I remember when my IQ was first tested - I was 12 years old. A teacher had selected a few of us (of all racial backgrounds) to apply to a camp for gifted students and the camp required an IQ test. I took it and was shocked at how low mine was. Mind you, it was well above the score necessary for admittance to the summer camp, but according to the Stanford-Binet test, I wasn't the genius I thought I was which was defined by that test as an IQ of 140. I can't remember my score, but I was in the next level, which I just looked up and saw is called "very superior intelligence", 120-140. (Honestly, I can't remember my actual score, but I do recall that I was well into very superior intelligence but not just a few points from genius, or I would have just chalked it up to a bad day).
KA Dilday worked on the New York Times opinion page until autumn 2005, when she began a writing fellowship with the Institute of Current World Affairs. During the period of the fellowship, she is travelling between north Africa and France.
Also by KA Dilday on openDemocracy:
"The freedom trail" (August 2005)
"Art and suffering: four years since 9/11" (August 2005)
"Rebranding America" (September 2005)
"Judith Miller's race: the unasked question" (October 2005)
"France seeks a world voice"
(December 2005)
"A question of class" (January 2006)
"Europe's forked tongues"
(February 2006)
"The worth of illusion" (March 2006)
"The labour of others" (April 2006)
"A question of class, race, and France itself: reply to Richard Wolin" (May 2006)
"The writer and politics: Peter Handke's choice" (June 2006)
"Zidane and France: the rules of the game"
(19 July 2006)
"Barack Obama, Moroccan Ali, and me"
(5 February 2007)
"Iraqis adrift"
(19 February 2007)
"Sister in spirit: Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel"
(6 March 2007)
I'm black by the way. I grew up in the southern United States where the average IQ for a black child is said to be 80. From first grade on, I went to one of the few private schools in Jackson, Mississippi that admitted black students (integration was still a distant and suspect practice), a school which was also known as Mississippi's most rigorous. Most of the other students were white, but until I got old enough to choose my own friends, on the weekends and after school I usually played with the other black kids who were the children of my parents' friends. They all went to public schools and as the years wore on, we had less in common. My school was rigorously academic and challenging. Mississippi public schools were the worst in the nation. We were getting radically different educations and we were being encouraged to think in very different ways.
Three weeks ago, the Nobel prize-winner, James Watson, was driven to resign from his job after making statements about the intelligence of Africans. He commented that he wasn't optimistic about prescriptions for change in Africa, because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but sadly, "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true", thereby dismissing a continent and colour.
(I met James Watson: we were standing next to each other at an event in New York, perhaps a book launch. I mentioned that I had read a review of his autobiography. He said, "Ah, the reviewer said I thought about sex and genes only." Do you? I said, "Sometimes I think about playing tennis", he said. Then leaning forward with a lascivious smile said, "but I think about playing with Anna Kournikova." Watson may be gene-sequencing smart, but he's a rather silly man.)
There are variations in the IQ's recorded for people classified by race and continent, but as many people note, IQ tests are geared toward a particular culture and within that culture, nurture plays a large role in determining how someone will score. On 6 November 2007, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States released a study conducted by researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at London's King's College indicating that "breastfeeding can have a positive effect on the IQ of children when combined with the right genes". Imagine how nutritionally deficient breast milk must have an effect. But beyond that, there is nurture. I remember that the teacher who sent us to the camp, Mrs Brent, always told us that she had an extremely high IQ. She was participating in a study to measure whether IQ increased over time, and hers had continued to rise according to the tests. Or perhaps practice at them made her better at them.
The cultural order
My parents were interested in my education but like many people who had grown up poor and pulled themselves into another class, they generally thought educational success was meant to be used in the pursuit of material success. They cared a lot about me getting good grades which I didn't really. Even at age 11, I wasn't so sure I thought that the people who were grading me were worthy of it and I cared more about my own schooling which mostly came from self-guided reading. But my parents also wanted my sister and me to have a happy childhood. We did fun things; we went to McDonald's for a treat; we watched television at night - bad 1980s sitcoms - as well as spending time at the public library and in piano and ballet classes. But we went to the same rigorous private school for twelve years and my older sister, less rebellious and more directed than I, graduated and went on to Harvard for college. With my mediocre grades but high test scores, I went on to a fine college, but not Harvard.
Then I landed in New York and met oodles of people who were way ahead of me. They came from hyper-achieving families and been trained from a young age for success.
In the online magazine Slate, a writer wrote about the data showing that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than the rest of the population. They test higher on IQ tests, particularly any measure of verbal ability. That seems right to me. I've always admired the value that it seems many Jewish families place on learning and intellectual pursuits.
It was most obvious when I made a close friend some ten years my senior, who had been raised in an aggressively intellectual Jewish family. He had been pushed to acquire knowledge and to argue and defend himself since a young age. It's wasn't unlikely that one of his parents had put a copy of Civilisation and its Discontents, War and Peace or On Genealogy in his hands when he was 11, and he had continued this aggressive pursuit, driving himself at a furious pace in reading, writing, absorbing. I liked to read novels and have fun sometimes, well lots of times.
But it didn't take me long to realise that his native intelligence seemed no greater than mine. And I could best him in arguments. When it appeared that I was winning an argument on the basis of analysis and logic, he would change tacks and overwhelm me with his superior knowledge, sometimes managing to work in complete non-sequiturs such as "name your top ten Jacobin poets." I couldn't name one. It was an exercise designed to remind me of my ignorance and thus re-establish the natural order, which to his credit, he chalked up primarily to age.
But some scholars, like the Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, suggest that focus on intellectual endeavours by Jewish communities has come at the expense of other achievement. In the Washington Post she wrote: "Consider a basic paradox. Even anti-Semites often give Jews credit for having exceptional intelligence. Self-congratulatory Web sites reckon that Jews, who make up about 0.2 percent of the world's population, have been awarded more than 160 Nobel Prizes. But if Jews are so smart, why do 22 Arab League countries account for a tenth of the Earth's land surface while the Israelis struggle to secure a country that is 1/19th the size of California?" (see "Are American Jews Too Powerful? Not even close.", Washington Post, 4 November 2007).
The tangible achievements of education are prioritised among blacks, or the community, but more often as a means of gaining material wealth that frees one from the powerless state of the salaried worker. Of course, not all Jewish families are rigorously intellectual and there are black families who encourage learning primarily for personal growth, but there are many blacks who think like the old black man I once sat next to on a city bus in New York. He became ecstatic on learning that I was in graduate school: "Education is money in the bank", he kept saying, "Money in the bank." Money gives power and freedom, so that sort of focus is perfectly understandable, for a traditionally disenfranchised group. He would have been disappointed that rather than studying business, law or medicine, I was studying political philosophers. And maybe my privilege, the fact that my parents had managed to pull themselves into the middle class by the time I was a young girl - we weren't rich but I never really wanted for anything - has enabled me to eschew wealth acquisition for intellectual pursuits.
The social deficit
Many commentators just dismissed James Watson's statements summarily, but ignoring the statistics that inspired him isn't useful. Watson made his comments based on data that is routinely read, absorbed and quoted. It's true that blacks' scores on IQ tests are lower on average, and that Africans do even worse, but it is also true that tests are designed by white westerners and they measure a certain type of intelligence, one that further tests have shown correlates highly with nurture.
My Jewish intellectual companion grew up processing complex literary data, formulating an opinion and defending it. He was far ahead of me in training and in knowledge acquisition. But fortunately, I'd had enough affirmation to know that he wasn't smarter, only better trained. I didn't back down, nor was I cowed by his greater knowledge into doubting my own intelligence, and that's the real point that anyone who hasn't done well on tests like that should absorb. I was only coming from a different cultural background within the same country. What about those whose worlds are even farther away?
I'm very keen on children at schools in poor areas being encouraged to read philosophy, taught classical music, introduced to poetry. It's often these children whose parents don't have time to spend educating their children at home and they can come to believe the whispers that they are inferior. But of course feelings on intellectual deficiency can happen to everyone. A friend who attended Eton, as per his family tradition, told me that he felt woefully ignorant on his first day there as he listened to two other boys begin discussing the difference between baroque and rococo.
As for James Watson, well his comments ensured that he was dispatched into retirement where he can spend his days dreaming about Anna Kournikova bending over to pick up a tennis ball. But even though we have stumbled down this dimly-lit road before, rather than simply ignore Watson's statements or dismiss them, it's best to continue the discussion about why people differently develop the intellectual skills that are useful in western culture so we can go about righting the imbalance.