Ehrlich, P.R., & Feldman S. S. (1969). The Race Bomb: Skin Color, Prejudice and Intelligence. New York: The New York Times Book Company.

Is There a Racial Difference in Intelligence?

Starting with birth, most Americans are consistently measured and their abilities consistently assessed. While no clear definition of intelligence has been adopted universally, in general, definitions stress either an ability to adapt to environment, the capacity to learn, or the ability to think abstractly. Like the word “love,” intelligence remains a term we all have a feel for but cannot quite pin down. Today, this undefined ability has become one of the most controversial topics in psychology. Psychological researchers have resisted racism by denying the existence of innate differences between races, such as intelligence. Many argue that this debate has dire consequences for both the scientific and psychological fields and needs to be based on objective empirical evidence ve

In The Race Bomb: Skin Color, Prejudice and Intelligence by Ehrlich and Feldman, they state that they believe Blacks may be caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy – by us convincing black children, their parents and their teachers that they are innately, immutably inferior. Maybe society has “programmed” Blacks to perform in the way that they do? Additionally, these researchers stated that at least some of the differences in intelligence that exist between urban and rural children or Blacks and Whites are due not to genuine differences in ability, but in their abilities to profit from their environments. Many different empirical studies on this issue, while come together on their end result, have correlation and causation statistics which vary quite largely. Additional findings suggest that cultural values influence the salience of objects in the environment, and therefore tests are never assessing underlying intelligence per se, for performance is always influenced by the content of the item. While this may not be empirical evidence which has been statistically recorded, formulated and hypothesized, I do feel that this argument does present an alternative reason for the known difference in IQ scores between races.

I do feel that Cernovsky’s article lacked a clear style as well as evidence and reasoning. He seemed to contest Rushton’s composition the entire time and never really appeared to present any evidence of his own. There were hardly any statistics backing his claims, making his argument, in my eyes, much weaker than Rushton’s. In addition, since his article was mostly rebuttal to Rushton’s, Cernovsky lacked style and organization within his own. This also cheapened the credentials of both him and his argument, to me. Although, in Cernovsky’s defense, I do praise him for his realization that much more evidence is needed and that nit-picking of facts to prove one’s point is highly unethical.

In accordance with this “phenotypic” factor, transracial adoption studies provide evidence against the heritability of racial differences in IQ. For example, in the well known Minnesota Adoption Study, by age 17, adopted children with two White biological parents had an average IQ of 106, adopted children with one White and one Black biological parent had an average IQ of 99 and adopted children with two Black biological parents had an average IQ of 89 (Rushton, 1997). Here, environment obviously played a grand role in these children’s IQ’s. To put it in a nutshell, the notion that group differences in average IQ are due to differences in genes for intelligence is hard to prove by empirical evidence. In my opinion, the emphasis on heritability in the race-IQ debate is purely a red herring promoted by those who do not understand the proper use of the empirical data and statistics.

From reading the two articles above I could not yet take a stand on this issue. I felt that both authors were very bias, highly emotional and that the empirical evidence presented seemed to be manipulated on both ends. In order to make a final ruling on my response to the question originally posed, is there a racial difference in intelligence, I decided to do some further research. These outside sources seemed to put a lot of the previous statements into perspective and give a clearer all-around presentation of the material. These readings included: The Race Bomb: Skin Color, Prejudice and Intelligence by Ehrlich & Feldman (1969), The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence and the Future of America by Fraser (1995), The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication,

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