{"id":142,"date":"2003-12-22T19:36:10","date_gmt":"2003-12-23T00:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=142"},"modified":"2013-07-09T13:17:37","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T17:17:37","slug":"racism-and-group-differences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=142","title":{"rendered":"Racism and group differences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of my essay <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=129\">What good<br \/>\nis IQ?<\/a>, I suggested that taking IQ seriously might (among other<br \/>\nthings) be an important step towards banishing racism.  The behavioral<br \/>\ndifferences between two people who are far apart on the IQ scale are<br \/>\nfar more significant than any we can associate with racial origin.<br \/>\nStupidity isn&#8217;t a handicap only when solving logic problems; people<br \/>\nwith low IQs tend to have poor impulse control because they&#8217;re not<br \/>\ngood at thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions.<\/p>\n<p>Somebody left a comment that, if what I was reporting about group<br \/>\ndifferences in average IQ is correct, the resulting behavior would be<br \/>\nindistinguishable from racism.  In particular, American blacks (with<br \/>\nan average IQ of 85) would find themselves getting the shitty end of<br \/>\nthe stick again, this time with allegedly scientific justification.<\/p>\n<p>This is an ethically troubling point.  It&#8217;s the main reason most<br \/>\npeople who know the relevant statistical facts about IQ distribution<br \/>\nare either in elaborate denial or refusing to talk about what they know.<br \/>\nBut is this concern really merited, or is it a form of tendermindedness<br \/>\nthat does more harm than good?<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s start with a strict and careful definition: <em>A racist is a<br \/>\nperson who makes unjustified assumptions about the behavior or<br \/>\ncharacter of individuals based on beliefs about group racial<br \/>\ndifferences.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I think racism, in this sense, is an unequivocally bad thing.  I<br \/>\nthink most decent human beings would agree with me.  But if we&#8217;re<br \/>\ngoing to define racism as a bad thing, then it has to be a behavior<br \/>\nbased on <em>unjustified<\/em> assumptions, because otherwise there<br \/>\ncould be times when the fear of an accusation of racism could prevent<br \/>\npeople from seeking or speaking the truth.<\/p>\n<p>There are looser definitions abroad.  Some people think it is<br \/>\nracist merely to believe there <em>are<\/em> significant differences<br \/>\nbetween racial groups.  But that is an abuse of the term, because it<br \/>\nmeans that believing the objective truth, without any intent to use it<br \/>\nto prejudge individuals, can make you a racist.<\/p>\n<p>It is, for example, a fact that black athletes tend to perform<br \/>\nbetter in hot weather, white ones in cool weather, and oriental asians<br \/>\nin cold weather.  There is nothing mysterious about this; it has to do<br \/>\nwith surface-area-to-volume ratios in the population&#8217;s typical<br \/>\nbuild. Tall, long-limbed people shed heat more rapidly than stocky and<br \/>\nshort-limbed people. That&#8217;s an advantage in Africa, less of one in the<br \/>\nCaucasian homelands of Europe and Central Asia, and a disadvantage in<br \/>\nthe north Asian homeland of oriental asians.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s right, white men can&#8217;t jump; limb length matters there,<br \/>\ntoo.  But whites can <em>swim<\/em> better than blacks, on average,<br \/>\nbecause their bones are less dense. I don&#8217;t have hard facts on<br \/>\nhow asians fit that picture, but if you are making the same guess I am<br \/>\n(at the other extreme from blacks, that is better swimmers and worse<br \/>\njumpers than white people) I would bet money we&#8217;re both correct. That<br \/>\nwould be consistent with the pattern of many other observed racial<br \/>\ndifferences.<\/p>\n<p>Sportswriter and ethicist Jon Entine has investigated the<br \/>\nstatistics of racial differences in sports extensively.  Blacks,<br \/>\nespecially blacks of West African ancestry, dominate track-and-field<br \/>\nathletics thanks apparently to their more efficient lung structure and<br \/>\nabundance of fast-twitch muscle fiber.  Whites, with proportionally<br \/>\nshorter legs and more powerful upper bodies, still rule in wrestling<br \/>\nand weightlifting.  The bell curves overlap, but the means &mdash; and<br \/>\nthe best performances at the high end of the curve &mdash; differ.<\/p>\n<p>Even within these groups, there are racially-correlated<br \/>\nsubdivisions. Within the runners, your top sprinters are likelier to<br \/>\nbe black than your top long-distance runners. Blacks have more of an<br \/>\nadvantage in burst exertion than they do in endurance.  I don&#8217;t have<br \/>\nhard recent data on this as I do for the other factual claims I&#8217;m<br \/>\nmaking here, but it is my impression that whites cling to a thin lead<br \/>\nin sports that are long-haul endurance trials &mdash; marathons,<br \/>\nbicycle racing, triathlons, and the like.<\/p>\n<p>It is not &lsquo;racism&rsquo; to notice these things. Or, to put<br \/>\nit more precisely, if we define &lsquo;racism&rsquo; to include<br \/>\nnoticing these things, we broaden the word until we cannot justifiably<br \/>\ncondemn &lsquo;racism&rsquo; any more, because too much<br \/>\n&lsquo;racism&rsquo; is simply recognition of empirically verifiable<br \/>\ntruths. It&#8217;s all there in the numbers.<\/p>\n<p>Knowing about these racial-average differences in athletic<br \/>\nperformance would not justify anyone in keeping a tall, long-limbed<br \/>\nwhite individual off the track team, or a stocky black person with<br \/>\nexcellent upper-body strength off the wrestling team.  But they do<br \/>\nmake nonsense of the notion that every team should have a racial<br \/>\ncomposition mirroring the general population.  If you care about<br \/>\nperformance, your track team is going to be mostly black and your<br \/>\nwrestling team mostly white.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, trying to achieve &lsquo;equal&lsquo; distribution is a<br \/>\nrecipe for making disgruntled underperforming white runners and<br \/>\nbasketball players, and digruntled underperforming black wrestlers and<br \/>\nswimmers.  It&#8217;s no service to either group, you get neither efficiency<br \/>\nnor happiness out of that attempt.<\/p>\n<p>Most people can follow the argument this far, but are frightened of<br \/>\nwhat happens when we apply the same kind of dispassionate analysis to<br \/>\nracial differences in various mental abilities.  But the exact same<br \/>\nlogic applies.  Observing that blacks have an average IQ a standard<br \/>\ndeviation below the average for whites is not in itself racist.<br \/>\nJumping from that observation of group differences to denying an<br \/>\nindividual black person a job because you think it means all black<br \/>\npeople are stupid <em>would<\/em> be racist.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s pick neurosurgery as an example.  Here is a profession where<br \/>\nIQ matters in an obvious and powerful way.  If you&#8217;re screening people<br \/>\nfor a job as a neurosurgeon, it would nevertheless be wrong to use the<br \/>\nstandard-deviation difference in average IQ as a reason to exclude an<br \/>\nindividual black candidate, or black candidates as a class.  This<br \/>\nwould <em>not be justified by the facts<\/em>; it would be stupid and<br \/>\nimmoral.  Excluding the black neurosurgeon-candidate who is<br \/>\nsufficiently bright would be a disservice to a society that needs all<br \/>\nthe brains and talent it can get in jobs like that, regardless of skin<br \/>\ncolor.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, anyone who expects the racial composition of the<br \/>\nentire population of neurosurgeons to be &lsquo;balanced&rsquo; in<br \/>\nterms of the population at large is living in a delusion.  The most<br \/>\nefficient and fair outcome would be for that population to be balanced<br \/>\nin terms of the distribution of IQ &mdash; at each level of IQ the<br \/>\nracial mix mirrors the frequency of <em>that IQ<br \/>\nlevel<\/em> within different groups.  Since that minimum IQ for<br \/>\ncompetency in neurosurgery is closer to the population means for<br \/>\nwhites and asians than the mean for blacks, we can expect the<br \/>\nfair-outcome population of neurosurgeons to be predominantly white and<br \/>\nasian.<\/p>\n<p>If you try to social-engineer a different outcome, you&#8217;ll simply<br \/>\ncreate a cohort of black neurosurgeons who aren&#8217;t really bright enough<br \/>\nfor their jobs.  This, too, would be a disservice to society (not to<br \/>\nmention the individual patients they might harm, and the competent<br \/>\nblack neurosurgeons that would be discredited by association).  It&#8217;s<br \/>\nan error far more serious than trying to social-engineer too many<br \/>\nblack wrestlers or swimmers into existence.  And yet, in pursuit of a<br \/>\nso-called equality, we make this sort of error over and over again,<br \/>\ninjuring all involved and creating resentments for racists to feed<br \/>\non.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of my essay What good is IQ?, I suggested that taking IQ seriously might (among other things) be an important step towards banishing racism. The behavioral differences between two people who are far apart on the IQ scale are far more significant than any we can associate with racial origin. Stupidity isn&#8217;t&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=142\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Racism and group differences<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4993,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions\/4993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}