Note: Co-Blogger recommends reading Saletan’s article and Metcalf’s article

I was reading Slate today on one of my rare and treasured work breaks, and I saw this…

Dissecting the IQ Debate:

By Stephen Metcalf

“In response to James Watson's remarks concerning the intelligence of blacks, Slate's William Saletan wrote a series of pieces on race, IQ, and genetics.”

Did he?  Let’s go look.  Sometimes I enjoy Lord Saletan’s (that’s what they call him over on another blog I like to read) work.  (They also call the vice president “Darth Cheney,” but that’s a whole nother blog post, and I’m trying to stay on topic here.) Yep, he sure did though….let’s peruse it.

“Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours." "Racist, vicious and unsupported by science," said the Federation of American Scientists. "Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence," declared the U.S. government's supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied "that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on."

I wish these assurances were true. They aren't. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians.”

Uh-oh.  Suspicious, I am.  This is a very common educated-racist comment.  If you’re lucky, that’s the last mention of Asians in the piece, the rest being devoted to black-bashing.  If you’re not lucky, a rant on why Asians are apparently smarter than white people ensues, usually boiling down the reasons for Asian scholastic success to the (genetically-based?  Sure, why not) low incidence of Asians on welfare and how they (anecdotally) use psychological torture on their kids during their school years to induce them to outperform anybody else (and somehow this gets linked to their devotion to Living the American Dream, so really, in the end, what it means is, Asians are just way better at being faux white). 

But I am actually, really, open-minded.  After all, that’s only the first paragraph.  Maybe it ain’t going where I think it is.  So I will read on.

“If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that way.”

More tired and weary, to be honest.  I am not black, but I am a woman, and much the same arguments are made substituting “male” for “white” and “female” for “black.”  Being that I personally am, depending on which of my standardized test results you are interested in, 99% smarter than the rest of the world’s population, 99.9% smarter or even 99.99% smarter, I wonder what the mad pursuit of the proof of these types of conjectures is motivated by.  I really don’t want to believe it’s racism, or sexism, or anything so massively irrational.  But the people doing it do keep trying their best to convince me it is. 

“Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution.”

Erk.  How totally irrelevant, unless the Christians in question are going through this struggle because these theories conflict with their personal witnessing of the Creation events, as the people going through this struggle about the racial intelligence issue find that these arguments conflict with their personal witnessing of really smart black people. 

Stephen Metcalfe does a good job in pointing out the really good questions that should be asked and I won’t repeat them here; read his article.  I admit to being really thrown by L. Saletan’s final entry into his series—man, you find out that the co-author of one of your lynchpin studies is a famous racist and “I guess I shoulda Wiki’d him, huh?” is the only thing you have to say..? 

Back to being a woman, which I can speak about with a lot more authority than being black.  We (women) get this genetically-dumber stuff a lot.  I used to visit an MRA website…if you don’t know what they are, in a nutshell, they are what everyone imagines a radical feminist must be, just in the opposite gender direction.  I will totally go into detail about them but darn it, I am staying on topic here if it kills me.  Which it may.  But as I was saying, I used to visit this discussion forum, and every time a new study or survey or whatever came out that supported that the boyz is smarter than the gurlz, they went hog-wild over it.  Whenever one came out supporting the opposite, they sneered at it and dismissed it as yet another manifestation of the Power Women Wield in the Media/Government/Academia.  (Yes, they are being totally irrational using both arguments at once.)  But to be fair, feminist groups tend to do the same thing, though usually more mildly—overall they are not interested in proving women to be SUPERIOR, only EQUAL (which cannot be said in reverse about MRAs overall). 

My problem with the whole thing is, as I said, not personal—regardless of what type of standardized intelligence test you throw at me, I will pass it with a 99%, 99.9% or 99.99% probability of doing so better than you.  Whether or not you or anybody else thinks that that’s (1) because there are always genetic gender freaks and I am obviously one of them or (2) for reasons totally unconnected to my gender or (3) because of a unique set of personal life circumstances I was better equipped to throw off the chains of patriarchy to show what women can really do if only given a chance is irrelevant to the fact that that’s what I can do, period.  My problem is the motives of those performing this kind of research and writing these kinds of articles.  I am all about the pursuit of knowledge…but what good do they really want to do with it?  Why do they care so much?  What dreams do they think they can make possible with this knowledge?  With lots of research the answer to that last question is obvious.  With MOST research it is.  But with this particular flavor, particular brand of research…what? 

L. Saletan says:

“Why write about this topic? Why hurt people's feelings? Why gratify bigots?

Because truth matters. Because the truth isn't as bad as our ignorant, half-formed fears and suspicions about it. And because you can't solve a problem till you understand it.

Two days ago, I said we could fight the evidence of racial differences in IQ, or we could accept it. Yesterday, I outlined the difficulty of fighting it. What happens if we accept it? Can we still believe in equality?”

There’s so much wrong with this set of statements I hardly know where to begin.  “Because truth matters.”  It sure does.  But it isn’t an answer to any specific question.  It’s a lot like answering the question “Why is the sky blue?” with “because your brain perceives it to be blue.”  Well, thank you, Captain Obvious!  But could you be a little more specific…?

I also get very wary when folks start talking about hurting people’s feelings.  This is basically code for “politically correct” and objecting to it is the individualistic hero’s task to Defy the Collective Hurt Feelings and Quest for the Truth!   Minimalization and ridicule of good and moral things doesn’t make them any less good and moral and doing it doesn’t make you any more clever or sophisticated.  I genuinely don’t get why so many people think it does.  I quite happily go my own way and believe precisely whatever I damn well deduce as being the most accurate description of what is and what could be and am very, very frequently at odds with the prevailing conventional morality.  Yet I somehow manage to also not only refrain from “hurting people’s feelings,” I manage to do all this secure in the knowledge that my beliefs will cause harm to practically nobody, in their feelings or anywhere else. 

Did he seriously ask if we could still believe in equality if we found out that some people are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than others?  Did I miss the stripping of citizenship and legal rights from all Americans who have been diagnosed with Downs syndrome, for instance?  When did our entire system of equality become contingent on a citizen’s genetics or raw intelligence?  If George W. Bush can become President of the United States, how can anybody ever again argue with a straight face that intelligence is a requirement for equality, much less the most elevated position anybody in our society can have..? 

L. Saletan goes on to list eleven reasons why we might want to pursue this research.  Some of them are reasonable, if not terribly significant, and the rest are so trivial as to be completely insignificant.  And I’m afraid the researchers, and the article writers, just managed to strike another blow to my determination to believe they are not motivated by prejudice.