Idang Alibi of Abuja, Nigeria writes on the James Watson affair:
A few days ago, the Nobel Laureate, Dr. James Watson, made a remark that is now generating worldwide uproar, especially among blacks. He said what to me looks like a self-evident truth. He told The Sunday Times of London in an interview that in his humble opinion, black people are less intelligent than the White people...
An intriguing opening. Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?
I do not know what constitutes intelligence. I leave that to our so-called scholars. But I do know that in terms of organising society for the benefit of the people living in it, we blacks have not shown any intelligence in that direction at all. I am so ashamed of this and sometimes feel that I ought to have belonged to another race...
Darn, it's just a lecture on personal and national responsibility. Of course, for African nationals, taking responsibility for their country's problems is the most productive attitude regardless. But it doesn't engage with the controversies that got Watson fired.
Later in the article came this:
As I write this, I do so with great pains in my heart because I know that God has given intelligence in equal measure to all his children irrespective of the colour of their skin.
This intrigued me for two reasons: First, I'm always on the lookout for yet another case of theology making a falsifiable experimental prediction. And second, the prediction follows obviously if God is just, but what does skin colour have to do with it at all?
A great deal has already been said about the Watson affair, and I suspect that in most respects I have little to contribute that has not been said before.
But why is it that the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay, whereas racial genetic differences in intelligence are not? Am I the only one who's every bit as horrified by the proposition that there's any way whatsoever to be screwed before you even start, whether it's genes or lead-based paint or Down's Syndrome? What difference does skin colour make? At all?
This is only half a rhetorical question. Race adds extra controversy to anything; in that sense, it's obvious what difference skin colour makes politically. However, just because this attitude is common, should not cause us to overlook its insanity. Some kind of different psychological processing is taking place around individually-unfair intelligence distributions, and group-unfair intelligence distributions.
So, in defiance of this psychological difference, and in defiance of politics, let me point out that a group injustice has no existence apart from injustice to individuals. It's individuals who have brains to experience suffering. It's individuals who deserve, and often don't get, a fair chance at life. If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
And I don't think there's any serious scholar of intelligence who disputes that God has been definitively shown to be most terribly unfair. Never mind the airtight case that intelligence has a hereditary genetic component among individuals; if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack. What about lead-based paint? Does it not count, because parents theoretically could have prevented it but didn't? In the beginning no one knew that it was damaging. How is it just for such a tiny mistake to have such huge, irrevocable consequences? And regardless, would not a just God damn us for only our own choices? Kids don't choose to live in apartments with lead-based paint.
So much for God being "just", unless you count the people whom God has just screwed over. Maybe that's part of the fuel in the burning controversy - that people do realize, on some level, the implications for religion. They can rationalize away the implications of a child born with no legs, but not a child born with no possibility of ever understanding calculus. But then this doesn't help explain the original observation, which is that people, for some odd reason, think that adding race makes it worse somehow.
And why is my own perspective, apparently, unusual? Perhaps because I also think that intelligence deficits will be fixable given sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech. When truly huge horrors are believed unfixable, the mind's eye tends to just skip over the hideous unfairness - for much the same reason you don't deliberately rest your hand on a hot stoveburner; it hurts.
"I am a woman" - is that a boast? No, it's just a fact.
"I am African American" - is that a boast?
"I am white." - is that a boast? It could be. Why do we perceive it that way?
All three are a difference you might have, rather than a thing you're interested in. They are also all things that can influence you. Gender stereotypes are criticized for numerous reasons, and I don't think they're perfect, but we can't deny that a lot of men and women have a set of differences they associate with gender. For many, it's part of their identity. At times, members of both genders have had issues with excessive pride in their gender such that it became a sort of prejudice against and oppression of the other gender. Yet, when I say "I am a woman." does it sound like a boast? Does any part of your mind want to jump to the conclusion that I am a feminazi or a man hater? Where does this perception of excessive pride come from when people talk about giftedness?
You might argue "It implies you're really good at something" - okay, so does the phrase "I'm a doctor."
If being good at something makes a statement a boast, why is it okay to say "I'm a doctor." as part of an introduction?
That you perceive the example IQ statement as a boast is a sign of bias. How do you know that it is a boast? It isn't objective. It is a subjective sense. You're guessing at the person's motive. If you wouldn't guess the same motive for "I'm a woman." and "I'm a doctor." then why do you guess it for "My IQ is 170."?
Specifically when it comes to speaking about IQ and giftedness, I want to know how we discern the difference between boasting and making a neutral statement of fact about what makes one different? Put another way, here is the problem: Being gifted and/or having a high IQ makes one different. It frequently makes sense to refer to this difference in order to provide a context in which to be correctly understood. Some examples: Gifted people are frequently misdiagnosed with mental disorders. They have numerous traits (like being really intense and sensitive) that make them look a bit crazy -- but they're not necessarily crazy, even though they may have these unusual traits. Gifted people tend to have different interests and are more likely to have certain personality traits. People who are gifted enough sometimes feel like outsiders, or aliens - they feel completely different. Saying "I'm gifted." could be a shortcut way to refer to all of those differences and others and give people an idea of how to interact with them and how to interpret their different behaviors without having to explain every single one of them individually. The same way that people tend to be gentler to women, who tend to identify as sensitive, but yet don't do that to men, because many men interpret it as condescension.
There must be thousands of different ways we interpret the people around us in order to meet in the middle that makes our interactions go far more smoothly... think of all the protocols we follow when we're around children, or people of a different religion. Gifted people are not able to request that people attempt to get along with them more smoothly by simply referring to their set of differences. Imagine if a computer could not specify it's protocol. This wreaks all sorts of havoc. This could be part of why we hear that gifted people feel misunderstood, alienated, and why they're labelled as having "social skills issues" - if OTHER people aren't trying to bridge the gap, and they're not allowed to freely discuss their difference and it's details, it makes it a lot harder for everybody to get along.
It's not easy to say you're gifted in such a way that it does not make people upset. All of the ways that I know of involve some sort of compensation for bias. That is what tells me that people are biased about statements of IQ and giftedness. People frequently assume the person's motive is to boast, as if there's no other reason you would want to mention it.
Can you think of a way that a person can freely state that they're gifted, or have a high IQ, and make it sound neutral, without sugar-coating, without having to hide it, and without using code words to obscure it, or cheating in some other way?
If not, then something is off, isn't it? If we can't think of a way to present it neutrally, or it turns out to be extremely hard, this would be a sign that our cultural perceptions of speaking about high IQ and giftedness contain assumptions, am I right?
It needn't be. For example, if this is said at a gathering at which trans folk are particularly visible, it might be perceived as a boast, since the whole question of who is and isn't a woman is foregrounded and has status associated with it. (Of course, at most gatherings this is not a reading that would occur to anyone, since trans folk are not typically visible.)
Again, it depends. In a gathering where being an African American ... (read more)