His new study promises another battle over race and IQ
Which is the smartest race on earth? Many nominate the Jews, whose intellectual achievements are out of proportion to their small numbers. C.P. Snow thinks the Japanese may be even brighter. Such musings are best muttered at late night bull sessions. In public, ranking races by intelligence is apt to smack of simple racism.
A decade ago, Arthur Jensen discovered that fact the hard way. Jensen, then a little-known professor of educational psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, created a furor and became a target of abuse by publishing an article in the Harvard Educational Review. Its claim: based on IQ tests, whites may be naturally smarter than blacks. Now, battered but unbowed, Jensen, 56, is returning to the fray. In a book to be published in December, he concludes that the IQ tests showing blacks scoring lower than whites are fair, accurate and not—as critics suppose—skewed by culture.
Jensen's original argument was based on a disquieting set of facts: during two generations of IQ testing, blacks have consistently scored 15 points lower than whites, and no one has yet designed a reputable test on which blacks do as well as whites.* He estimated that a quarter of the IQ gap was due to environmental and cultural differences, the rest to genetics. Liberal academics and blacks denounced Jensen as a racist. Margaret Mead and others staged an unsuccessful fight to strip the professor of his status as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In the uproar over the Jensenist heresy, one black psychologist angrily called IQ testing "a multimillion-dollar supermarket of oppression," and the National Education Association urged a moratorium on all IQ tests of the young.
This time Jensen is armed with a massive technical analysis that he considers the last word on racial testing. Titled Bias in Mental Testing (The Free Press), the book is not concerned with genetics or the causes of the black-white IQ gap, but only with the merits and validity of the actual tests.
Among Jensen's conclusions:
> The argument that whites do better than blacks because they have larger vocabularies is wrong. In fact, blacks do slightly better on verbal tests than on nonverbal ones.
> IQ tests, both verbal and nonverbal, are not expressions of "white culture" that penalize blacks. Surprisingly, blacks do better on "culture-loaded" tests than on "culture-fair" tests that are carefully constructed to root out references more familiar to middle-class whites than to blacks.
> The idea that culture-fair tests framed by whites will inevitably favor whites is also wrong. In a Japanese language version of the U.S.-conceived Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Japanese youngsters outscored American whites by an average of six points.
> The major tests used by schools, employers and the armed forces are very accurate in predicting future success or failure for native-born English-speaking Americans.
> When white and black children of equal socioeconomic status are tested, whites score an average of twelve IQ points higher than blacks.