In this essay, written in 1995, I recounted the development up to that time of my ideas on the vitally important subject of race and intelligence. I hope the document will be read in the exploratory spirit in which I wrote it. The worst thing about the present racial situation is the silencing of needed discussion, and, even if my ideas are wrong or overstated on some points, one must start somewhere.
With the publication of The Bell Curve, we see the fascinating phenomenon of mainstream journalists and intellectuals wrestling, most of them for the first time, with the uncomfortable facts about race differences in intelligence. While this is an historic event, it can also seem rather disappointing. Apart from the writers who demonize Murray and Herrnstein, which was to be expected, even those more thoughtful liberals and conservatives who (grudgingly) admit the subject of race and intelligence into discourse hedge it around with so many qualifications as to make it almost meaningless. Thus William Buckley acknowledged the reality of the racial IQ difference, but then quoted Murray and Herrnstein to the effect that it’s not important. Scott McConnell in the New York Post said that IQ can be changed. Jacob Weisberg of New York magazine, a true liberal diehard, threw even more fences and evasions and escape hatches around the subject. Unfortunately, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein themselves had already set the stage for this intellectually unserious treatment of their work by downplaying the idea of race differences even as they promoted it. Murray, in his many appearances on television, has been appallingly evasive about the true content and purport of his ideas.
As disappointing as this hedging is, we need to recognize that it is a natural and predictable stage in an unfolding of thought that will take some time to reach clarity. It does not happen all at once, but necessarily goes through several stages. This is because the question of race and intelligence does not consist, as people seem to imagine, of just one idea, it consists of a constellation of ideas, which must be grasped one at a time until the larger scene comes into view. To illustrate this, I would like to tell the story of the involvement of one non-specialist—namely myself—with these ideas. The experience as I’ve lived through it can be compared to looking at the world through slightly out-of-focus lenses, then slowly sharpening the focus until what was hazy becomes clear. Or it is like something in the background of one’s field of vision slowly moving into the foreground.
In this process, rationalizations and evasions slip away, sometimes gradually, sometimes through startling insights that revolutionize one’s whole way of thinking. In telling about my own experience of these ideas as they came to me, one by one, I can perhaps give the reader a more comprehensive, if non-systematic, approach to understanding this subject.
In the mid-1980s, New York magazine had a cover story on the growing tensions between blacks and Jews. The article gave figures on black SAT scores that were absolutely stunning; for example, in the entire U.S. only about one hundred blacks in any given year scored over 700 in the verbal SATs. What this meant to me was that the number of blacks at the top level of academic abilities was virtually non-existent. So it was no longer a surprise that there were so few blacks in the intellectual professions.
At the time, however, I did not draw any deeper conclusions from this with regard to black intelligence . The data did not suggest to me that differences in SAT scores related to something I would call "intelligence" or that such differences were permanent, but only that, as blacks were at this point, it was unrealistic to expect proportional equality in all professions, and in particular there was this shocking absence of blacks at the higher levels of verbal and logical ability.
In 1990 I met Michael Levin when he hosted a National Association of Scholars meeting at his apartment in Manhattan, around the time that he was first being attacked for his statements on black intelligence. I acquired a copy of Professor Levin’s controversial article in the Australian quarterly Proceedings which contained the sentence, "The average black is significantly less intelligent than the average white." After reading it and also hearing him interviewed on a radio program, I wrote a letter to Levin in which, perhaps contradictorily, I expressed both admiration for his courage and concern that he was being too blunt; specifically, I suggested that instead of saying "blacks on average are less intelligent" he might say "blacks on average are less capable in the intellectual skills measured in I.Q. tests"—wording, I argued, that would be more precise and less demeaning to blacks.
The insights that came to me on this personal journey of discovery accumulated through several distinct stages.
First I learned that blacks on average score much less well on achievement tests, which explained why there were so few blacks in intellectual professions, but I didn’t associate these facts with a black deficit in "intelligence" as such.
Then that pioneer Michael Levin came along and tactlessly used the forbidden word "intelligence" to describe the quality in which blacks differ from whites. I was disturbed by this, wishing he would speak of a "difference in test-taking ability" rather than of a difference in intelligence. Yet at the same time I seemed to recognize that intelligence was, in fact, the issue at hand.
Then I came to understand that the quality measured by intelligence tests is something real, as proved by the fact that the results of IQ tests performed in childhood correlate highly with achievement in later life.
At this point, however, I still accepted the conventional view that group deficits in intelligence, even if real, were to a large degree determined by inferior cultural circumstances, and therefore could be eliminated by improvements in behavioral standards, socio-economic status, home environment, and so on. My inchoate belief in environmentalism was decisively refuted by the Scarr-Weinberg study showing that black children raised from infancy by white middle-class parents still were about 15 IQ points behind whites. This proved that IQ was determined by heredity, not culture.
But even if IQ itself was not cultural but genetic, there was the objection that the IQ tests themselves were culturally biased. This was eliminated by the discovery that blacks did worse in questions involving pure cognitive ability than in questions using white cultural references.
Then there was the growing awareness of the markedly different styles of thought between the races, including blacks’ much greater suggestibility and reliance on rhetoric and emotional manipulation; their relative lack of ability to think in objective, cause-and-effect terms, their noticeably lesser orientation toward objective things and ideas outside the self; and their demonstrably lesser orientation toward the common political good and a moral and stable social order. There was, finally, the pronounced orientation of many blacks toward paranoid conspiracy theories, their tendency to see every issue in terms of race and to blame all their problems on whites.
Finally, drawing all these thoughts together into a new paradigm, there was the discovery of the "optical illusion" of racial sameness. This experience convinced me that the intellectual differences between blacks and whites are both substantive and qualitative—in short, that there are intrinsic racial differences in civilizational abilities.