Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Actually, It's 'E' Before 'I'
"If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women. If much depends...on the early education of youth and the first principles which are instilled take the deepest root, great benefit must arise from literary accomplishments in women." - Abigail Adams
Thanks to my family support network, I never fully internalized the idea that most, if any, of my private-school peers were more intelligent than me. But, I did assume that everyone outside my family did.
That's why I never asked for help in school. I wrongly thought that asking for help amounted to an admission that black people were, in fact, inferior, as was periodically pronounced from the ivory towers of academia and other corners of the race-conscious IQ industry.
Fortunately, I was able to flip that negativity into motivation. But when I read about the remarks made recently by the esteemed biologist James Watson, I winced at the thought of how many black youngsters might continue to internalize the destructive but persistent message that they are inherently less intelligent. And I wonder if they too will turn that negativity into motivation.
Far from the modern conservative utopia of a "color-blind society," Euro-centric racial chauvinism seems to rear its ugly head in the popular press every few years or so - from the eugenics of Arthur Jensen to Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's Bell Curve to Dr. Watson, renowned for his role in describing the double-helix structure of DNA and for representing America on the international Human Genome Project.
Watson told the London Sunday Times he's "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."
He expressed a hope for human equality but added that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true." And here we go again.
But did you hear about the recent work of African-American economist Roland Fryer of Harvard University and University of Chicago economist Steve Leavitt, who co-authored the popular book Freakonomics?
Fryer and Leavitt responded to Watson's scientifically-unfounded claims by pointing to Department of Education research that includes test data of the mental abilities of one-year-olds.
"While you might think it would be impossible to capture anything meaningful at such a young age," Leavitt writes, "it turns out that these measures of one-year-olds' intelligence are somewhat highly correlated with IQ scores at later ages, as well as with parental IQ scores."
They found "no racial differences in mental functioning at age one, although a racial gap begins to emerge over the next few years of life....The observed patterns are broadly consistent with large racial differences in environmental factors that grow in importance as children age."
"We cannot rule out the possibility that intelligence has multiple dimensions and racial differences are present only in those dimensions that emerge later in life."
Their paper was rejected in the second round of reviews for publication in the American Economic Review. But, these findings do seem to dovetail with insights coming from cognitive scientists.
"The sort of learning a child acquires in kindergarten and the early grades is not the true foundation of her education," leading cognitive researcher Dr. Stanley Greenspan notes. "The 'three R's' and all that follows - symbolic and increasingly abstract academic knowledge - cannot be understood by a person who has not grasped the sequence of skills that make learning possible."
Greenspan is talking about the pre-school emotional roots of cognitive development. But, the trend in education, especially under No Child Left Behind, is to focus on external carrots and sticks when its internal emotive experience that primarily shapes the way brains grow and think.
If we were serious about increasing student academic achievement, we would see to it that all women get top-rate pre-natal and post-natal care, especially single-mothers of future students. Instead, legislation that would increase the number of children with access to health care - indispensable for physical and emotional health - gets vetoed in order to appease the private insurance industry.
If we were serious about ed reform, we would put a policy-emphasis on early childhood development, based on what science is telling us about the need for creating learning environments that have nothing to do with the "factory" test-taking model that typifies American public schools.
In the meantime, I've got to build up my three year-old son's EQ (emotional intelligence quotient) to counter the likelihood that his IQ will be questioned someday simply because of his skin color.
Sean Gonsalves is an assistant news editor for the Cape Cod Times and a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at sgonsalves@capecodonline.com
12 Comments so far
Show AllThe most essential item left out of the batteries of tests inflicted on children now and "No Child Left Behind" is love.
The notion of love of learning for its own sake is alien to this administration and the right-wing. The C- minus leader and his flunkies hate and fear critical thought and analysis. They can't imagine that learning can be an adventure, a pleasure, even a high.
The obesity epidemic shows the poor nutrition that affects poor minorities as a result of a diet in high fructose corn syrup and greasy fried fast food. Coupled with a lack of quality education in a crime filled environment no child can develop to their full potential. It's surprising that someone like Watson doesn't realize that DNA points to the African origins of ALL races of humans.
The resurfacing of pseudo-scientific racism and biological determinism results from the failure and self-denial of the liberal prescriptions for progress. The liberal project proposes that all humanity everywhere can be uplifted by capitalism and US-style democracy. Its pretensions are universalistic, fanatical, and totalitarian. What happens when capitalism and 'democracy' do not result in uplift for African-Americans, Latinos, Africans, Latin Americans, etc? Liberal thought holds that cultural and institutional environments and attitudes prevent "underdeveloped" peoples from thriving in a supposedly efficient economic market and just political system. For example, the "underdeveloped" presumably cling to parochialism over national identities, kith and kinship ties over allegiance to the state, patron-client relations over an impersonal and professional bureaucracy, and ascription over acheivement. (See Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's "The Civic Culture.") The upshot is that it's up to them to overcome these environments by changing their attitudes. These are the dominant explanations learned in high school and affirmed in college, the business world, and government policy making. Biological determinism is, therefore, not that much of a stretch from the existing and accepted explanations of "underdevelopment." In fact, racist claims were the dominant paradigm until the mid-20th century. It wasn't until the defeat of Nazism and the emergence of a "development" school of thought that we started talking about "institutions" and "culture" rather than "Negroes, Mongols, and Caucasians". The vocabulary of the development school was politically correct and palatible to emerging white liberal sensitivities against explicitly racist language. For more on this paradign shift, I strongly recommend Arturo Escobar's "Encountering Development" and Frank Furedi's "The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race."
I believe the truth is self-evident.
However, we have been able to discover as we go along that there are so many methods used to preserve social and class status. In fact, I would argue that class status is the real nemesis here. The poor are kept poor by any means necessary, and of whatever heritage.
Inia:
good observation on education. I agree that the structure of the educational system is going further away from the idea that each person on the planet may have some special purpose within them that an education ought, it might be argued, to reveal. Now we have a system that prepares individuals for a life in the system. I had a discussion with a friend of mine this past weekend about this. He argued that he like the focus that young people had, his niece was studying to be a veterinarian.
Focus is all well and good, but I've seen young people focused on that doctor's degree all the way through their college years, only to find at the end that they really didn't have the internal wiring to cut it. And so were obliged to take less lucrative occupations and so be forced perhaps to think less of themselves? Forced to do so by the very system to which they hung their hopes and dreams. What a betrayal.
How Watson manages to retain any credibility at all is beyond me. It's long past time that everyone realized he's just a weird buffoon that hung on the coat tails of Crick. And they both sapped off Rosalind Franklin. He's a weasel who was in the right place at the right time.
Also, I can't imagine Watson pouring over IQ stats (even if they were valid). He obviously "learned" all he knows at cocktail parties, populated with fellow elite racists.
"Watson told the London Sunday Times he's 'inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa' because 'all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.'"
The African continent has been, and continues to be, raped by Western industrialized nations that have no stake in improving the lives of the people there. To the contrary, keeping Africans poor and ignorant has been quite profitable for the 'civilized' white exploiters. Cheap labor, no unions and some natural resources, such as diamonds, to sell. Try installing our social policies without the interference of the WTO, World Bank, IMF and various other modern colonialists. Blacks in South Africa, for example, are doing much better in terms of educational advancement and literacy, than the countries surrounding them since they overthrew their white overlords.
In America, it is decidedly unfair to compare disadvantaged kids to white middle-class kids -- as has been pointed out, lower-class children often eat poor diets that inhibit the proper functioning of the brain (some still don't have breakfast), and middle-class kids have smaller classes, the latest teaching tools, and better teachers.
This is why none of the blatherings of Watson Murray and co. have any validity; they are culled from statistical averages. As Mark Twain once said, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
And perhaps you've heard the joke that shows the paucity of statisical averages: Bill Gates walks into a bar that contains seven middle-class patrons: 'on average' each person in the bar is now worth $10 billion dollars.
As with any scientific sociological study, you must first have a level playing field before making any extrapolations about a particular ethnic group. Such is not the case with Murray and his colleagues, and Watson's ill-informed comment is nothing more than high-falutin'racism.
Another concept I've read about is "stereotyping". If educators lead black kids to expect they fail, they will, even if the educators do not intend to induce this feeling. If black children feel they are being measured in racial terms against white or Asian children they will perform less well. That's as much as I've read, but I plan to learn more.
Watson's book, "The Molecular Biology of the Gene," is a very readable and insightful textbook. He contributed useful research and also helped secure funding for many others to do good research. None of that has much to do with his racial attitudes.
Where he has hurt himself is when he improvises. This is a pretty good lesson for us all, no? Be careful when you're talking out of your ass?
killyt said:
"The resurfacing of pseudo-scientific racism and biological determinism results from the failure and self-denial of the liberal prescriptions for progress. The liberal project proposes that all humanity everywhere can be uplifted by capitalism and US-style democracy. Its pretensions are universalistic, fanatical, and totalitarian."
The liberal of yesteryear is the conservative of today.
Mr. Duncan,
"TMB of the G" has many coauthors, with Watson at the head of the list, a perfect metaphor for this man's entire life. I wonder just how much of it he wrote. Securing funding for others to do good research: more confirmation for my thesis. This man's a born smoozer, and very little else. Perhaps he's a talented administrator; I'll give him that. (On the other hand Crick was a true scientific talent.)
There's a lesson here: A singular event in one's early life (good or bad) can set the pattern for the rest, and this ties in with this article nicely. Too bad Watson hasn't perceived the moral of his own life. He's been very lucky.
I was a program director for a human service agency about 7 years ago. The school system had a single bilingual (spanish/english) program located in the elementary school in the towns poorest district. Parents fought and fought to be able to send their children to that particular school, from any district, because the program was that good.
Then came that years standardized testing. The rules for the test were that it must be given and taken in english. The school with the bilingual program had the worst scores in town and, predictably, funding for the bilingual program was cut. The money was moved to programs designed to.....i don't know....teach test taking?!
After talking with the school principal I started making calls to the dept of ed, school board members, members of the legislature etc. to no avail. My question was simple..."Does it seem to you that if you wanted to measure what a student had actually learned, you'd test them in the language they are most comfortable with?"
Sadly, the most given answer was along the lines of.."But if they are going to live here they need to speak english."
This past year I did some work as a substitute teacher in some of the poorer school districts in another state. If anything, it has gotten worse. A friend in a third state is a teacher and her salary is directly connected to test scores and she is, unfortunately in some ways, in a bilingual district.
Language is just one way in which we affect test scores. Other obvious ways have already been mentioned. In almost every case, housing, nutrition, pre and post natal care, access to health care, it is a class issue. Class is another way to divide and conquer. We've gotten ourselves to a place where in order to stroke our egos we must be better than someone/something else. Thus a.." if I'm a poor white single mother at least I'm not a poor black single mother" mentality develops which goes a long way toward keeping us from figuring out that poor is the common denominator and the issue we should be dealing with at the moment. It keeps us from focusing on the fact that the words poor and child should never appear together in this land of plenty. It puts us in a place where in order to feel good we must demonize others, making sure that some other group doesn't get more crumbs than we get. The true issue is why we are fighting over crumbs in the first place. Until we are able to reject this type of thinking, to work TOGETHER on the common issues, the class war will continue to be won by those who divide us with non sensical blather.
This is not something that can be legistated or enacted or put into law. It has to happen on an individual basis, in the hearts and minds of people and communities. As long as we stand slathering over federal dollars and allowing our government to control education, we will continue to live with a system that is designed to program the poor to attack each other while the rich get on with the business of educating their own offspring to rule the masses.
Warren Buffett acknowledged that it is a class war and noted that his side was winning.......at least he's upfront about it.
I think this shows the danger in having too much confidence in the source. I mean, because Watson is a great scientist who made a major contribution to human culture, people give too much credence to off-the-cuff remarks he made that are, quite frankly, worthless. His own cognitve structures show he has internalized the racial prejudice of human culture, as have we all. He should be wise enough not to blather on like drunk idiot at a bar.
If black children score lower on an IQ test, it's because of the self-fufilling prophecy of a system that's been rigged to make it come out that way.