Some elements of the Right, led by noxious figures like Charles Murray and
Steve Sailer, have insisted on pushing their racist view that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races. I have written on this
previously. Sailer wrote a few days ago:
Now, Lynn has a new book out, Race Differences in Intelligence, which tabulates 620 separate studies of average IQ from 100 different countries with a total sample size of 813,778. That's nearly four times the number of studies summarized in his book with Vanhanen.
. . . A common stratagem [of the Left], I've found, is to assume that IQ differences matter only if they are genetic in origin. Since no decent, civilized, right-thinking person could possibly believe that racial differences in IQ have any genetic basis, then racial and national differences in average IQ can't possibly exist.
Except--they do exist.
Racism does not exist say these racists. It's all in the genes. Now what will they say about this study:
On tests of intelligence, Blacks systematically score worse than Whites, whereas Asians frequently outperform Whites. Some have argued that genetic differences across races account for the gap. Using a newly available nationally representative data set that includes a test of mental function for children aged eight to twelve months, we find only minor racial differences in test outcomes (0.06 standard deviation units in the raw data) between Blacks and Whites that disappear with the inclusion of a limited set of controls. The only statistically significant racial difference is that Asian children score slightly worse than those of other races. To the extent that there are any genetically-driven racial differences in intelligence, these gaps must either emerge after the age of one, or operate along dimensions not captured by this early test of mental cognition.
(Emphasis supplied.) Sort of blows up that "it's the genes" theory to any but the most hardened racists. Which means Murray and Sailer and Co. of course.