| People keep assuming that asking the question "what relationship (if any) is there between race and intelligence from a biological standpoint?" is the racist part. The question by itself isn't really the problem. The racist part is pretending that it's still an open question. It isn't. There is no measurable biological relationship between race and intelligence. There has been a massive amount of research into what influences "intelligence", and the sum of it makes it clear that environmental factors easily have a significant enough effect to explain differences in scores between racial groups on different metrics. Someone might bring up the fact that often even when controlling for factors like education and family income, the racial gap narrows but might not disappear completely. The response is that it is fundamentally impossible to fully control for the effect of race on the environment someone grows up in. Even when absolutely every other factor is identical, a white person and a black person are not going to have the same environment because their race constantly affects how the rest of the world interacts with them. Essentially: We know environmental factors can affect any given metric of intelligence on a magnitude consistent with racial performance gaps on those metrics. Proof of this can be found in things like the fact that average IQ scores have increased over time, and the average IQ of black people in the 1990s was equivalent to the average white IQ in the 1940s. Biology does not change in 50 years so the improvement must be entirely from changes in environmental factors. In addition, race itself intrinsically has a significant effect on one's environment. Those two facts alone are enough to make it clear that any hypothetical biological component is too insignificant to be measured. |