The “hard truth” about race and IQ discussed in leading newspaper!

“Let’s not cower from the hard truth about race and IQ.”

That’s the title of Matthew Syed’s article in the London Times. Wow! Then comes the article lead: “The facts are not in serious dispute: blacks score, on average, significantly lower than whites in IQ tests in the United States, Britain and beyond.”

Exciting stuff to see, in the stuffy Times.

But it’s all a tease.

First comes the bold, un-PC statement:

Yes, significant racial IQ differences exist.

But then comes the hackneyed follow-through:

But they exist because blacks and whites live in such different environments that blacks as a group are stunted .

You’ve gotta be kidding. The environmental argument has been buried and reburied, but Syed digs it up, acting as if he’s presenting us with something new, brave, and fresh.

In fact, IQ has been tested for over a century now, in tests of increasing sophistication, on every continent, in every country, in black countries, in white countries, in white-majority countries with black minorities, in black-majority countries with white minorities, among the underclass, among the working class, among the middle and upper class, of both races, and the black-white difference persists throughout. How can this be due to some environmental factor affecting blacks, unless the environmental factor is—blacks themselves?

But for Syed, none of this history, none of this evidence exists.Not only does he tote forth the mysterious and non-dispositive Flynn Effect, he even ventures this:

Allied with evidence of how IQ differences disappear when black children are brought up in residential nurseries with white children, the environmental hypothesis becomes convincing.

This is false, as shown by the Scarr-Weinberg adoption study, in which black children adopted in infancy by white middle-class families showed no significant improvement in IQ over other black children.

How many multiracial nurseries, how charter schools, how much cradle-to-grave Head Start, how many phony books by Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom chirping that we’re “closing the gap,” how many enervating social engineering projects must the Western world endure before it accepts the simple fact—which is not anyone’s fault, folks, it’s just happens to be the way it is—that there are significant inherited differences in intelligence between blacks and whites?

Shame on the London Times for publishing this trash.

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Charles G. writes:

Here is an excellent article (in pdf format) by Ralph Scott about the futility of “No Child Left Behind” and other equally futile attempts to close the racial “gap” in education. Quite good.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 17, 2007 10:18 PM | Send