Anyone read The Bell Curve? What did you think? What your thoughts on blacks not being as smart as other races

Question

Has anyone on this board read the bell curve? What did you think?

I am not racist for many reasons, one being that I love all people especially my super cute little cousin who is black and has the cutest little fro. As a matter of fact I even worked in a hair store selling weave. I know all about that stuff. I am a hair dresser now.

But one day a very close friend of mine in cosmo school just did something that made me say "you know, thats not normal. she is a really nice and cool person how could she be so dumb as to blurt out something like this." It was not just one time. It was several things that my black classmates and people from the store did that made me think that statistically blacks must not be as smart as other races. So I went to the library did a search and low and behold there was the bell curve.

Answer 1

I would check out the book, The Bell Curve Debate - it is a series of essays destroying the bad science that is contained in the book, The Bell Curve. The studies that the Bell Curve authors founded most of their argument on were discredited in the 1960s. The authors wrote another book - about Welfare - was even worse - a classic case of the misapplication of statistics - and yet Ronald Reagan used it to set public policy.

The way that you phrased your question makes me think that you have a hidden agenda of some kind. Sadly, most people's opinion of other races is based on some kind of personal experience, and your experience led you to your own erroneous conclusions. In my life, I have known all kinds of black people (and white people, etc etc). My personal experience does not lead me to believe that race and intelligence are correlated in any sort of significant way. I have had black classmates in honors classes and honors colleges, black managers, I have worked for black-owned businesses. I have also lived on the streets, and met street people of all races.  So, I have met people from all walks of life.

I used to think that racism arises from power differentials - and there may be a case for that. But, as I grow older, I think that racism spawns from our ignorance of each other, stranger-ness of each other. We tend to attribute all kinds of behavior and attributes, erroneously, to race. I actually specialized in the study of race relations as a sociologist, and I don't know if my studies served me well socially - I was always hyperconscious of race, and I was always reminding my black friends that they were black.

And the pattern is hard to break - I had to know a guy for 4 years before I stopped seeing him as black. And my life has been better since we've become human toward each other again.

Answer 2

you could argue for and against forever most likely.

      The problem is it is impossible to accurately research the difference between the races.

     You will have crazy racist's using any shred of information to prove there point and you would also have equally crazy liberal PC police use every shred of evidence + the authors past life to disprove the research(and if that fails death threats). Leaving scientists who could be unbiased too scared to look into those kinds of matters.

Answer 3

There is a lot of misunderstanding about IQ in that it is not intelligence, but it is a measurement which has correlation with other things that imply intelligence.  The results that the Bell Curve suggested were statistically significant, but the validity of what they were claiming the results showed was really meant to sell a book. For example, as I recall, they didn't attempt to separate social economics of the families that raised the individuals from the results, but rather the SES of the individuals themselves. This would introduce a confounding variable in that, I believe we can all agree, if you randomly choose a black individual from the population of the US, they are less likely to be a member of a wealthy family than a randomly chosen white.  As far as your observations of races on campus, even if the book was correct, it is unlikely you would notice that there was 2% less of your black peers that were smarter than you compared to equivalent white peers. Consider too when you are looking around at racial groups, I doubt you feel that there are only 4% more asians out of your league as well. This is really what they are suggesting rather than that all people of one race are smarter or less-so than another.

Even if we could make a definition for "race" (exactly where are you going to draw the lines?), the differences in biological capacities for intelligence haven't been shown without serious problems with the statistical assumptions used for the studies.

Peace and Best Regards All!