What About Racial Superiority?

HOW do you view the races? To be specific, do you consider whites to be inherently superior to blacks? Regardless of your verbal answer, what do your attitudes and actions reveal?

People often say that they have no racial prejudice. Yet, the fact is, racist views have long dominated. And so the view persists among many that blacks are innately inferior to whites, and are meant to occupy a lower status permanently.

How did such ideas originate? What makes them so persistent?

Religion’s Role

The modern idea of inherent superiority of whites had its origin with the conquest and enslaving of African blacks. The slave trade needed justification, particularly since those engaged in it were professed Christians. Charles de Second in Montesquieu, French jurist and political philosopher, explained how the traders reasoned: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow, that we ourselves are not Christians.”

Professed Christians in America also needed justification for slavery, for the economy of the southern cotton planters was based on Negro slavery. Thus an American historian says:

“The South searched the Scriptures for Biblical endorsement of the practice. . . . Constantly the South argued that slavery was sanctioned and in fact commanded by the Bible, and was a divinely-appointed institution especially beneficial to the Negroes.”​—“A Complete History of the United States,” by Clement Wood, pp. 217, 337.

The churches took a lead in justifying slavery. It was taught that Negroes are a cursed race, which is why their skin is black. In 1844 Methodists split North and South over slavery. The Baptists in 1845 and, about the same time, the Presbyterian Church divided right down the political Mason-Dixon line. As late as 1902 a Bible House in St. Louis published the widely circulated book “The Negro a Beast” or “In the Image of God.” It includes a chapter entitled “Convincing Biblical and Scientific Evidence that the Negro is Not of the Human Family.”

So, with church approval, blacks were viewed as inherently inferior to whites. The Encyclopædia Britannica lamented: “It was the misfortune of the African to be enslaved in America by Christians, who, unable to reconcile their beliefs with the practice of slavery, recast their conception of the Negro so that they came to regard him as property, not as a human being entitled to rights and liberties.”​—Vol. 16, p. 200D, 1971.

But it was not just the churches that championed such views. Philosophers and scientists did also.

Others Champion White Superiority

Around the 1830’s southern philosophers in the United States formulated the principles regarding the natural inequality of man, a concept by then already accepted by most Southerners. And the leading American physical anthropologist of the time, Josiah C. Nott, attempted to provide biological support for this concept. The view of some came to be that the various races evolved separately and that blacks are more closely related to apes. After noting certain characteristics as evidence, The Encyclopædia Britannica observes: “The negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to the highest anthropoids.”​—Vol. 19, 1911, p. 344.

Some hold similar views today, including Professor Carleton S. Coon, former president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. He asserts that five races of men, in isolation from one another, “evolved independently into Homo sapiens not once but five times.” In a national United States television broadcast, a spokesman claimed that Coon “presents evidence, and takes the position, that the Negro race is 200,000 years behind the White race on the ladder of evolution.”

Such views, long held regarding blacks, help us to understand how early Americans could speak ‘of all men being created equal,’ yet sanction a form of slavery in which persons were viewed as inferior. The Sociology of Social Problems, Third Edition, by Paul B. Horton and Gerald R. Leslie, explains:

“The ‘all men are created equal’ dictum did not apply to Negroes, since they were ‘property,’ not men. Theories of a biblical Hamitic curse, of incompleted or separate evolutions, of geographic determinism, and of intelligence test evidences were successively employed to justify treatment of Negroes as inferiors. As long as such notions were believed​—and most people did believe them—​there was no inconsistency in professing democratic ideals while practicing discrimination.”

Probably few persons today claim that blacks are “not men.” Yet many still believe that they are inherently inferior. Their higher illegitimacy and crime rates, lower economic and social status, and, particularly, lower average scores on IQ tests, are considered “proof” of their biological inferiority. But is this evidence really proof of biological inferiority? Are there circumstances that account for the shortcomings of blacks, on an average, when compared with whites?

Origin of Americas Blacks

Many persons in the U.S. believe that the African forefathers of American blacks were savages, without culture or civilization. They feel that they were dull mentally, childlike, incapable of accomplishing complex tasks, or of developing an advanced civilization. But the facts are otherwise, as The World Book Encyclopedia comments:

“Highly developed Negro kingdoms existed in various parts of Africa hundreds of years ago. . . . Some of the Negro kings and their nobles lived in great wealth and splendor. Their capitals sometimes became centers of culture and trade. Between 1200 and 1600, a Negro-Arabic university flourished at Timbuktu in West Africa and became famous throughout Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East.”​—Vol. 14, 1973, pp. 106, 107.

True, African culture is quited different from European, even as Oriental culture also is different. And, unfortunately, some equate difference with inferiority. Yet, at the same time, there is no denying that in recent centuries the development of African life and culture was arrested. There was a lack of progress, a backwardness. But why?.

The reason was due, in large part, to the slave trade, about which The Encyclopedia Americana said: “It disorganized Negro culture and industry, stopped the development of art, overthrew governments and was the cause of that modern stagnation of culture which has marked the Dark Continent since 1600.”​—Vol. 20, 1927, p. 47.

The magnitude of the slave trade, and its impact on African society, shocks the senses. According to The New Encyclopædia Britannica, 1976, “estimates of the slaves shipped across the Atlantic run from 30,000,000 to 100,000,000.” More conservative estimates give the figure “as about 15 million.” But even the lesser estimates are staggering, especially when one considers the casualties involved.

It must be acknowledged that Africans were captured both directly by whites and in wars and raids by blacks, who sold their countrymen to white slave traders. No matter who bore initial responsibility, the captives were then marched to the coast, and held at embarkation stations. Then, chained together by twos, they were crammed below in the holds of ships in a space only large enough for them to lie down. There they spent most of the fifty-day Atlantic voyage without light or fresh air. About a third of the prisoners are estimated to have died even before boarding ship, and another third in passage.

It was in the early 1500’s that the first slaves were brought to the West Indies and South America to work the mines and plantations. In 1619 a Dutch slave ship delivered the first blacks to North America, not as slaves but as indentured servants. However, later in the 1600’s slavery was fully established, and, in time, there were some four million black slaves in the United States.

What Slavery Did to Them

Africans commonly were delivered first to the West Indies, where they were “seasoned,” or broken in as slaves, before being shipped to America. The policy was to separate people of the same tribal origin, to prevent any mass uprisings. Even families were broken up, and new names were given the slaves by the traders or by their new masters. The aim was to make blacks subservient, obedient. In the process, their personalities were distorted, their mentalities suppressed, and, realizing the futility of resisting, blacks often began to behave as if they were inferior.

Slave codes were formulated to assure their complete subordination. The Encyclopedia Americana says:

“Slaves could not own property, possess firearms, engage in commerce, leave the plantation without permission from their owners, testify in court except against other Negroes, make contracts, learn to read and write, or hold meetings without the presence of white persons. . . . the murder or rape of a slave or of a free Negro by a white person was not regarded as a serious offense.”​—Vol. 20, 1959, p. 67.

In most slave-holding states, the punishment for teaching a black to read or write was either a fine, a whipping or imprisonment.

In 1808 the United States made the slave trade illegal. However, the trade continued despite the law, since slaves were in greater demand than ever. This led to an ultimate perversion​—producing slaves for sale. The Encyclopedia Americana explains:

“A large-scale and profitable domestic slave trade developed, and some of the most cruel and cold-blooded incidents of the slave system were associated with it, such as the breeding of slaves in the older states for sale farther south, and the constant breaking of family ties by selling members separately.”​—Vol. 20, 1959, p. 67.

Yes, the view that blacks were “not men” led to the breeding and selling of them, as is commonly done with livestock. Then, abruptly, in 1865, slavery was fully abolished in the United States. Yet attitudes persisted, and blacks were kept “in their place”​—that of subordination to whites—​by segregation laws and other means.

Lynching by hanging was one important instrument of control. There were, on an average, 166 lynchings annually between 1890 and 1900. Also, as The Encyclopedia Americana relates:. “The sexual exploitation of Negro women by white men continued to be tolerated. Negroes received grossly unfair and discriminatory treatment at the hands of police and frequently in the courts.”​—Vol. 20, 1959, p. 70.

Are we talking about ancient history? No, the grandparents of many living blacks were slaves. And people living today have heard from the lips of former slaves what life was like then. Even into the 1950’s the mass media in America portrayed blacks as inferior​—invariably their role was as servants to whites.

Generally, however, blacks were not visible at all, neither in magazines, on television nor in newspapers, except in stories of crime. They were discriminated against at every turn, receiving second-rate schooling, and being barred from certain types of employment and from many other benefits enjoyed by whites. Practically everywhere doors of opportunity were shut to them, robbing many of any hope of improving their lot.

In view of these circumstances, can one really expect blacks to do as well, on the average, as whites in educational and other achievements? Would it be fair to judge them inferior as a race when they do not measure up to a certain standard? What happens when opportunities are open to them?

Opportunity and Motivation

Prior to 1947 blacks were barred in the U.S. from major-league baseball. That year, as racial tensions often ran high, a black was permitted to play. Soon blacks began to excel in baseball. In 1971, the year that they were world champions, in one game the Pittsburgh Pirates fielded a team of nine players​—all black. The situation is similar in other sports, causing the New York Times this year to say, “pro basketball is virtually a black game.”

What does this mean? That blacks are biologically superior physically to whites? Or does it mean that when opportunities are opened and instruction and motivation are provided, blacks can do well? Obviously the latter. Races are not born with talent to be ballplayers, musicians, scientists, college professors, and so forth. These things must be learned.

It is wrong to stereotype races, saying that one race is naturally dull and slow, another aggressive and militant, still another gentle and subservient, and so forth. Races are the way that they are particularly due to the education, training and motivation that they receive. For example, the Chinese were often characterized by many as being naturally gentle and subservient. But given the different education and motivation that they have received over the past several decades under Communism, few would characterize them that way today.

Yet the view persists that naturally, biologically, blacks as a race are slower mentally and less intelligent than whites. Is there reliable evidence that this is so?

Are Whites More Intelligent than Blacks?

YES, say many people. Whites, as a race, have inherited more intelligence than blacks.

William Shockley, a Nobel laureate in physics, strongly asserts that this is so. He says: “My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of American Negroes’ intellectual and social deficits is . . . racially genetic in origin.”

Professor Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California in Berkeley is a leading exponent of the view that in intelligence whites are biologically superior to blacks. He declares: “The number of intelligence genes seems to be lower, overall, in the black population than in the white.”

What is the basis for such claims?

Basis tor Claims

Inheritance, many will point out, has a lot to do with racial differences. Blacks have inherited dark skin, thick lips and kinky hair, and whites have inherited strikingly different features. So, if whole groups of people have inherited such different physical characteristics, it is only reasonable, some will argue, that the races would inherit different degrees of intelligence. But do they? Why is it claimed that blacks, as a race, have inherited less intelligence than whites?

The reason is principally due to results from Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests. In these tests blacks score, on the average, about 15 points lower than whites. Even when whites and blacks of a similar social and economic status are tested, the scores of whites average significantly higher than do the scores of blacks. So Jensen concludes from such evidence “that something between one-half and three-fourths of the average IQ difference between American Negroes and whites is attributable to genetic factors.”

The results from IQ tests, coupled with conclusions based on the evolution theory, have reinforced the opinion of many that blacks are mentally inferior. Some scientists have argued that the races evolved, to a large extent, independently over hundreds of thousands of years. Blacks, it is claimed, crossed the evolutionary threshold into the category of Homo sapiens later than whites.

Since IQ tests today are the principal basis for the claim that blacks are inherently less intelligent than whites, let us look at those tests.

Intelligence and IQ Tests

First of all, what is meant by intelligence?

That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. A great many different qualities might be called intelligence. People may be “intelligent” in one context, perhaps being able to memorize names and dates easily, but be “stupid” in another, such as in doing arithmetic problems. So there is no universally accepted definition of what intelligence is.

What about IQ tests, then? Do they measure intelligence? Commenting on this, Patrick Meredith, professor of psychophysics at Leeds University, England, said: “It might be held that Frenchmen are brighter than pygmies, but if you see pygmies in their natural environment making bridges out of fibre and living life successfully you might ask what you mean by intelligence. The IQ rating is no indication of how a person will behave in a defined situation. The IQ test is a totally unscientific concept.”

It is generally agreed that IQ tests fail to give a complete picture of the many factors involved in intelligence. Circumstances and backgrounds of peoples are too varied for them to be able to do this. What, then, do IQ tests measure?

Arthur Whimbey, professor of psychology at a university in the southern United States, observes: “Studies lead to the conclusion that IQ tests do not measure innate intellectual capacity, but rather a group of learned skills that can be taught in the classroom or in the home.”

To confirm this, it has been demonstrated that persons can be taught how to take IQ tests, with startling results. One investigator reports that a young Mississippi black student was given instruction about taking such tests, and in six weeks he raised his IQ score dramatically.

You can easily imagine the wrong conclusion s a person might draw from IQ scores, and the effects this can have. An American black, who is now a university professor, writes:

“At 15 I earned an IQ test score of 82 . . . Based on this scare, my counselor suggested that I take up bricklaying because I was ‘good with my hands.’ . . . I went to Philander Smith College anyway, graduating with honors, earned my master’s degree at Wayne State University and my Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis. Other blacks, equally as qualified, have been wiped out.”

Yet, the fact remains that whites score, on the average, 15 points higher than do blacks on IQ tests. Why? If one is going to argue that blacks are innately just as intelligent as whites, then why don’t they score better than they do?

Examining the Question in Context

There are many factors that can account for their lower average IQ scores. In particular, American blacks have been greatly disadvantaged by their treatment by whites as inferiors, and as undesirables. Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren illustrated modern racial attitudes in an April 1977 Atlantic article.

When the Supreme Court’s school segregation decision was pending in the mid-1950’s, President Dwight Eisenhower of the United States invited Warren to a White House dinner for the purpose of influencing him to decide in favor of upholding the segregation law. “The President,” Warren writes, “took me by the arm, and, as we walked along, speaking of the southern states in the segregation cases, he said, ‘These [Southerners] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.’”

As vocalized by this president, whites have commonly attempted to “keep blacks in their place”​—in a segregated, subordinate position cut off from the benefits enjoyed by whites. During slavery, and later during legalized segregation, this was easy to do. Blacks who stepped out of line were whipped, lynched or otherwise punished. The effect was to produce the childlike, subservient, mentally slow “Sambo” personality. Whites have commonly believed that this personality was inherent in blacks. However, Harvard professor Thomas F. Pettigrew explains:

“No African anthropological data have ever shown any personality type resembling Sambo; and the concentration camps [in Nazi Germany] molded the equivalent personality pattern in a wide variety of Caucasian prisoners. Nor was Sambo merely a product of ‘slavery’ in the abstract, for the less devastating Latin American system [of slavery] never developed such a type.”

Thus, IQ test results must be considered in this context of over 300 years of oppression during which many blacks, for their own defense and survival, adopted a subservient personality. And remember, until the latter part of the last century it was against the law in many places of the United States for blacks to learn to read or write. Even since then, blacks, taken as a whole, simply have not had the same educational opportunities as whites.

Effect of Environment

The quality of preschool home education also bears directly on intellectual achievements. It is of interest that the full 15-point IQ gap is manifest in the United States between black and white children by age five, even before they go to school. Some may claim that this is proof that blacks are born with less intelligence than whites, but there is evidence that other factors can be responsible.

Early childhood is a principal period of intellectual growth. Dr. Benjamin Bloom of the University of Chicago, as well as other educators, maintains that by the time a child reaches age five he has undergone as much intellectual growth as will occur over the next thirteen years. In keeping with such conclusion, Science News Letter observes: “During the early years, a child’s intelligence can be greatly influenced by a responsive environment conducive to learning and exploring.”

But consider the home situation of many American blacks. Their families are more frequently disrupted than are white families. The father is often not at home, perhaps being forced to look in another area for employment. Often, in black families, the mother alone must rear the children. Under such circumstances, can it be expected that the young will be provided the early educational training that will equip them to match the intellectual achievements of whites?

Further, recent studies show that in larger families, black or white, where parents usually give less individual attention to their children, the children have lower IQ scores. Since black families are, on the average, larger than white ones, this may also be a contributing factor to blacks’ lower intellectual achievements.

Another factor to consider is that home environments are not the same​—white and black cultures are significantly different. And traditional IQ tests have clear cultural biases that favor whites. As an example, a Stanford-Binet picture test showed a prim-looking white woman and a woman with Negroid features and slightly unkempt hair. The child was marked “right” for picking the white woman as “pretty,” and “wrong” if he picked the black.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a large number of blacks have achieved IQ scores well above the average score of all whites. In fact, during World War I blacks from certain parts of the northern U.S. scored higher on IQ tests than whites from certain parts of the South, which would indicate that blacks are not born with lesser intelligence. Theodosius Dobzhansky, an American biologist, made this telling observation: “The race differences in the averages are much smaller than the variations within any race. In other words, large brains and high I.Q.’s of persons of every race are much larger and higher than the averages for their own or any other race.”

The book Intelligence​—Genetic and Environmental Influences, edited by medical doctor and university professor Robert Cancro, examines at length environmental factors that contribute to the lower intellectual achievements of blacks. In view of all the disadvantages blacks have had, the writers conclude: “It is really surprising to find the mean IQ of black Americans only 15 points below that of white Americans. No reason whatever exists to consider this discrepancy as biologically inevitable.”

The well-known anthropologist Ashley Montagu reached a similar conclusion. He writes: “If nutrition is poor, health care deficient, housing debasing, family income low, family disorganization prevalent, discipline anarchic, ghettoization more or less complete, personal worth consistently diminished, expectations low, and aspirations frustrated, as well as numerous other environmental handicaps, then one may expect the kind of failures in intellectual development that are so often gratuitously attributed to genetic factors.”

Montagu concludes: “There is no evidence that any people is either biologically or mentally superior or inferior to any other people in any way whatever.”

Yet is there proof that the difference in average IQ scores of the races is not due to whites inheriting more intelligence than blacks?

Conclusions from the Evidence

There is no proof that whites either have, or have not, inherited more intelligence than blacks. What is clear, however, is that environment has a big effect on intellectual development. In Israel, for example, deprived Oriental Jewish children, who were placed in communes called kibbutzim and brought up collectively, showed higher IQ’s than children of the same background reared by their parents. Also, American Indian children reared in white foster homes obtain significantly higher IQ’s than their brothers and sisters on the Reservation. But does the same hold true for blacks?

A recent study of black children reared in white homes revealed that it does. The study, which included over a hundred white families who adopted black children at an early age and reared them in their homes, showed that the IQ’s of these blacks compared favorably with those of whites. “Overall,” write the investigators, “our study impressed us with the strength of environmental factors. . . . If a different environment can cause the IQ scores of black children to shift from a norm of 90 or 95 to 110, then the views advanced by the genetic determinists cannot account for the current IQ gap between blacks and whites.”

The weight of scientific opinion, therefore, seems to be that the lower average IQ scores of blacks can be explained largely, if not entirely, by environmental factors. In the book The Biological and Social Meaning of Race, Frederick Osborn of the Population Council of New York sums up: “Only one conclusion is possible from the studies which have been made to date. Differences in test intelligence between the major races are no greater than can be accounted for by the known differences in their environments. On this there is general scientific agreement.”

It is of interest that, as opportunities have opened to them, more and more blacks are succeeding in fields of business, education, medicine, and so forth.

Yet, it must be acknowledged, the question of the relative intelligence of the races cannot be positively determined. The evidence is now inconclusive, open to various interpretations, as one writer noted: “A hundred different conclusions can, and have been, drawn from the same body of evidence. The conclusion one arrives at depends as much on emotion as reason.”

So, then, why bring up the matter of IQ scores in an attempt to prove that blacks are less intelligent than whites? Steven Rose, professor of biology at the Open University, England, explains why some people do: “The question of the genetic basis of racial or class differences in IQ . . . achieves meaning only in a racist or classist society attempting to justify its discriminatory practices ideologically.”

As a result of the storm of controversy over the alleged lower inherent intelligence of blacks, the National Academy of Sciences declared: “There is no scientific basis for a statement that there are or that there are not substantial hereditary differences in intelligence between Negro and white populations. In the absence of some now-unforeseen way of equalizing all aspects of the environment, answers to this question can hardly be more than reasonable guesses.”

One thing is certain, however, and that is that there is no sound basis for viewing people of another race as inferior. Without making any distinctions as to race, the Bible wholesomely advises us to have “lowliness of mind considering that the others are superior to you.”​—Phil. 2:3.