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Race, IQ, black crime, and facts liberals ignore

by Thomas Sowell (October 8, 2002) extract

Summary: Only by painstakingly going back and recalculating IQs, based on the initial norms, was Professor Flynn able to discover that whole nations had, in effect, had their IQs rising over the decades by about 20 points. Dr. Sowell admits the IQ gap is real and fails to mention it hasn't narrowed.

Quoting Sowell,

...Studies had shown that females predominated among high-IQ blacks. One study of blacks whose IQs were 140 and up found that there were more than five times as many females as males at these levels. This is hard to explain by either heredity or environment...white males and white females have the same average IQs, with slightly more males at both the highest and lowest IQs...

My own research was financed in part by a grant from a foundation that told me to remove any mention of IQ research from the activities listed in my project's application...Many schools and boards of education also did not want it on the record that they had cooperated by supplying data for any such research...A well-known black "social scientist" urged me not to do any such research...As it turned out, the research showed that the average IQ difference between black and white Americans -- 15 points -- was nothing unusual.

In recent years, research by Professor James R. Flynn, an American expatriate living in New Zealand, has shaken up the whole IQ controversy by discovering what has been called "the Flynn effect." (He notes they changed the way IQ tests are done.) Since the black-white difference in IQ is 15 points, this means that an even larger IQ difference has existed between different generations of the same race...In the half century between 1945 and 1995, black Americans' raw test scores rose by the equivalent of 16 IQ points...black Americans' test score results in 1995 would have given them an average IQ just over 100 in 1945...

Ref. http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=1958

So black girls overall have a much higher IQ than black men. If we look at black crime, black men commit many times the crimes of black women. At the same time, over 70% of the out of wedlock black births are to these same black women. One out of 15 black men are in jail, one out of 100 black women are in jail.

Sowell makes a good point, but failed to mention if white IQ scores went up as well. Also note from 1945 to 1995 billions have been poured into the very problem to elevate black IQ scores. And they did change the way the tests were conducted. What if the same money had gone to white children? Is IQ all genetic? I don't believe so, but about 50-50 in my view. IQ isn't everything. So some of this problem can be compensated for if blacks, etc. worked harder, etc. and not play the victim and race card constantly. Note that here in Appalachia whites that engage in the same destructive behavior as inner-city blacks suffer identical economic results. The same welfare programs inflicted on inner-city blacks were tried in white Appalachia with identical failing results. L. Loflin

Crippled by Their Culture: Race and Racism doesn't hold back America's Blacks

by THOMAS SOWELL April 26, 2005 (extract)

For most of the history of this country, differences between the black and the white population--whether in income, IQ, crime rates, or whatever--have been attributed to either race or racism...Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts. As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks...

What then could explain such large disparities in demographic "representation" among these three groups of blacks? Perhaps they have different patterns of behavior and different cultures and values behind their behavior. There have always been large disparities, even within the native black population of the U.S. Those blacks whose ancestors were "free persons of color" in 1850 have fared far better in income, occupation, and family stability than those blacks whose ancestors were freed in the next decade by Abraham Lincoln.

What is not nearly as widely known is that there were also very large disparities within the white population of the pre-Civil War South and the white population of the Northern states. Although Southern whites were only about one-third of the white population of the U.S., an absolute majority of all the illiterate whites in the country were in the South.

The North had four times as many schools as the South, attended by more than four times as many students. Children in Massachusetts spent more than twice as many years in school as children in Virginia. Such disparities obviously produce other disparities. Northern newspapers had more than four times the circulation of Southern newspapers. Only 8% of the patents issued in 1851 went to Southerners. Even though agriculture was the principal economic activity of the antebellum South at the time, the vast majority of the patents for agricultural inventions went to Northerners. Even the cotton gin was invented by a Northerner.

Disparities between Southern whites and Northern whites extended across the board from rates of violence to rates of illegitimacy. American writers from both the antebellum South and the North commented on the great differences between the white people in the two regions. So did famed French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville...Slavery also cannot explain the difference between American blacks and West Indian blacks living in the United States because the ancestors of both were enslaved. When race, racism, and slavery all fail the empirical test, what is left? Culture is left.

The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity...While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations...It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

Nevertheless the process took a long time. As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Again, neither race nor racism can explain that--and neither can slavery.

The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it...The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only "authentic" black culture--and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with...

Ref. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006608 (Extract)