Old post that I am reposting. It is getting linked around.
It is common refrain among race realists, and in particular White racists, who make a fetish out of the number, that the US Black IQ is 85. Broadly speaking, that used to be the case, but IQ’s of Black children have always been higher.
Blacks having high IQ’s as young children that gradually decline towards adulthood unfortunately has been noted by researchers and observers for a long time. There are descriptions of this phenomenon going back to 1850. So there is no need for White nationalists to get all freaked out when someone says that Black elementary school kids are pretty smart.
More charming Black thugs, throwing gang signs and looking menacing. The young woman is a mulatto or very light-skinned Black girl. I used to see kids like her a lot when I taught school.
Although the people above are acting like complete idiots, Blacks this age have average IQ’s of 90. I’ve dealt with quite a few Black gangbanger kids like this as a teacher, and most of them aren’t stupid at all. They’re just assholes. No excuses.
I believe that Black adult IQ has been bumped up to 89 now and Black child IQ to 92 due to changes in IQ norming in the US. IQ tests were formerly normed on a scale of US Whites = 100. A couple years ago, I think they changed it to US population = 100. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the scores in the table below.
So now the US White adult IQ is 103 and White kids are the same (actually White adult IQ = 102.5; White Child IQ = 103.5), and the US Black adult IQ is 89, and child IQ is 92. So there is an 10.5 pt gap between B-W kids and a 13.5 pt gap between B-W adults.
But even Charles Murray and Philippe Rushton, two White racist scientists working in this field, concede that the B-W gap has shrunk about 3 points in the last 30 years.
I believe that the US Asian score has now been bumped up to 107. We would also estimate that the IQ’s of US Hispanics to be about 92-93 now and US Amerindian IQ’s should be about 91 or so, all with the renorming.
Things haven’t really changed much, just the whole scale has been bumped up. It’s important to understand that.
These scores are taken from this paper, and indicate varying scores for IQ tests and semi-IQ tests taken over about 30 years. As you move down in each individual row, you move into revised versions of the tests in more recent years.As you can see, White adult IQ (age 25+) in the US is now 102.6, or 103 rounded off. Black adult IQ (age 25+) has increased in recent years to 89.1 or 89 rounded off.
There remains a 13.5 point gap between Blacks and Whites. It is no longer appropriate to say that Blacks have an IQ of 85. The B-W child gap is about 11 points. On the Stanford-Binet test, which can be given to both children and adults, there is a 10.8 point gap, but it would be nice to see who the S-B was given to, kids or adults.
It is correct that with a 10-14 pt B-W IQ gap at the moment, “leveling the playing field”, which really boils down to equality of outcome, is not possible without much magic, fakery and nonsense. It would be ideal if racial IQ differences, while changing, would at least enter into this debate, but that’s not possible right now.
Keep in mind that Black IQ declines as Blacks age. James Flynn, a world-recognized expert in the field, said a while back that Black 5-yr-olds may have IQ’s of 95. Traditionally, they suffered a 10 pt drop down to 85 at age 25.
With renorming, Black 5 year olds may have IQ’s as high as 98. That’s going to drop to 89 by age 25. There have been articles recently remarking on how Black school performance is worse in Black high schoolers than in Black elementary schoolers. Black high schoolers have lower IQ’s than Black elementary students, and this will reflect in scores.
He may have been a thug, but Mychal Bell, famous stereotypical Black thug of Jena Six fame, was also said to be a pretty smart kid. There were reports that he was an A student, but in my discussions with prominent Jena, Louisiana citizens who knew some of his teachers, they said that he was intelligent, but he did not get good grades. I used to see this all the time as a teacher.
US Blacks can no longer be said to be stupid. I think that high school failure rates are due to either culture, socioeconomics, or else genetic Black personality, or some combination of one or more of those. Even White highly extroverted persons don’t like to be chained to a seat all day, and most of them hate school and studying. They want excitement, good times and adventure. Ditto with Black thrill-seekers like Mr. Bell.
White racists like to rant about “no progress” in the Black IQ of 85 over 100 years. That “no progress” claim does not include Flynn Effect Black IQ rise of 22 pts since 1930, much of which have been washed out because White IQ has been rising concomitantly with the Black rise.
These same racists usually say that the Flynn Effect is not a real intelligence rise, but Black skulls have gotten dramatically larger since 1900 to the point where they are dramatically different from African skulls. It would stand to reason that a dramatic increase in Black skull size combined with a dramatic increase in Black IQ would represent a real intelligence increase – the Flynn Effect.
US White and US Black skulls now look more alike than either skull does to its ancestors 150 yrs ago.
We really are smarter than our grandparents.
We are creating a new race here in the US – the Negro. A study looking at head sizes from the colonial era to today found that Whites and Black skulls now resemble each other more than either one resembles their grandparents. Both Black and White skulls have gotten larger, taller and narrower, the lower half of the face and jaw have receded, and the chin has become more prominent.
Both changes are in favor of more progressive features and against more archaic features.That means that modern Whites have skulls that look more like modern Blacks than our White ancestors of 250 years ago. And modern Blacks have skulls that look more like modern Whites than their African slave ancestors of 250 years.
I do not feel that it is appropriate to constantly compare US Negroes with Black Africans. Not only are they completely different groups of people living on different continents for centuries, but at the moment, they’re not even equivalent racially in many ways. US Negro skulls do not look much like Black African skulls anymore.
The change in general is that US Black skulls have moved to an intermediate position between Africans and Europeans, in part due to interbreeding with Whites, but also due to improvements in environment, especially nutrition. Researchers also suggest genetic changes in skull size for both US Blacks and Whites.
The implications of this are interesting. Truesdell notes that the changes in favor of more progressive features and against more archaic features in both Black and White skulls were “in part genetic.” What this means is that both Blacks and Whites have been preferentially (eugenically) selecting for more progressive facial features and against more archaic features.
As progressive facial features tend to have higher IQ’s and archaic features tend to have lower IQ’s, the result was eugenic selection towards more attractive features and higher intelligence. In Blacks, these changes have occurred since 1900, while in Whites, they have been going on since colonial times.
In slave society, there probably was not a lot of progressive selection going on. With liberation, Blacks were freer to choose partners who could make more money. Since 1900, Blacks have been practicing eugenic selection towards Blacks who look “Whiter” and are more intelligent. In earlier times, Whiter Blacks could probably negotiate better in White society and could possibly make more money. But Black positive selection for Whiter features continues to this day.
All of the race realist ranting about dysgenics grows very tiresome. Humans are intelligent creatures. It’s only logical that the evolution that drove us to this point is ongoing. Selection for better looking and more intelligent partners is a wise choice for any intelligent mammal, and we are the smartest of them all.
Another White racist lie is that the Black-White achievement gap has not moved in the past 40 years, since we noticed it and declared war on it. In fact, the B-W achievement gap has shrunk by 1/3 over the past 30 yrs and there is evidence the decline was related to spending on education. Obviously, given IQ realities, there is going to be a point of diminishing returns here.
References
- Dickens, William T. & Flynn, James R. October 2006. Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples. Psychological Science.
Jantz, RL. July 2001. Cranial change in Americans: 1850-1975. J Forensic Sci. 46(4):784-7.
Truesdell, Nicole D. May 2005. Secular Change In The Skull Between American Blacks And Whites. MA Thesis. Baton Rogue, LA: Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Department of Geography and Anthropology.
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