@oralloy,
Quote:
There is no correlation between "race" and performance on IQ tests.
There is however a correlation between the opportunities someone is given and the expectations that people have of them, and how they perform.
That is correct. Exposure and environment play a supporting role in IQ tests. The idea that cultural and social differences stem from or are determined by biological differences, an idea that came to a tragic harvest in recent years, has a long history.
As a biological concept, race refers to a number of people who possess common inherited characteristics. Most racial classifications are based on external physical traits: color of the skin, hair and eyes, head form, type of hair, contours of the nose and jaw, height, body build, amount of body hair.
The racial interpretation of social and cultural variation asserts that these biological characteristic account for the level and nature of a particular culture, the form of government, or the frequency of various patterns of behavior. According to such theories, European civilization was superior to that of the rest of the world because of the innate superiority of the white man. African Americans have a higher rate of venereal disease and illegitimacy in the United States than whites, such a theory holds, because of their innate immorality. Whatever distinct qualities are attributed to the Jews (who have been identified both as evil capitalists and evil Communists, as a menace to others because they are superior or because they are inferior) are traced to hereditary capabilities. Such theories gain a seeming plausibility because there are some empirical correlations between racial characteristics and culture social forms.
It is possible to point to actual differences in behavior, beliefs, values and social organization between groups that are racially more or less distinct, between tall, blond, blue eyed Nordics and short, dark brown-eyed Mediterraneans, between Europeans and black Africans, between yellow-skinned Chinese and white-skinned Americans. It is then an easy, though not legitimate, step from these obvious facts to the conclusion that racial traits determine cultural and social characteristics.
Anthropological, sociological and historical data provide overwhelming testimony that similar cultures can be found among peoples with very different physical characteristics, and that culture and social organization can change quickly without any corresponding change in racial identity. Popular conceptions of race must therefore be distinguished from the tested knowledge arrived at through scientific investigation.
Biologists and physical anthropologists seek to discover the genetic character of human races, insofar as they exist, and to find out whether race possess any distinctive traits or abilities.
There are, it appears, racially linked traits; for example, only blacks can suffer from a disease called sickle cell anemia, but as we have seen there is little evidence that skin color, hair form or any of the other attributes that have been thus examined exert any determining influence on culture or social organization.
The ideas to which men have subscribed however, have played a very important historical role. Although they do not constitute the total explanation for the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis who considered Jews an inferior race or of racial segregation in the United States, England, the Union of South Africa, and elsewhere, racial––or perhaps more accurately, racist ideologies can justify or rationalize the treatment of particular racial and ethnic groups.
