Race and IQ. Charles Murray Has a New Book. Are Black People Less Intelligent?

 

Charles Murray's Facing Reality Renews Discussion of Race and IQ
Murray's Statistics Say One Thing, My Teaching Experience Says Something Else

 

I was approaching home. The car radio was tuned to WBGO, a jazz station out of Newark, NJ. Ella Fitzgerald was singing "These Foolish Things." I parked the car. The keys remained in the ignition. I can hear Fitzgerald any time I want on my CDs, but it had been one of those days that abrade the soul. Though I was eager to enter my apartment and put the day's struggles behind me, I sat in the parked car and listened till the end of the song. I felt as if I had never heard Fitzgerald, or anyone else, sing before. I noted her awesome mastery of the form. Sinatra said that Fitzgerald "is the only performer with whom I’ve ever worked who made me nervous … she is the greatest popular singer in the world, barring none." Yes, Fitzgerald commanded every syllable of the lyric, every beat of the music, with the expertise of a surgeon handling a scalpel. At the same time, though, that she was epitomizing flawless technical execution, she was, with all-enveloping human warmth, tenderly caressing an absent lover. She was laying bare her heart, beating, wet, and raw. "These Foolish Things" is not at all a sad song, and it was not because of any sadness that tears welled up in my eyes. At the end of a long day, Ella Fitzgerald, who passed away in 1996, gave me beauty.

 

Listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing here. Next, listen to WAP. Compare the WAP lyrics to the lyrics of "These Foolish Things." Though separated by only 63 years, the two performances could not be more different. Both Ella Fitzgerald and Megan Thee Stallion are African American women, and they both represent the most popular art forms of their eras. Other than that, they have absolutely nothing significant in common.

 

There is no such thing as an essential black identity, any more than there is such at thing as an essential white or Asian or other identity. What there is, is universal human nature, expressing itself through diverse human cultures. In 1957, American song lyrics expressed style, sophistication, and elegance. In 2020, a black woman boasts that she produces large amounts of vaginal lubrication. An Ella Fitzgerald singing today would receive scant attention. A Megan Thee Stallion would have been sidelined in 1957.

 

Charles Murray has come out with a new book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. In this book, Murray asks Americans to confront two controversial realities. African Americans, as a group, score at the bottom of academic achievement tests. This is known as the "achievement gap." Asians, as a group, score at the top, whites second, Hispanics third. Murray acknowledges that any given black person could be much smarter than any given white person, and any given Asian person could be much less intelligent than either. He's talking about average scores. Murray associates African Americans' lower IQ scores with two other phenomena: lower academic performance and lower career performance. Taxpayer-funded programs like "No Child Left Behind" have not succeeded, Murray says, and he implies that IQ is to blame. He also says that corporations like Exxon will never meet stated goals to place black people in top positions because there are not enough qualified black candidates for those positions.

 

African Americans, as a group, also commit more violent crime than members of other groups; therefore, we must acknowledge, Murray says, that police will behave differently in a black neighborhood. Murray cites extensive statistics to support his assertions. Murray says that he published a book emphasizing these two difficult facts in response to phenomena like Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Project, and Critical Race Theory. He says that any approach that blames all of America's problems on white supremacy is doomed to fail, and may well destroy the country without producing any worthy replacement.

 

In recent interviews with Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes, Murray has been asked if he believes that African Americans are genetically inferior. Murray points out that extensive and costly attempts to close the achievement gap, attempts that have been taking place for decades, have not yet done so. In other words, he expresses pessimism that remediation will ever elevate African American scores. He says that for the purposes of his book, it doesn't really matter why African Americans, as a group, score at the bottom of these tests, rather, we must simply accept that these low scores are a fact, a fact that no amount of burning and looting by BLM supporters, or self-flagellation by white liberals, or purity purges suddenly discovering racism in Dr Seuss books and statues of abolitionist heroes, will ever change. If there aren't enough black astrophysicists or black tech entrepreneurs, it's not because of white supremacy, and no new riot or government intervention will ever produce more black astrophysicists or entrepreneurs. Whatever Murray personally concludes on the questions of black genetic inferiority, one thing is certain. Others will cite Murray's work as supporting, with statistics, claims of black genetic inferiority. One can see that in some Amazon reviews of Murray's book.

 

Charles Murray, love him or hate him, is an intellectual giant. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center, who hates him, describes him as "one of the most influential social scientists in America." Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He holds a BA from Harvard, an MS and a PhD from MIT, and he's published bestselling books. One would have to be an intellectual giant of comparable skills and stature to tackle Charles Murray.

 

I am not an intellectual giant. I'm sure, though, that many a reader has had something like this experience. People cite an expert to "prove" something true. This "truth" has been reached by the best available research. In the marrow of your bones, you know that that "truth" is false.

 

Assertions that members of ethnic group X are genetically less intelligent aren't just about black people. They are about me. I'm Polish-American, that is, a "Dumb Polak." Stupidity is associated with Polish identity. Polak jokes had their heyday in the 1970s, but they live on in the lives of Polish people. In 2021, some Poles were trying to have a responsible conversation about the Holocaust and World War II. David Cole, a journalist, pelted them with dumb Polak jokes.

 

I am dyslexic and I suffer from ADHD. Even in kindergarten I realized that others could see and understand things that I could not, and this maddened me. Dyslexia is independent of IQ. There were things I could see and understand that powerful people around me could not. I wanted so badly to penetrate the barrier separating my understanding from theirs. I wanted to share knowledge, mine with theirs, theirs with mine, so no one had to feel cognitively poor or left out. Teachers and guidance counselors did not mentor me to achieve my dreams. I was written of as a "retard," a bad kid, white trash, who wasn't supposed to amount to anything. Given that I often wrote backwards, I was told I might be possessed by Satan. This was said seriously. In high school I was placed in a class with students who couldn't read or write. They were mostly juvenile delinquents. One pushed a knife in my back and I had to fight to avoid injury. I worked as a cleaning woman, a nurse's aide, a landscaper, a waitress.

 

I craved to contribute to intellectual life. To me teaching means passing on the Promethean torch. I got an MA from UC Berkeley, and a PhD from Indiana University, two highly ranked grad schools. "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how," said Viktor Frankl, paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche. I wanted to educate others better than I had been educated. That was my "why." My "how" is the ritual I go through to read and write. I have to be alone. I have to be wearing headphones. I listen to repetitive sounds, like a CD of a train or ocean waves. I consume caffeine in the form of dark chocolate or diet cola. I read very slowly, for only one hour at a time. Any longer and the shame, sadness, and frustration at my own handicaps become too great. I do something physical like lifting weights, and then I return to reading or writing. None of my teachers would have ever predicted that I would get a PhD and become a published writer. I did.

 

Those who believe in black people's intellectual genetic inferiority will insist that no amount of remediation will close the achievement gap. They're wrong. Culture, not genes, is behind the achievement gap. As culture changes, the gap will change. "The culture argument is just a cop-out," some readers will insist. "The culture argument just makes excuses for black people's failure to measure up." To those readers, I want to mention four men I've known. As you read about them, please ask yourself how you would have fared had you lived their lives.

 

"Jay" grew up in a cold-water flat in Newark, NJ. His only playground was a rocky expanse empty of any feature except broken glass. His grandfather was lynched. His father, traumatized by a life of incarceration, prejudice, and deadly violence, was an alcoholic. His mother, citing poverty, rarely ate, and rarely fed her kids. In spite of all this, Jay's natural intelligence gained him attention. He was granted a scholarship to an Ivy League institution where he studied biochemistry. Jay earned his degree, but traveling between the world he grew up in and the elite world of scholarship that his IQ should have offered him a free pass into was too jarring of a trip. He died as he was born, in poverty. I was part of the clean-up crew going through his things. I found stacks of papers on scientific matters, jotted notes that never left Jay's squalid quarters. We wept bitter tears. "He could have done so much." Jay was never able to escape the straitjacket of the ethnicity and the social class he was born into. There was no one on the Ivy League campus he entered forty-five years ago to reach out to him, to weave him into the fabric, to tell him that people like him, with his background, were welcome. Murray corelates high IQ with success and high income. In Jay's case clashing cultures, not IQ, was the barrier to a fulfilled American Dream.

 

Mike was a brilliant writer and stand up comedian. Steve was a musician and the best natural poet I've ever met. Don was one of my students, a very gifted young man. The world will never know any of their talents. Mike became a homeless alcoholic and died in obscurity. Steve never published a single one of his poems before his relatively early death of a treatable illness that shouldn't have taken his life – he didn't have health insurance. Don was hit with two blows, one emotional and one physical, in the 1990s. Both Don's doctors and his friends helped relieve his pain, with the then-popular opioids, legal and illegal. Don died of an overdose at age 24.

 

All four of these men were all white. Two of them were sons of Polish immigrants. Two were Irish Americans. They were every bit as gifted, in their own fortes, as anyone worthy of coverage on the front page of the New York Times. What prevented them from achieving the kind of success that Murray reads as proof and byproduct of superior genes? Culture doomed them. What culture? The culture in admissions offices that result in disproportionately low numbers of poor white applicants even being allowed on campus, as shown in the research of Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford. If a poor white student does beat the odds and manages to gain admission to an elite college campus, he will encounter a culture that lets him know in myriad ways that he is not wanted, and that he must change who he is in order to fit in and succeed. If he does change, he will merely be a counterfeit, and he will be ostracized for inauthenticity. Damned if he does; damned if he doesn't.

 

Vicki Madden, an author who made the leap from being a poor white kid to earning a prestigious degree, wrote in a 2014 New York Times op-ed how elite culture communicates to poor kids that they don't belong. "Once those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds arrive on campus, it’s often the subtler things, the signifiers of who they are and where they come from, that cause the most trouble, challenging their very identity, comfort and right to be on that campus. The more elite the school, the wider that gap … my own experiences were not only undervalued but often mocked, used to indicate when someone was stupid or low-class: No one at Barnard ate Velveeta or had ever butchered a deer." The hundreds of reader comments accompanying Madden's op-ed offer one anecdote after another of poor students, but bright students, both white and black, who missed their chance, or who grabbed the brass ring and lived with nagging alienation from their roots.

 

Achievement, including the academic and career achievement that some read as the inevitable byproduct of superior genes, is in fact just as much a byproduct of mutable culture as of immutable IQ. Achievement is the end result of an assembly line, in which each added part, added by yet another set of hands in a long row of sets of hands, exponentially enhances the ongoing project. I saw this when I worked as departmental secretary for Indiana University, Bloomington's, chemistry department. Each professor was, of course, brilliant. They had to be. What differentiated these academic stars from a failure like Jay is not genes or race. Each professor was held up by hundreds of hands. Colleagues, secretaries, societies, deans, social directors, receptionists, award ceremonies, recognitions, reminders, editors, research assistants, offered daily, hourly, encouragements, invitations, nudged and prodded and molded each professor into being the productive success the university that invested in that professor wanted that professor to be. I used to joke that one professor I worked with could not enter a room without immediately being handed a bouquet of flowers and a magnum of champagne. He was, in fact, an intellectual mediocrity. He had attempted suicide and had few friends. He wrote the right book at the right time and he was enough of a non-entity to allow himself to be molded as the university and academic trends demanded. He's set for life.

 

Jay, Mike, Steve and Dan had all made it past the initial entrance ramp to the assembly line of academic and career achievement, and each made one false move that knocked them right off. Maybe they mentioned eating Velveeta or butchering a deer. That was enough to signal: this person does not belong here. The trap door opens beneath them and they are lost. Whites tempted to invest in ideas of white intellectual superiority must look around and realize – they, no less than black people, know gifted people who never realized their gifts because their surrounding culture did not support those gifts. Culture, not genes, explains many failures among both whites and blacks alike.

 

Yes, but, someone might argue. That culture in the chemistry department was invented by white people, not black people. Doesn't that invention of a culture that facilitates academic achievement prove white intellectual superiority? No. Humans have lived in Northern Europe for tens of thousands of years. For most of those millennia they were hunter gatherers, living lives comparable to North American Indians or Australian Aborigines. They practiced human sacrifice and lived to be thirty or forty years old. If Northern Europeans were endowed with genetically superior genes, Northern Europe would not have experienced cultural stasis for so long. Sumer, in the Middle East, and Egypt, on the continent of Africa, produced agriculture, monumental architecture, and writing while the British Isles were still in the Stone Age.

 

Europe beyond the Mediterranean didn't begin its journey to universities, the scientific method, and IQ tests until a vast culture change, that is the arrival of Christianity, as described by Tom Holland in is book Dominion, Rodney Stark in The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, and Scott Locklin in "No Catholic Church, No Scientific Method." That university culture isn't wedded to white people's genes, and can service the intellectual achievement of those with non-European ancestry, is evidenced by the academic success of Asians, Nigerians, and Jews.

 

Charles Murray and I have one thing in common. We have both been Peace Corps Volunteers. He served in Thailand during the Vietnam War and eventually ended up working for the CIA there. I served in the Central African Republic, one of the poorest and most remote countries on earth. In the past, CAR was depopulated by the slave trade. French colonizers practiced a forced labor system, not much different from slavery, right into the twentieth century. More recently, powerful forces struggle for CAR's raw materials including gold, diamonds, uranium, and oil.

 

There were one hundred students in each of my classes. The floor was dirt and the windows lacked glass or screens. The country was, and still is, politically unstable. Life expectancy was 49 years. French tanks patrolled the countryside, and hunger and deadly diseases were part of everyday life. My African students were among the best I've ever had. They recognized that school was a precious gift. They were eager, enthusiastic, active, and quick to learn. And they had nowhere to go with their talents. Their own government massacred one hundred students before I arrived, that government was overthrown, and the next government was overthrown shortly thereafter. Today, forty years later, CAR is still a failed state. Life expectancy is 52 years. If I had the money, I could have taken students from CAR and gotten them into an Ivy League school. As it is, I have to assume, given the statistics, the TB, the schistosomiasis, malaria, AIDS, and constant unrest, that many of them are dead. But the intellectual sharpness and alacrity my African students showed me under the most demanding conditions make it impossible for me to believe in black intellectual inferiority.

 

Murray makes much of supposed Asian intellectual superiority. I taught in Asia after Africa and I did not encounter this alleged Asian intellectual superiority. My Asian students were slower than my African students. Again, I understood this slowness to be an expression of culture. The Hindu caste system emphasizes a rigid hierarchy and the social inferior's submission to social superiors. My Asian students shrank from shining in class. My African students felt no such cultural restraint.

 

Anyone naïve enough to believe that test scores prove white or Asian or Jewish intellectual superiority might benefit from knowing something about the history of IQ tests. As I wrote in my book "Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype," "Princeton Psychology Professor and eugenicist Carl C. Brigham was the inventor of the SAT. Brigham used an early version to measure the intelligence of millions of World War I U.S. Army recruits. In a 1923 Atlantic Monthly article, Robert M. Yerkes, professor at both Yale and Harvard, and founder of the famed Yerkes National Primate Research Center, reported solemnly: 'Of natives of England serving in the United States Army only 8.7 percent graded D or lower in intelligence; of natives of Poland, 69.9 percent. In the English group, 19.7 percent graded A or B, and in the Polish group, one half of one percent.' Accompanying Yerkes' article were three charts; on all three, Poles scored the lowest of over a dozen ethnic groups." One can see those charts here.

 

A century has passed since IQ test innovators denounced Poles as a lesser race with lesser intellectual capacity than superior "white" people. Jason C. Booza noted in 2007 that 19.1% of the Polish population in America has a Bachelor’s Degree as compared to 15.5% of the total population. Poles are more likely to have an advanced degree. Fewer Polish American families live below the poverty line than the national average. A hundred years ago, about sixty percent of Poles under Russian control were illiterate. Today Poland has a 99% literacy rate. If one believes that contemporary IQ tests prove African American intellectual inferiority, one must also believe that Polish people were an intellectually inferior "race" in 1923, and somehow managed to acquire a completely different set of genes in the past hundred years. Poles didn't acquire new genes. Culture changed. Test scores and incomes changed with culture. 

 

Similar points can be raised about alleged IQ superstars, Asians and Jews. The stereotype of Jews as doing well in the sciences is relatively recent. Centuries ago, when Jews were more likely to be religiously adherent, Jews were thought of as being wedded to study of the Talmud to the exclusion of secular knowledge. The Talmud was perceived as a convoluted, primitive text stuffed with irrational superstitions. The stereotype of Jews was of a people too rejecting of secular education to excel in science. Lists of the big names of the scientific revolution include Italians, Dutch, Germans, Englishmen, Scots, Poles, Czechs, almost all of Christian backgrounds. Many prominent scientists of previous centuries were devout Christians, including Copernicus, Mendel, Pascal, Newton, Galileo, Lavoisier, Lemaitre, Descartes. Jews did not begin appearing on lists of big names in the sciences until after Jews secularized. Again, it was culture, not genes, that engendered Jewish intellectual success.

 

One hundred years ago, when tests were "proving" that Poles were an intellectually lesser race whose immigration to America threatened this country, Chinese were written off as so inferior as not to be allowed into the country at all. The 1924 Quota Act limited Polish immigration to a trickle. Chinese immigrants were banned outright in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese people were seen as servile, primitive, and ineducable. China itself was a backward land that was manipulated, invaded, and exploited by foreign powers. Like a turtle on its back, China was incapable of defending itself from horrific abuses, from the Opium Wars to the Rape of Nanking. This is hardly the profile created by a genetically superior race.  

 

The "smart Asian" stereotype is selective. It refers specifically to Asians from China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea. The smart Asian stereotype does not refer to Asians from Muslim Malaysia or Indonesia, the Catholic Philippines, or Buddhist Cambodia. China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea have been influenced by Confucianism, which emphasizes the bond between parent and child. That culture, not those genes, has contributed to East Asians doing well on standardized tests in recent years.

 

No one would seriously argue that the 19^th century Chinese railroad workers, or Japanese laboring in sugar cane fields or as household servants, had different genes than Chinese and Japanese students flourishing today in academic institutions. No one can argue that thirty percent of Cambodian-Americans live below the poverty line, versus ten percent of Vietnamese Americans, or that fewer Cambodian Americans have an undergrad degree than Vietnamese Americans because of some genetic difference between them. The thousand-kilometer border between Vietnam and Cambodia does not prevent genetic intermixing, but it does separate a largely Buddhist culture from a largely Confucian one.

 

I can imagine my leftist friends reading to this point in this essay and agreeing heartily. "Yes," they'd insist. "It's culture, not genes, behind African Americans' low test scores." And that culture, they would go on to say, is white supremacy. My leftist friends are half right. Every day in this country, black students are sabotaged by white people and white culture. Leftist white culture hurts black students. When asked if he thinks that black people are genetically inferior, Charles Murray refers to the billions of dollars spent over the course of decades to improve black test scores. In spite of these massive efforts, the achievement gap persists. Several cultural trends contribute to this gap. Those cultural trends include white guilt. They also include an "Afrocentric" education style, and anti-intellectualism among blacks.

 

Too many American education dollars are squandered by administrators informed by white guilt. Too many teachers and administrators are afraid to make the same demands of black students that they make of white ones. Teachers are pressured to pass underperforming black students (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here … etc.) On June 28, 2021, according to the Daily Wire, "Princeton University admitted an incoming class with 68 percent of students who self-identify as a person 'of color' after nixing its standardized testing score requirement." Princeton also announced that undergraduate students of the classics would no longer be required to know Latin or Greek. The "history of our own department bears witness to the place of Classics in the long arc of systemic racism," Princeton announced. A black faculty member added, "the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics."

 

Black conservative scholar Glenn Loury responded to these announcements plaintively. If African Americans want to demonstrate their intellectual achievement, he said, educators do African Americans no favors by removing the very criteria that prove intellectual achievement. John McWhorter is another black conservative scholar who rejects Princeton's lowering of standards in the name of diversity. Lowering standards robs students of the intellectual "high" students can feel when they accomplish something. No pain, no gain, McWhorter says, "you often must go through a phase of drudgery – learning the rules, memorizing vocabulary – before you pass into a phase of mastery." Why not let black students enjoy that mastery? "The implicit intention – sparing Black students the effort of learning Latin or Greek – can be interpreted as racist itself."

 

Scholar Harold Black grew up under Jim Crow in the South. On July 5, 2021, he protested "The Dumbing Down of American Education." "Princeton University’s announcement … has been seen by some as further evidence of the 'wokeness' of white liberals intent on denigrating their own culture … My mother who went to an all-black high school in Macon, Ga during the 1930s had both Latin and Greek … School systems say these actions are to increase diversity implying that black and Hispanic kids are too dumb to achieve at a high level. However, many charter schools demonstrate otherwise … There are well documented methods of instruction that can dramatically raise reading levels … Such have met resistance in the public education industrial complex. Instead of adopting these methods the schools are instead moving to teach to the lowest possible denominator."  

 

Some insist that blacks are inherently different from whites and that blacks should not even attempt to succeed at "white" academics. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's mentor and friend, gave a speech to the NAACP in April, 2008. Wright devotes the opening paragraphs of his speech to a relativist theme, relying on a catchphrase, "different does not mean deficient." He cites Dr. Janice Hale as teaching him that African American schoolchildren are like "apples" and white children are like "rocks." Blacks and whites come from "different worlds;" blacks are right-brained, people-oriented, "creative and intuitive." Whites are left-brained, "analytical," and prefer things to people. Black people and white people clap differently. Wright's approach is the mirror image of the idea that black students score at the bottom because of genetics. Wright is not saying that genes make blacks worse; he's saying that genes make blacks "apples" rather than "rocks."

 

Back in 2007, a black friend was struggling through a PhD program. Like so many other PhD candidates, he just couldn't get the dissertation written. He knew about my cognitive handicaps and he asked me for advice. How did I do it? I told him about my various disciplines. He surprised me by becoming angry. "I'm black; you're white," he said. "I shouldn't have to write a dissertation. I should be able to get a PhD by" – he struggled for a moment – " by putting on a drum performance!" I found this comment especially fascinating because my friend is not a drummer. He doesn't even own any musical instruments. I can only guess that he had selected drumming based on a rather stereotypical view of black people as percussionists. He never finished the dissertation and never got the PhD.

 

In July, 2020, the Smithsonian Institution released a graphic insisting that individual responsibility, objective truth, science, hard work, respect for authority, private property, planning for the future, delaying gratification, progress, being on time, intelligence as an attractive quality, the concept of winning a competition, mastery, action to solve problems, courtesy, and correct grammar are all aspects of "whiteness." With such allegedly "Afrocentric" approaches, the achievement gap is waved away. Achievement is just another expression of racist whiteness. Jeremiah Wright, the Smithsonian Institution, and others who think that their dumbed-down approach, focused on "intuition," "clapping," and drumming is "Afrocentric" need to learn that 29% of Nigerian Americans have earned an advanced degree, as opposed to 11% of the nation as a whole. Yes, people with black skin can compete, can read, can analyze, can be on time, can be polite, can acquire and respect private property, and can succeed in academia. People with black skin perform these feats everyday.

 

To close the achievement gap, blacks must overcome an aspect of their own culture: anti-intellectualism. It wouldn't surprise any thinking person that people who have been enslaved, put down, and excluded, would develop their own value system that is the photographic negative of the oppressive power group's value system. To distinguish themselves, and to build in-group solidarity, African Americans developed their own distinctive speech patterns, music, and fashion. That common human survival technique gave us spirituals, jazz, and soul food. When a cultural trait becomes self-destructive, though, it's time to jettison it.

 

John McWhorter wrote one of the bravest pieces I have ever read, "Explaining the Black Education Gap." In that article, and in his subsequent, 2001 book, Losing the Race, McWhorter details black people punishing each other and sabotaging themselves for engaging in academics. Shelby Steele has written that when a black kid can't play basketball, he is not pitied, and no one redefines sports success to accommodate his failure. Rather, he is told to spend long hours practicing on the court; he does, and he improves. That insistence on long hours of practice leading to mastery could and should be applied to academics. Orlando Patterson has written that "cool pose culture" encourages black kids to underperform at school. Both black and white peers reward young blacks for acting out gangster fantasies.  

 

In their 2004 book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom responded to Charles Murray's earlier book, The Bell Curve. They write that Murray's argument for "a genetic view of IQ" is "unconvincing" and "uncertain;" study results on the matter "conflict." The Thernstroms also reject the leftist assertion that the achievement gap is caused by white supremacy. They compare funding for majority black and white schools and say that money is not the problem, either, nor is it the race of the teacher or the class size.

 

The achievement gap, the Thernstroms insist, is caused by, and it can be changed by, culture. "Some group cultures are more academically advantageous than others," they write. "A wealth of evidence indicates that African-American children – and especially black boys – are far more likely than others to break school rules, disrupting their own and their classmates' education." Black children, on average, grow up with fewer than half the books in the home that white kids have in their homes. "This parental choice is a good measure of broader differences related to the world of learning." Black children spend more time watching TV than other children.

 

Charter schools, Abigail Thernstrom said in an interview, freed from teachers' unions, need to teach the cultural skills that facilitate learning. "Teach [students] how to look at people straight in the eye when they're talking to them, how to shake hands, how to show respect for teachers and classmates when they're talking to them, how to talk quietly in the lunchroom, how to get to school on time, dress for success and so forth." Leftists denounce any such education as imperialist whiteness. Thernstrom says, "If you do not learn these soft skills you will not climb the ladder of economic and social opportunity in America."

 

Reviewer Kevin Currie-Knight sums up the main ideas of the Thernstroms' book well. "I currently work as a special educator in a middle class high school that is 98% black … many of the statistics and arguments in this book encapsulate well the things I see every day … according to surveys, black students spend less time on homework, more time watching television, and experience less parental accountability than do their white and Asian counterparts … This book confirms that this experience is not limited to my high school, but is happening on a national scale … The solution to all of this is to become aware of the 'soft bigotry of low expectations' … The only way we can close the racial gap is to set, and keep, standards."

 

One might think that culture is easier to change than genes. In the age of CRISPR, that might no longer be true. Humans cling to cultural forms unless outside forces change them. Egypt maintained the same style of art for three thousand years. That style was based on ideas of Egyptian gods and the afterlife. Egypt's conversion to Christianity rendered that art style obsolete, and it changed.

 

Poles, too, have a history of anti-intellectualism. Sociologist Aleksander Hertz wrote that Poles traditionally regarded intellectuals with "unfriendly treatment, mockery, and mistrust." How did that change? Through cataclysm. Nazis invaded and murdered almost all of Poland's Jews, wiping out what had been the country's mercantile class and much of its white-collar elite. Soviets invaded and eliminated the aristocracy, redistributed the manorial estates, paved over farmlands and opened large factories. Nazis and Soviets both mass murdered educated people. These atrocities created a vacuum. Poles whose parents were peasants and whose grandparents were serfs filled that vacuum. No such cataclysmic change is on the horizon for African Americans.

 

We all know that a child fed a decent meal will do better at school than a child who has snacked on junk food. We know that a child who sleeps in a quiet bedroom will do better than a child who, like the children of my own city of Paterson, must sleep with super-loud car stereos blaring from sunset to sunrise, with no effective intervention by city authorities. We know that reading actually changes the brain for the better, and that internet addiction changes the brain for the worse. We know that the human brain does not reach full maturity till the mid-twenties, and everything that happens from conception to age 25 has a huge impact. We know, we know, we know.

 

We must consign to the trash can the white guilt that encourages us to lower standards for black students. We must similarly toss the "Afrocentric" "whiteness-studies" identity politics that says that black people think, and clap, differently than white people, and that objective truth and the scientific method are somehow "white." We must listen to and apply the wisdom coming from black conservatives, who have long been saying everything that needs to be said on this issue, and we should start applying their wisdom today.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery