At the end of my essay What good

is IQ?, I suggested that taking IQ seriously might (among other

things) be an important step towards banishing racism. The behavioral

differences between two people who are far apart on the IQ scale are

far more significant than any we can associate with racial origin.

Stupidity isn’t a handicap only when solving logic problems; people

with low IQs tend to have poor impulse control because they’re not

good at thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions.

Somebody left a comment that, if what I was reporting about group

differences in average IQ is correct, the resulting behavior would be

indistinguishable from racism. In particular, American blacks (with

an average IQ of 85) would find themselves getting the shitty end of

the stick again, this time with allegedly scientific justification.

This is an ethically troubling point. It’s the main reason most

people who know the relevant statistical facts about IQ distribution

are either in elaborate denial or refusing to talk about what they know.

But is this concern really merited, or is it a form of tendermindedness

that does more harm than good?

Let’s start with a strict and careful definition: A racist is a

person who makes unjustified assumptions about the behavior or

character of individuals based on beliefs about group racial

differences.

I think racism, in this sense, is an unequivocally bad thing. I

think most decent human beings would agree with me. But if we’re

going to define racism as a bad thing, then it has to be a behavior

based on unjustified assumptions, because otherwise there

could be times when the fear of an accusation of racism could prevent

people from seeking or speaking the truth.

There are looser definitions abroad. Some people think it is

racist merely to believe there are significant differences

between racial groups. But that is an abuse of the term, because it

means that believing the objective truth, without any intent to use it

to prejudge individuals, can make you a racist.

It is, for example, a fact that black athletes tend to perform

better in hot weather, white ones in cool weather, and oriental asians

in cold weather. There is nothing mysterious about this; it has to do

with surface-area-to-volume ratios in the population’s typical

build. Tall, long-limbed people shed heat more rapidly than stocky and

short-limbed people. That’s an advantage in Africa, less of one in the

Caucasian homelands of Europe and Central Asia, and a disadvantage in

the north Asian homeland of oriental asians.

And that’s right, white men can’t jump; limb length matters there,

too. But whites can swim better than blacks, on average,

because their bones are less dense. I don’t have hard facts on

how asians fit that picture, but if you are making the same guess I am

(at the other extreme from blacks, that is better swimmers and worse

jumpers than white people) I would bet money we’re both correct. That

would be consistent with the pattern of many other observed racial

differences.

Sportswriter and ethicist Jon Entine has investigated the

statistics of racial differences in sports extensively. Blacks,

especially blacks of West African ancestry, dominate track-and-field

athletics thanks apparently to their more efficient lung structure and

abundance of fast-twitch muscle fiber. Whites, with proportionally

shorter legs and more powerful upper bodies, still rule in wrestling

and weightlifting. The bell curves overlap, but the means — and

the best performances at the high end of the curve — differ.

Even within these groups, there are racially-correlated

subdivisions. Within the runners, your top sprinters are likelier to

be black than your top long-distance runners. Blacks have more of an

advantage in burst exertion than they do in endurance. I don’t have

hard recent data on this as I do for the other factual claims I’m

making here, but it is my impression that whites cling to a thin lead

in sports that are long-haul endurance trials — marathons,

bicycle racing, triathlons, and the like.

It is not ‘racism’ to notice these things. Or, to put

it more precisely, if we define ‘racism’ to include

noticing these things, we broaden the word until we cannot justifiably

condemn ‘racism’ any more, because too much

‘racism’ is simply recognition of empirically verifiable

truths. It’s all there in the numbers.

Knowing about these racial-average differences in athletic

performance would not justify anyone in keeping a tall, long-limbed

white individual off the track team, or a stocky black person with

excellent upper-body strength off the wrestling team. But they do

make nonsense of the notion that every team should have a racial

composition mirroring the general population. If you care about

performance, your track team is going to be mostly black and your

wrestling team mostly white.

In fact, trying to achieve ‘equal‘ distribution is a

recipe for making disgruntled underperforming white runners and

basketball players, and digruntled underperforming black wrestlers and

swimmers. It’s no service to either group, you get neither efficiency

nor happiness out of that attempt.

Most people can follow the argument this far, but are frightened of

what happens when we apply the same kind of dispassionate analysis to

racial differences in various mental abilities. But the exact same

logic applies. Observing that blacks have an average IQ a standard

deviation below the average for whites is not in itself racist.

Jumping from that observation of group differences to denying an

individual black person a job because you think it means all black

people are stupid would be racist.

Let’s pick neurosurgery as an example. Here is a profession where

IQ matters in an obvious and powerful way. If you’re screening people

for a job as a neurosurgeon, it would nevertheless be wrong to use the

standard-deviation difference in average IQ as a reason to exclude an

individual black candidate, or black candidates as a class. This

would not be justified by the facts; it would be stupid and

immoral. Excluding the black neurosurgeon-candidate who is

sufficiently bright would be a disservice to a society that needs all

the brains and talent it can get in jobs like that, regardless of skin

color.

On the other hand, anyone who expects the racial composition of the

entire population of neurosurgeons to be ‘balanced’ in

terms of the population at large is living in a delusion. The most

efficient and fair outcome would be for that population to be balanced

in terms of the distribution of IQ — at each level of IQ the

racial mix mirrors the frequency of that IQ

level within different groups. Since that minimum IQ for

competency in neurosurgery is closer to the population means for

whites and asians than the mean for blacks, we can expect the

fair-outcome population of neurosurgeons to be predominantly white and

asian.

If you try to social-engineer a different outcome, you’ll simply

create a cohort of black neurosurgeons who aren’t really bright enough

for their jobs. This, too, would be a disservice to society (not to

mention the individual patients they might harm, and the competent

black neurosurgeons that would be discredited by association). It’s

an error far more serious than trying to social-engineer too many

black wrestlers or swimmers into existence. And yet, in pursuit of a

so-called equality, we make this sort of error over and over again,

injuring all involved and creating resentments for racists to feed

on.