by the public reaction. «You have not converted a Man because you have silenced him» as the Twentieth Century artist Ben Shahn famously quoted John, Viscount Morley's "On Compromise", 1874.

Let's look at the notorious recent remarks by Nobel Prize winning scientist James Watson. What did he reportedly say?

inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa. . . . All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says not really.

Now there's his apology, and his explanation, but no real discussion about whether what he said was true, or even the extent that it might be true, or the ways in which it might be true, has appeared in the press to date.

No, don't for a minute think that I think he's right about race and intelligence. Even disregarding the important questions "What is race?" and "What is intelligence?" I'm just not even convinced that intelligence is really hereditary. His explanation kind of hints at that, but doesn't really say it. Most people think, or just assume, that intelligence is hereditary because they were told when they were young that it is, and the generality of the population who don't follow this don't realize that Sir Cyril Burt faked his data, although he still has defenders.

I would like the press to honestly report the controversies about intelligence and the effects on it of heredity and environment, including prenatal environment. I would like people to understand that this is not a simple issue. I wish I had saved the link, but I read some time ago that blonds exposed to blond jokes before taking IQ tests scored 8 points lower than a control group of blonds. Sounds suspiciously similar to the famous 11 points difference between blacks and whites in the US, doesn't it? But there are all kinds of other explanations that should be debated. The role of caste in American society particularly needs to be considered. African Americans are not just an ex-slave group, they are the traditional undercaste group, Untouchables.

There are even more controversial ideas that no one will even mention. Most testing of blacks has been in the US. Not only have there been pressures on them to act dumb, coming not only from the white community but from other blacks who accuse intelligent blacks of "acting white".

African Americans are a distinct gene pool. If they score lower on intelligence tests than whites, what does that have to do with Africans, even assuming that intelligence is hereditary? Maybe the intelligent ones were doing the catching, and the 'slow' ones were caught and sent to the Americas? There have been claims that Igbos and other African ethnic groups are even more highly intelligent, on average than white Americans. To extrapolate from one group of blacks to all blacks is no less racist than to extrapolate from a single black to all blacks.

Most damning to the heredity theory is the fact that Igbos made a large contribution to the African American population. The word "okra" (for example) is an Igbo word in American English. The simplest (and therefore the most likely) explanation for the differential success of Igbos over African Americans is cultural. African Americans have lost their original Igbo culture and therefore are not as entrepreneurial (and not as successful) in America's highly competitive entrepreneurial society. Maybe we should forget about Swahili and get African Americans back to their real African culture.

But most of all, let us have an honest debate about race and intelligence. Let us remember that each individual is an individual, and that even if blacks, as a group, score lower on intelligence tests than whites, there are still extremely intelligent blacks.

I got that last link from a high IQ society I belong to, that W. R. Jones also belongs to. No, it's not Mensa, it's 20 times as selective as Mensa. There is no shortage of extremely, highly intelligent blacks in the world, even in the United States, where intelligent blacks were systematically killed during slavery and where blacks have been pressured to act stupid, sometimes even by their own people. Shouting people down who say blacks are less intelligent doesn't convince blacks who are unsure about their own intelligence. Facts might.