Ehrlich, P.R., & Feldman S. S. (1969). The Race Bomb: Skin Color, Prejudice and Intelligence. New York: The New York Times Book Company.

Is There a Racial Difference in Intelligence?

Starting with birth, most Americans are consistently measured and their abilities consistently assessed. While no clear definition of intelligence has been adopted universally, in general, definitions stress either an ability to adapt to environment, the capacity to learn, or the ability to think abstractly. Like the word "love," intelligence remains a term we all have a feel for but cannot quite pin down. Today, this undefined ability has become one of the most controversial topics in psychology. Psychological researchers have resisted racism by denying the existence of innate differences between races, such as intelligence. Many argue that this debate has dire consequences for both the scientific and psychological fields and needs to be based on objective empirical evidence versus

As I stated before, it has been recorded over time that Caucasians seem to consistently rank above their African-American counterparts in IQ test scores. Many contenders of Rushton's ideas argue that these scores are merely the product of culturally biased testing materials. Rushton himself highly contends this, stating that the tests seem to show similar patterns of internal item consistency and predictive validity for all groups, and the same differences are found on relatively culture-free tests.

Rushton, J. P. (1994). The Equalitarian Dogma Revisited. Intelligence, 19, 180-183. In B. Slife (Ed.), Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Psychological Views, 180-183. Guilford, CT: Duskin/McGraw-Hill

In The Race Bomb: Skin Color, Prejudice and Intelligence by Ehrlich and Feldman, they state that they believe Blacks may be caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy - by us convincing black children, their parents and their teachers that they are innately, immutably inferior. Maybe society has "programmed" Blacks to perform in the way that they do? Additionally, these researchers stated that at least some of the differences in intelligence that exist between urban and rural children or Blacks and Whites are due not to genuine differences in ability, but in their abilities to profit from their environments. Many different empirical studies on this issue, while come together on their end result, have correlation and causation statistics which vary quite largely. Additional findings suggest that cultural values influence the salience of objects in the environment, and therefore tests are never assessing underlying intelligence per se, for performance is always influenced by the content of the item. While this may not be empirical evidence which has been statistically recorded, formulated and hypothesized, I do feel that this argument does present an alternative reason for the known difference in IQ scores between races.

At the present time, biological intellectual capacity cannot be measured directly. Such a measure would require assessment of the genetic component of performance, the genotype. In The Fallacy of I.Q., Senna explains that from conception on, the genotype is modified by environmental factors. Thus, an individual's genetic potential is always being expressed though behavior acquired in a social and cultural setting, his phenotype. A person's performance on an "intelligence" test is phenotypic behavior.

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