| > You might bristle, but, according to studies I've seen, a white supremacist is not actually wrong when s/he announces that "Black people are on average less intelligent than white people!". I must object. Nobody knows how to define or measure "intelligence." When you/they say "intelligence" what is actually being discussed is a specific artificial measure that's meant to indicate what we consider "intelligence," with varying amounts of success. In addition to the general problems of defining and measuring "intelligence," which nobody really understands how to do, there's also the more specific problem that the techniques developed so far are often biased against minorities. There's also the problem of cause. The racist crazies tend to interpret any difference as "Disliked Minority X is inherently less intelligent," even though it's almost impossible to distinguish between differences caused by nature versus nurture. If differences are real, how much is due to genetics and how much is due to being oppressed for generations and therefore receiving inferior education and opportunities? Finally, even if there were a difference, and even if it were inherent, there's the problem of group versus individual. To make this more concrete, let's momentarily ditch intelligence and look at something more morally clear, like propensity for violent crime. Let's say it's demonstrated incontrovertibly that purple people are 10x more prone to violent crime than green people. That still doesn't justify systematic discrimination against purple people, even though the data is clear and the morality of the difference is clear, because individuals matter. Just because purple people are more likely on average to be violent criminals doesn't mean any individual one is. To justify different treatment based on race, you'd have to show that every purple person was this way, which is simply not true. When it comes to real-world intelligence in real-world races, it's even less relevant, because variation within groups far outweighs variations between groups. Even if it was demonstrated that intelligence varied between races and even if it was decided that lower intelligence somehow merits bad treatment, this still wouldn't justify systematic racism. In short, there are a bunch of different questions: 1. What are we even measuring? 2. Does a difference even exist? 3. Does that difference justify different treatment? 4. Does a group-level difference justify prejudging individuals within the group? You seem to be concentrating on #3 exclusively. While it's a fascinating question, I also think it's the least relevant to questions of race, precisely because individual differences far outweigh even the craziest speculated differences by fevered racists. The question of how to deal with people of different intelligence is a good one, but it tells us virtually nothing about race relations as compared to e.g. how to set up Special Education programs. |