Word: white
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...current issue of the Harvard Educational Review. But Jensen, 45, an educational psychologist at the University of California in Berkeley, chose to build on such postulates some less plausible ones of his own. He argues that in some ways the American black is intellectually inferior to the American white. And he suggests that the explanation lies not so much in the Negro's deprived environment as in his genes...
...relies heavily on the so-called intelligence test. He defines intelligence, somewhat circularly, as "what intelligence tests measure." In education, he says, what they measure is the subject's adaptability to a system that stresses cognition-the ability to reason-and that is designed for normal, middle-class white children. On this contrived scale, the American black typically registers below the American white-on the average, about 15 IQ points. This information is not very new. Moreover, its insight into the relative intelligence of black and white is inconclusive and limited, as Jensen himself admits. Jensen also allows...
...geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, in a response to the Jensen article commissioned by Harvard's Review. "But this is not to say that the magnitude and direction of genetic racial differences are predictable." In American society, he adds, the environmental difference between being black and being white could of itself account...
This possibility appears to gain support from a well-known study by Geneticists Irving I. Gottesman and James Shields, which was not cited by Jensen, of 38 pairs of identical white twins. Separated in infancy, these twins were reared in different environments. Gottesman and Shields found that, since the twins were presumed to be genetic equals, the environmental factor alone must have accounted for a spread of 14 IQ points-almost the same gap that separates black and white...
Until instruments more precise than the IQ test are developed, any attempt to rank the intelligence of black and white is meaningless-and is bound to be mischievous in the light of its political implications. Too little is known of the genes to justify positive statements about their contribution to the intelligence of mankind at large, much less to any division of mankind. The suspicion that there are genetically determined differences at birth, and that these may contribute to the enormous diversity of the human intellect, is at least as old as Plato. But, as Geneticist Lederberg observes, "it remains...