Racism and group differences
<p>At the end of my essay <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129">What good<br />
is IQ?</a>, I suggested that taking IQ seriously might (among other<br />
things) be an important step towards banishing racism.  The behavioral<br />
differences between two people who are far apart on the IQ scale are<br />
far more significant than any we can associate with racial origin.<br />
Stupidity isn&#8217;t a handicap only when solving logic problems; people<br />
with low IQs tend to have poor impulse control because they&#8217;re not<br />
good at thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions.</p>
<p>Somebody left a comment that, if what I was reporting about group<br />
differences in average IQ is correct, the resulting behavior would be<br />
indistinguishable from racism.  In particular, American blacks (with<br />
an average IQ of 85) would find themselves getting the shitty end of<br />
the stick again, this time with allegedly scientific justification.</p>
<p>This is an ethically troubling point.  It&#8217;s the main reason most<br />
people who know the relevant statistical facts about IQ distribution<br />
are either in elaborate denial or refusing to talk about what they know.<br />
But is this concern really merited, or is it a form of tendermindedness<br />
that does more harm than good?</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s start with a strict and careful definition: <em>A racist is a<br />
person who makes unjustified assumptions about the behavior or<br />
character of individuals based on beliefs about group racial<br />
differences.</em></p>
<p>I think racism, in this sense, is an unequivocally bad thing.  I<br />
think most decent human beings would agree with me.  But if we&#8217;re<br />
going to define racism as a bad thing, then it has to be a behavior<br />
based on <em>unjustified</em> assumptions, because otherwise there<br />
could be times when the fear of an accusation of racism could prevent<br />
people from seeking or speaking the truth.</p>
<p>There are looser definitions abroad.  Some people think it is<br />
racist merely to believe there <em>are</em> significant differences<br />
between racial groups.  But that is an abuse of the term, because it<br />
means that believing the objective truth, without any intent to use it<br />
to prejudge individuals, can make you a racist.</p>
<p>It is, for example, a fact that black athletes tend to perform<br />
better in hot weather, white ones in cool weather, and oriental asians<br />
in cold weather.  There is nothing mysterious about this; it has to do<br />
with surface-area-to-volume ratios in the population&#8217;s typical<br />
build. Tall, long-limbed people shed heat more rapidly than stocky and<br />
short-limbed people. That&#8217;s an advantage in Africa, less of one in the<br />
Caucasian homelands of Europe and Central Asia, and a disadvantage in<br />
the north Asian homeland of oriental asians.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s right, white men can&#8217;t jump; limb length matters there,<br />
too.  But whites can <em>swim</em> better than blacks, on average,<br />
because their bones are less dense. I don&#8217;t have hard facts on<br />
how asians fit that picture, but if you are making the same guess I am<br />
(at the other extreme from blacks, that is better swimmers and worse<br />
jumpers than white people) I would bet money we&#8217;re both correct. That<br />
would be consistent with the pattern of many other observed racial<br />
differences.</p>
<p>Sportswriter and ethicist Jon Entine has investigated the<br />
statistics of racial differences in sports extensively.  Blacks,<br />
especially blacks of West African ancestry, dominate track-and-field<br />
athletics thanks apparently to their more efficient lung structure and<br />
abundance of fast-twitch muscle fiber.  Whites, with proportionally<br />
shorter legs and more powerful upper bodies, still rule in wrestling<br />
and weightlifting.  The bell curves overlap, but the means &mdash; and<br />
the best performances at the high end of the curve &mdash; differ.</p>
<p>Even within these groups, there are racially-correlated<br />
subdivisions. Within the runners, your top sprinters are likelier to<br />
be black than your top long-distance runners. Blacks have more of an<br />
advantage in burst exertion than they do in endurance.  I don&#8217;t have<br />
hard recent data on this as I do for the other factual claims I&#8217;m<br />
making here, but it is my impression that whites cling to a thin lead<br />
in sports that are long-haul endurance trials &mdash; marathons,<br />
bicycle racing, triathlons, and the like.</p>
<p>It is not &lsquo;racism&rsquo; to notice these things. Or, to put<br />
it more precisely, if we define &lsquo;racism&rsquo; to include<br />
noticing these things, we broaden the word until we cannot justifiably<br />
condemn &lsquo;racism&rsquo; any more, because too much<br />
&lsquo;racism&rsquo; is simply recognition of empirically verifiable<br />
truths. It&#8217;s all there in the numbers.</p>
<p>Knowing about these racial-average differences in athletic<br />
performance would not justify anyone in keeping a tall, long-limbed<br />
white individual off the track team, or a stocky black person with<br />
excellent upper-body strength off the wrestling team.  But they do<br />
make nonsense of the notion that every team should have a racial<br />
composition mirroring the general population.  If you care about<br />
performance, your track team is going to be mostly black and your<br />
wrestling team mostly white.</p>
<p>In fact, trying to achieve &lsquo;equal&lsquo; distribution is a<br />
recipe for making disgruntled underperforming white runners and<br />
basketball players, and digruntled underperforming black wrestlers and<br />
swimmers.  It&#8217;s no service to either group, you get neither efficiency<br />
nor happiness out of that attempt.</p>
<p>Most people can follow the argument this far, but are frightened of<br />
what happens when we apply the same kind of dispassionate analysis to<br />
racial differences in various mental abilities.  But the exact same<br />
logic applies.  Observing that blacks have an average IQ a standard<br />
deviation below the average for whites is not in itself racist.<br />
Jumping from that observation of group differences to denying an<br />
individual black person a job because you think it means all black<br />
people are stupid <em>would</em> be racist.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s pick neurosurgery as an example.  Here is a profession where<br />
IQ matters in an obvious and powerful way.  If you&#8217;re screening people<br />
for a job as a neurosurgeon, it would nevertheless be wrong to use the<br />
standard-deviation difference in average IQ as a reason to exclude an<br />
individual black candidate, or black candidates as a class.  This<br />
would <em>not be justified by the facts</em>; it would be stupid and<br />
immoral.  Excluding the black neurosurgeon-candidate who is<br />
sufficiently bright would be a disservice to a society that needs all<br />
the brains and talent it can get in jobs like that, regardless of skin<br />
color.</p>
<p>On the other hand, anyone who expects the racial composition of the<br />
entire population of neurosurgeons to be &lsquo;balanced&rsquo; in<br />
terms of the population at large is living in a delusion.  The most<br />
efficient and fair outcome would be for that population to be balanced<br />
in terms of the distribution of IQ &mdash; at each level of IQ the<br />
racial mix mirrors the frequency of <em>that IQ<br />
level</em> within different groups.  Since that minimum IQ for<br />
competency in neurosurgery is closer to the population means for<br />
whites and asians than the mean for blacks, we can expect the<br />
fair-outcome population of neurosurgeons to be predominantly white and<br />
asian.</p>
<p>If you try to social-engineer a different outcome, you&#8217;ll simply<br />
create a cohort of black neurosurgeons who aren&#8217;t really bright enough<br />
for their jobs.  This, too, would be a disservice to society (not to<br />
mention the individual patients they might harm, and the competent<br />
black neurosurgeons that would be discredited by association).  It&#8217;s<br />
an error far more serious than trying to social-engineer too many<br />
black wrestlers or swimmers into existence.  And yet, in pursuit of a<br />
so-called equality, we make this sort of error over and over again,<br />
injuring all involved and creating resentments for racists to feed<br />
on.</p>
