‘But Some Blacks Are Extremely Intelligent!’
On a visit to America in 1986, a well-educated friend responded to my view that blacks were on average less intelligent by saying, ‘But some of the blacks working in my office are extremely intelligent!’. But of course I wasn’t saying that no blacks are smart but only that fewer were, indicating how people can act as if they don’t understand the concept of averages.
As applied to individuals this creates presumptions: if I had to guess who was smarter, this random white or this random black, it would be rational to pick the white; but in any given case I could well be wrong. Most people understand this , but when it comes to ‘sensitive’ issues common sense flies out the window.
Furthermore, whatever the average difference, there must be an overlap, i.e., blacks who are more intelligent than many (or even most) whites. That this (random) white is probably more intelligent than this (random) black is one thing; but that he must be is something for which I cannot imagine any possible grounds.
Philosopher Talks Sense, Journalist Nonsense I came across this from a well-known British philosopher, Anthony Flew:
... the fact that I belong to some set which is on average less this or more that than another set, to which you belong, carries no implication that I, as an individual, am less this or more that than you. … [As for] the correspondent who told [Arthur] Jensen that “If the group is to be labelled intellectually inferior, I, as a member of that group, am also inevitably and automatically labelled”, his argument was … fallacious. [The reference is from Arthur Jensen’s Genetics and Education (1972, p.15). The entire quote is from “‘Education against Racism’: three comments”, by Anthony Flew, Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 21, no. 1, 1987, p.136.] In The Race Gallery (1996), Marek Kohn, discussing The Bell Curve, writes (p.115):
... what counts [Herrnstein and Murray say] is an individual’s capabilities, and an individual of any ethnic group may have a high IQ. Many critics did not feel that this was an adequate solution to the racial intelligence question. ‘What’s the difference between thinking that the black male next to me is dumb and thinking there’s a 25 per cent chance that he’s dumb?’ [meaning that there’s a 75% chance that he’s not dumb] asked Alan Wolfe, one of twenty commentators given space in The New Republic after Andrew Sullivan’s decision to publish a piece by Herrnstein and Murray caused almost his entire editorial staff to revolt.
While I might not expect an uneducated African adolescent to understand probability (which is what this amounts to), I certainly would of someone writing in The New Republic. If this man Wolfe is really such an imbecile that he cannot understand this simple statement of probability, then he should look for a new line of work, because he would truly be a disgrace to his profession – indeed, to almost any profession.
Gedaliah Braun
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