Black Intelligence December
10, 2007 WPFW 89.3 Washington
1
Black Intelligence
Transcript of a Commentary by Ambrose I. Lane, Sr.
December 10, 2007 We Ourselves WPFW 89.3 Washington
Ambrose
: Top of the morning, top of the week this is We Ourselves
and Im Ambrose I. Lane, Sr.
You know over several decades Ive watched the major press in this
country. And uh they
do things in such a way often that you dont
pick up on whats actually being done. Yesterdays New York Times
and Washington Post carried articles in the oped
section that raised
questions about black intelligence. Now you know Ive learned over the
years that even though the article cant be positive it raises an issue
that never should be raised because its a false issue and it keeps the
division going in this country, keeps racism going.
The one in the Washington Post Im going to read it for you, titled
White May Be Might, But Not Always Right.
And then I go to the New
York Times and we have an article in the New York Times titled
All
Brains Are The Same Color
and then it has a little thing called Putting
the rest the Myth of Racial Difference in IQ
.
This is 2007, why are we still doing this? And its very clear. This
leadership of this country always wants to stimulate racial antagonism.
Always wants to make the whites feel superior and blacks fill that they
are inferior. And even though an article might be positive by knocking
down that theory, it has raised it. And by raising it, its in the minds of
those who read it and talk about it.
Im going to read this one to you so youll understand what Im talking
about. This is by Khalil G. Muhammad,
White May Be Might, But Not
Always Right
. Listen to what he says.
Recently I showed my college students a
YouTube clip of
Bill Cosby
's and Alvin Poussaint's appearance on "The
Oprah Winfrey
Show." After hearing Cosby plead for poor
blacks to embrace their parenting responsibilities, many of
the students said they wished their parents had followed
his advice. They regretted that some of their peers had
done poorly in school, abused drugs and alcohol, and run
afoul of the law. These problems, they agreed, might have
been avoided with more supervision at home.
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10, 2007 WPFW 89.3 Washington
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They might have been the perfect audience for a Cosby
townhall
lecture on the dangers of selfdestructive
values
in black America. They might also have been perfect
illustrations of the growing "values gap" between poor and
middleclass
blacks described in a widely cited recent
Pew
Research Center
poll.
Except almost all my students are white.
Cosby and the recent Pew study are the latest in a long
fingerwagging
tradition of instructing poor blacks to lift
themselves up by their bootstraps and reject pathologically
"black" values. Today, rap culture is usually presented as
Exhibit A, but strains of the same argument have cropped
up for more than a century. If blacks would just get their
act together, this old story goes, all the social inequalities
between them and the rest of society would disappear.
In its coverage of the Pew report
findings, National Public
Radio
asked whether some blacks were lagging behind
because they were choosing not to become "closer to
whites in their values." Unfortunately, this line of
questioning reinforces one of the most persistent myths in
America, that white is always right. The myth reflects an
enduring double standard based on "white" and "black"
explanations for social problems. And it assumes that
"white" culture is the gold standard for judging everyone,
despite its competing ideologies, its contradictions and its
flaws, including racism.
The masquerade began over a hundred years ago. Shortly
after the end of slavery, sociologists and demographers
began presenting research on black failure and struggle as
"indisputable" proof of black inferiority. One of the first
studies was released in 1896, when the leading racerelations
demographer of the period, Frederick L. Hoffman,
analyzed census data showing that blacks were doing
worse than whites in mortality, health, employment,
education and crime. The problem was not racism, he
argued, but "race traits and tendencies."
To him, the civil rights acts of the 1860s and 1870s had
leveled the playing field. Blacks should be left to compete
against whites on their own and face the inevitable. The
Black Intelligence December
10, 2007 WPFW 89.3 Washington
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black man, he wrote, "has usually but one avenue out of
his dilemma the
road to prison or to an early grave."
At the same time, when explaining rising rates of crime,
suicide and mentalhealth
problems among whites,
Hoffman blamed industrialization and the strains of
"modern life." He called for a reordering of the nation's
economic priorities. Hoffman's study coincided with and
provided justification for the
Supreme Court's notorious
Plessy v. Ferguson
decision, which legalized segregation.
As segregation took hold, there was a powerful need to
minimize the role of racism as a factor in explaining racial
disparities. The "Cosby" role at the start of Jim Crow was
first played by
Booker T. Washington. Counseling blacks to
conquer their inferiority, he repudiated civil rights activism
in favor of selfhelp
and moral regeneration.
Many whites loved Washington, and his ideas were echoed
by liberal social scientists such as the psychologist G.
Stanley Hall, who instructed black people to stop
sympathizing "with their own criminals" and "accept
without whining patheticism and corroding selfpity
[their]
present situation, prejudice and all."
But when Hall turned his focus on whites, his research on
adolescent psychology directly influenced national efforts
to protect them from the ravages of industrial capitalism.
Drawing on his work, the childwelfare
activist Jane
Addams established Hull House in
Chicago at first to help
immigrant families adjust to American life, and later to
save thousands of Chicago's white youth from lives of
crime, violence and drug abuse attributed to "modern city
conditions." But black children were not generally welcome
at Hull House. Addams claimed that similar problems
among black youth were due to the race's "belated" moral
development, manifested in poor parenting and a lack of
"social restraint."
The pioneering black social scientist W.E.B. Du Bois
challenged this first generation of white liberals and social
scientists, including Hoffman, on the flawed assumptions
and racial double standards in their studies and in their
practices. But when Du Bois tried to argue that pathology
Black Intelligence December
10, 2007 WPFW 89.3 Washington
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knows no color, he was ignored, criticized and dismissed
by his white peers as an angry black man with, as one
sociologist put it, a "chip on his shoulder."
Du Bois's frustrations led him to leave academia for a life
of antiracist
activism. In 1910, the year he became
director of research and publicity for the
NAACP, he
warned that "whiteness" was becoming the new basis of
the nation's consciousness. "Are we not coming more and
more day by day to making the statement, 'I am white,'
the one fundamental tenet of our practical morality?" he
asked.
In today's era of hiphop,
Du Bois's warning still goes
unheeded. If rap music is so bad, why are white kids its
major consumers? And by what value system should we
judge the large media companies that publish and
distribute hiphop
or,
really, gangsta rap, its most
popular and sinister cousin?
Were "white values" on display two years ago when the
federal government failed to adequately respond to one of
the greatest natural disasters in American history?
If lowerclass
"black" values are so distinct from those of
the rest of America, particularly the "white values"
supposedly now embraced by middleand
upperclass
blacks, why, according to the Pew report, do less than a
third of white Americans graduate from college? Are
legions of whites similarly devaluing higher education? Are
they "acting black"?
If lowerclass
black values are so peculiar, why do whites
report the same or higher levels of illegal drug use as
blacks, as numerous studies show?
What of underperforming white schoolchildren in rural
America, the
Great Plains, Appalachia or the Deep South?
Are they "acting black" because they can't compete with
their upwardly mobile suburban counterparts?
Today's liberals still empathize with America's invisible
white working poor, who they warn are being "nickel and
dimed" to the point of near homelessness. But why the
Black Intelligence December
10, 2007 WPFW 89.3 Washington
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empathy? Isn't their poverty really a function of their
choosing
to embrace their hidden blackness?
Du Bois's scholarship and activism helped pave the way for
the modern civil rights movement, which helped exorcize
the ghost of America's Jim Crow past. That he was right
about racism but that we still continue to accept the same
flawed thinking about race and social problems suggests a
powerful and enduring paradox.
If we insist on explaining racial disparities in terms of black
vs. white values, then we need to explain what exactly
white values are. When we do, we'll find that whiteness is
an inadequate standard by which to judge good black
people vs. bad ones.
As my students would tell you, the real white world is as
pathological, as respectable and as diverse as the black
one.
1
Now this is a Post Oped
and its written by Khalil Muhammad who is
an assistant professor of history at Indiana University.
Now Im not going to read all of the, all of the New York Times article,
just a few sentences. That is entitled
All Brains Are The Same Color by
Richard E. Nisbett. Now he is a professor of psychology at the
University of Michigan, and is the author of The Geography of
Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why. He
begins his article;
JAMES WATSON, the 1962 Nobel laureate, recently
asserted that he was inherently gloomy about the
prospect of Africa and its citizens because all our social
policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the
same as ours whereas all the testing says not really.
Dr. Watsons remarks created a huge stir because they
implied that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and
the controversy resulted in his resignation as chancellor of
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But was he right? Is there
a genetic difference between blacks and whites that
condemns blacks in perpetuity to be less intelligent?
2
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10, 2007 WPFW 89.3 Washington
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And then he goes on to, to debunk this whole theory thats been
around for well over a hundred years. Now, Ive seen this over and
over again by the press, the establishment corporate press. They get it
going because the want, they want to make certain that the general
public, at least the reading general public will discuss it among
themselves so that the people will spread the same stuff that theyve
been spreading for well over a hundred years. You know most people
dont realize it but they apply the same kind of reasoning to everyone
that they defeat.
For example, right now in Iraq what are we saying about the people of
Iraq? Now heres a country that weve destroyed. Weve killed maybe
close to a million of their people, close to a million. Weve driven out,
because the conditions we have created, weve driven out several
millions more. They are now in other countries bordering Iraq. And
were insisting that the Iraqi parliament produce for us a law that turns
over most of the wealth in their oil industry to our corporations. But
what is our press saying? What in the world is wrong with these
people in Iraq? Why dont they get their act together?
Weve done it everywhere weve been. We did the same thing in
Vietnam the
same thing in Korea. And weve always done that to
African Americans in this country. After the Civil War we insisted that
the newly freed slaves, whod been slaves in this country for so many
centuries, pick ourselves up by our own boot straps. And weve always
had fools among us who would say the same thing because they have
been able to for example Bill
Cosby whos an excellent comedian.
Bill has made a huge amount of money but they let him know his
money didnt mean anything when he tried to buy a television
network. They let him know that all his money didnt mean a thing.
But here he is spouting the same nonsense and in all of his stuff Id
like, I would love for him to have said something about 40 years of
planned unemployment in black neighborhoods in this country. Thats
what weve had for the last 40 years; double digit unemployment. Id
like for him to say something about that. And for Puissant to join him
in this without talking about the truth is awful.
But here they start again. They started first with Bill Cosby, then Juan
Williams, and then our Supreme Court Justice, and now these oped
pages of two of the most powerful newspapers in this country. I just
want you to understand what theyre doing. Ive seen it so many times
over several decades. Just be aware. Theyre playing the same old
game again to stir up racism in this country. Just be aware of it. Now
Black Intelligence December
10, 2007 WPFW 89.3 Washington
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well take your calls at 5880893
or 2025880893
and you disagree or
agree.
Wed just like to hear your thoughts on these matters. Ive seen it so
much, over and over again, decade after decade. And uhin
fact the
New York Times article does a little tracing of that history, of how
weve done it. One after another from Dr. Jensen, Arthur Jensen in the
1969 article in the Harvard Educational Review and after him the Bell
Curve Charles
Murray and Richard Herrnstein. Over and over again
the establishment has done this to keep racism going.
Closing Show Remarks
Well I want to thank all of you for calling in and for those who we were
unable to get to, thank you so much. Be on the be aware that they
are starting it again. When the Times, the New York Times and the
Washington Post carry oped
pieces about racism you know theyre
starting the same BS again. So be aware and spread the word. Take
care and Ill see you again on Friday.
Commentary Notes:
1. Muhammad, Khalil G. "White May Be Might, But Not Always
Right"
Washington Post, 9 December 2007, sec. B, p.03.
2. Nisbett, Richard E. "All Brains Are The Same Color"
New York
Times
, 9 December 2007, sec. Opinion.