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Add to FavoritesThere are differences in intelligence between individuals. A myriad of factors go into determining a person's intelligence. Family, nutrition, social environment, early stimuli and opportunities for discovery, genetic predisposition, developmental pathway, and far far more. A person's ultimate capacity for learning is largely based on their early development. The brain is a growing thing, and needs nourishment to thrive. This is best accomplished in a safe, stable, well-fed environment which provides many opportunities for learning, interaction, and growth. A family which has a secure income, a loving home life, a supportive community, and a willingness to interact with the young child in educational play provide just such an environment. Contrast that with a family that struggles to make ends meet, is intolerant of one another, falls asleep to the echoing sounds of gunfire, and uses the television as a babysitter. The second example offers far less opportunity for a child's intelligence to blossom.
The question of intelligence is multifaceted too. What sort of intelligence? Numerical reasoning? Literary genius? Kinesthetic prowess? Avant-garde creativity? In general, most people possess strengths in some realms of intelligence, and are weaker in others. Persons familiar with educational and psychological theory will recognize Gardner's "Multiple Intelligences" here. We recognize that few people are masters of all skills, but that instead our minds and bodies have specialties. The historical tendency has been to focus on Math reasoning and Verbal skills as the benchmark for intelligence, as in IQ testing and SAT's. This approach is great, when determining who might make the best mathematician or essayist, but does little to pinpoint the greatest athletes, doctors, gardeners, musicians, etc. Nor does it address a person's understanding of other people. Each of these areas require a specialized type of knowledge, and it is now an antiquated notion that only math and grammar denote intelligence.
Having established that there are indeed differences in intelligence, now consider race.
Race is, for lack of a better word, a myth. Understand that, over centuries of mostly isolated development, individual societies came to have a set of similar traits. This can be viewed as a factor of natural selection - favoring traits that best suit the environment - and also favoring the appearances that a society has deemed attractive. Human genetics are no different than those of other animals, and so the different civilizations tended to express those traits that were best for them. In sunny climates, darker skin provides an advantage against burning. In colder climes, a big nose is handy for warming the air on its way to the lungs. One society might find buxom blonds to be the height of desirability, while another might prefer a more diminutive style of beauty. All combined, the traits that are favored did tend to diverge in different societies.
People fear and dislike that which is different. This is a general fact of human history. The concept of "different is good" is entirely a modern one, and even still is preached far more often than actually embraced. When our divergent societies came face to face with one another, they saw quite plainly that they were different. Outlandishly different. That word says it all - outlandish. People from a land out there - different. The concept of race grew out of this fear of what was different. In an attempt to behave "scientifically", at a time when science was more speculative than experimental, the Western European population came up with the idea that there were sub-species of humans. They did mean the sub part too. They considered the other "races" inferior. They could support this notion because the societies they were looking down upon had inferior technology, different (and therefore clearly incorrect) religious beliefs, and "silly" customs. From that narrow point of view, clearly they were superior, and all other cultures must be something lesser.
However, genetics are malleable. These different "races" could mingle easily, and a mixture of traits were often produced. An solid understanding of genetics was beyond even the "superior" race back then, but people do know better now. We all share the same genetic blueprint, and the traits we use to define race are superficial and meaningless, aside from individual standards of beauty. No one genetic group has demonstrated itself to be superior in intellectual development, given equal starting conditions. Comparisons are generally made between different cultures, and the results incorrectly attributed to the subjects' skin colors rather than those factors which impact their brains. A society that stresses education in math and emphasizes family unity could be expected to outperform (in math) another society that has fragmented families and lets technology supplant the need to perform even simple arithmetic like balancing a checkbook. Race has nothing to do with such a measure. Societal values have everything. This becomes obvious when a family from one culture moves to another. They may retain their physical appearance, but within a generation or two, the local customs, values, and behaviors have become internalized, and the children's performance is more akin to the local children's than to those who might be called the same "race".
To recap, there are going to be differences in intelligence between any two people (except maybe certain pairs of twins). Culture and environment, food and family all make a contribution. Race, however, does not. In fact, it would be a positive sign of intelligence if people would stop thinking about race at all.
[The author is a certified teacher with experience teaching in several communities of varying income, culture, and yes, even various genetic heritages.]
Learn more about this author, Ernest Capraro.
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Yes
Suggesting there are differences in intelligence between races can be misunderstood as racism, rather than a misunderstanding of intelligence. It is also a gross misunderstanding of what "race" is or means.
First to tackle the concept of "race." Nobody really knows what race, as it applies to humans, means. We do know that certain people look different, come from different cultures, and that the differences in humanity are closely tied to which part of the world their ancestors came from. People with pale skin and eyes, thinner hair, and less excitable temperaments tend to come from colder climates. All of their features, and much of their temperament, are adaptations to environment for the purposes of survival. People with ancestry closer to the equator, where the sun is stronger and stays in the sky for a longer duration, tend to have darker skin and eyes, hair that is more dense and wiry to protect their scalp from the sun, and broader noses that do not need to warm the air before it reaches their lungs. These are just two examples of how race may be defined. They're also two of the most common groupings of physical characteristics that we're familiar with in our contemporary word. But do these characteristics define race? According to the experts, those whose knowledge and research is extensive, the answer is, "No." Why? Because race based on physical characteristics is a modern concept. It has only been during the past few hundred years that "race" has moved from being defined through wealth, power, and status to physical characteristics. If something is possible of changing its meaning, then it has no intrinsic meaning and cannot be absolutely defined by modern, and often arbitrary, criteria.
Race may not exist as an absolute, but our modern culture has established criteria for defining race, and we do place value on the different races. One of those value systems is intelligence. And here we go again with a Big Question: What is intelligence? Ask 50 experts what intelligence is, then brace yourself for a mind-numbing, theory-clashing, hot-headed debate on what it actually is. Experts achieve the crown of Expert by researching what already exists, and then putting it together in a way new enough to attract attention. If any two "experts" agreed on anything, one of them would be redundant. We can't rely on any one definition of intelligence.
However, we can, and do, adopt certain definitions of intelligence in our school and workplace environments. We just can't resist measuring people and putting them into little boxes. The definition of intelligence generally adopted by schools are those theories that have orderly tests attached to them that measure the theory and make it easier for schools to label children and move them through the system. At the beginning of standardized school testing, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Quotient Test was the most commonly used test. It was terribly discriminatory in its use of language, and did not take into consideration the wide range of non-racial temperaments that allows one child to excel at taking tests, while causing a "brighter" child to choke up when faced with a test they could ace while half asleep. In short, it was useless, showed false differences in intelligence between different races, and damaged the self-perception of millions of children. But it did serve its purpose. It brought a small, but unjust, amount of order out of chaos.
More recently the WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) has been introduced as a more accurate way of testing intelligence in children. We still can't come up with a definitive definition of intelligence, but what the heck, let's go ahead and test it anyway. And this time, let's use WISC because, if given in its entirety, it covers roughly 20 different areas we hope will help us better categorize and file away our children, and make our task of public education manageable. Generally, only the ten verbal and performance portions of the WISC are given in public schools. These do tend to have less of a racial bias because, as explained to me by an educational therapist, the most heavily weighted section of the WISC to define intelligence is the ability to memorize random words and symbols. Not problem solving, just memorizing gibberish. Yep, that pretty much sounds like public education. At least it lessens the possibility of racial bias.
At its best, "intelligence" can, and should, be defined as human potential and the realization of that potential. Potential is endless, and in 1983 Dr. Howard Gardner published a book entitled "Frames of Mind" that outlined multiple intelligences (or potentials) that exist in human beings. They are:
-Logical-Mathematica l Intelligence
-Linguistic Intelligence
-Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence
-Musical Intelligence
-Interpersonal Intelligence
-Intra-personal Intelligence
-Spacial Intelligence
In the 20th anniversary edition of "Frames of Mind" Gardner proposed a possible eighth intelligence-spiritu al intelligence. Whether or not there are seven or seventy different types of intelligence, it's fairly easy to see that there are many ways that individuals can be gifted with potential that enriches their lives, expands the quality of life for them and those around them, and makes a contribution to the world. Many educators embrace Gardner's vision of intelligence, but it still remains too broad, too liberating, and too hard to narrow down into a tidy test to begin actually educating our children to help them realize their unique potential.
Now, to bring this back to my contention that there are differences in intelligence between races, we have to go back and refresh our memories on how our modern world defines race-the geography of our ancestors, which in turn shapes our outward appearance. If the geography of our ancestors shapes the architecture of our bones, the color and density of our skin, and the color of our eyes, it stands to reason that the same geography has helped shape our cognitive abilities. One example would be any race with ancestry from arctic regions. With that much blinding snow in all directions, the mind has to form finely tuned spacial relations on a minimum of sensory clues, or they're going to freeze where they stand. Another example would be a person with geographical ancestry that comes from a crowded island environment with a somewhat harsh climate. People in that environment, along with their long noses to warm air before it hits the lungs, would probably adapt their intelligence/cogniti on/psychometric abilities in the direction of logistics and mathematics. It takes a little logic and math to keep order in a crowd.
No discussion of the differences of intelligences in races would be complete without at least some mention of Michael Jordan. With his broad, flat nose, long and slender body, dark skin, and physical strength, it's safe (in several different ways) to say that he's of African decent. It's also fairly safe to say that his ancestors came from a region of Africa with wide open spaces that were arid, and the people relied on the fruits of the hunt for survival. This would require a great deal of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence-an awareness of where one's body is in space, judgment of how and when and how hard to throw a spear, and infinite unconscious mathematical computations happening simultaneously to know when to move in closer and when to run. His performance on the basketball court is a scorecard in motion of his superior bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. But his intelligence doesn't stop there. Neither his, nor any person's, degrees of intelligence in the seven different areas Gardner has identified is limited. Jordan was a horrible basketball player in high school and was kicked off the team. That didn't stop him, and that requires a tremendous amount of intra-personal intelligence. His charisma is testimony to his off-the-charts interpersonal intelligence, and his adaptation to a successful post-basketball career suggests a whole lot of logical-mathematical intelligence going on.
Superior intelligence of a specific type, mostly determined by what we define as race, is not a limitation or a value judgment. As our world becomes more complex and competitive, we all need to build on our natural gifts of intelligence, nurture our dominant intelligence, have the smarts to delegate our weaknesses to the next guy who excels in that area, and get over our emotional-cultural fixation on the concepts of "race" and "intelligence."
Yes, there are differences in intelligence between races, but there are enough different intelligences to go around, and enough ambiguity about race to make both non-issues. Don't impose value judgments on others because of who their ancestors were, and you'll open the floodgates of your own potential. Honor and respect intelligence in all its different forms, and you take the first step to realizing all the potential that time and place have given to you. Don't wish you were anybody but yourself, then be yourself all the way. It's the best road to appreciating others, with the clearest sign posts, you'll ever travel.
Learn more about this author, Cyd Madsen.
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