Yes, many people would disagree, which is sad, because this is something that has been understood for over 100 years, yet our education system does not really like to say these things. My degree is in Biology, so my views come from that perspective.
Think about this though.
All of development can only be affected by two things. #1 biology, i.e. genetics; the DNA that says what to do. #2 is environment, which is really just action - reaction. There is nothing else, unless you want to consider supernatural issues, but lets just avoid that issue for now.
Your DNA is like a computer program. If you start a program, like Turbo Tax for example, the way the program works is defined by the computer code, but the input changes how the program responds. A human is the same way. The DNA forms a set of rules that will be followed, but the input (environment) determines how the program develops. Everything is reactionary.
So take Turbo Tax for example again. If you run it many times and put in the same numbers every time then you will get the same results every time. But if you do anything different then the results will be different.
This is to say that a person will develop uniquely depending on his environment, so like if you took someone and made 10 clones, raised one in poverty, one poor, one low middle class, one middle class, one in America, China, Africa, etc, each clone will develop differently. The DNA determines how the environment (input) affects development, so it is true that race does matter to some degree, but the difference between people of different races is often less than people within races, which is surprising, but true. A "black" man and a "white" may have more DNA in common than two black men.
So, what I'm getting at here is that RACE is not the issue, CULTURE is. When you break down the facts there is no way to deny this. Its really common sense though if we think about it. Black children adopted at a young age by middle class whites are more successful than blacks raised in poverty by black families. Obviously race is not the issue, the environment is.
The whole black/white issue is not even an issue, its a matter of culture and social situations.
Another great example of all this, and one that blacks need to get more educated on so they can use it as an argument, is the issue of "white races".
In Europe there was no idea of "whites". "Whites" is a new American idea. In the old world, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa people all recognize many smaller ethnic groups. A good example is the Irish in Great Britain. The Irish have been discriminated against by the Anglos for hundreds of years. The same attitudes that many whites have towards blacks in America the Anglos had to the Irish. They aid that the Irish were an inferior ethic group, stupid, lazy, unlawful, worthless, etc, that "by blood" they were inferior. The Irish have been discriminated against and poor for centuries there.
Now, in America, once all whites grouped together and saw themselves and WHITES, not separate ethnic groups, the Irish were no longer discriminated against, and now today in America the Irish are just as successful as any other Europeans.
So this is an example of how the perception of race creates the problem, not genetics. You have to really understand how oppressed the Irish were to really get this example, the Irish were close to where blacks in America were about 80 years ago in America. All that was needed for Irish people to be successful is for them to get out of their oppressed environment AND also for them to get out of their own culture and into a new culture with a fresh start.
I am positive that the issue in America with any oppressed minority is the exact same. The issue is not race at all, its environment, which is not to say just how whites treat blacks, but the black community itself too. Look at poor white people. Poor white people have poor white kids often, not because of genetics, but because kids growing up in a poor environment develop into the type of people who become poor.
Same with blacks, and on top of that they also have discrimination to deal with too.
So how does white trailer-park trash get out of poverty as a group? They can't, and neither can blacks in poverty. It gets even more complicated though.
Our economic system requires that a certain amount of people be in poverty. We can't get everyone out of poverty unless we change our economy. For example a janitor or garbage man, etc may work full time, and still be in poverty. Those jobs have to be done, so someone has to do it, yet if they don't pay well that means whoever is doing those jobs will always be in poverty. Every single full time job should have to pay a wage above the poverty level, but they don't. It does not matter if people work harder in those jobs, and those jobs HAVE to be filled so people can't just not do those jobs and get better jobs instead. Someone will have to take the jobs, and whoever that is, will be in poverty.
Our system also requires that a certain amount of people be unemployed. The Federal Reserve tries to keep unemployment above 4%. When unemployment gets too low wages goes up, which employers don't like, and which also contributes to inflation. So, the Fed manipulates interest rates in efforts to indirectly influence unemployment, driving it up when it goes under 5%. This means that there will always be people without a job no matter what and that in fact we could have 0% unemployment if our government wanted to allow that to happen, but that that would drive wages up dramatically and increase inflation, which is bad for the wealthy. Overall though what it means is that the system is designed to have people out of work, so blaming people who are out of work makes no sense. No matter what there will always be people out of work, the system will not allow for there not to be people out of work.
Right now, blacks makeup a disproportionate number of the unemployed and working poor. So, if we try to make the situation proportionate, yet we maintain a system were there will always be people in poverty and always be unemployed people then that must mean that we would have to force more whites into poverty for blacks to get out.
So this is getting to the real issues here. The problem is not race, and its not just culture or environment, it's also the entire system. AA starts having problems when people see that AA may be disadvantaging whites, which if AA were to really work like proposed it would disadvantage whites, because if unemployment is always going to be at least 5% then if fewer blacks make up that statistic then it means that other races must be making up that statistic. So, the fight to get out of poverty can never really be won unless the system changes, and it is impossible to expect the poor to do it, they can't, the wealthy have to do it by paying higher wages eliminating unemployment, but of course the wealthy don’t want to do that because the only way to do that w/o just causing useless inflation is to lower profits of the wealthy.
Here is a good interview on the Bell Curve, the book that claims that Blacks are "inferior" to whites:
http://www.skeptic.com/03.3.fm-sternberg-interview.html
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Sternberg: What I mean is that there is absolutely no relation between how heritable something is and the existence of a difference in group means. The most common example is height. Height has a heritability of greater than .9, but heights have increased quite dramatically in some countries like Japan and have also increased in our own country over the course of several generations. So despite the much higher heritability of height than anyone believes of intelligence, we see that height can increase. To take a more extreme example: there is a disease known as Phenylketonuria (PKU), which is 100% heritable and yet through an environmental intervention, namely withholding Phenylalanine from the diets of infants from birth, you can either reduce or eliminate the mental retardation that normally results. In other words, even when heritability is 1.00, environmental interventions still matter. There are different ways to look at intelligence. One is to do heritability statistics, which I've never found to be that helpful. Another way is to look at studies on intervention. For example, Dennis did a large study in Iran where he found that kids that were placed in Iranian orphanages, almost without exception, were mentally retarded, whereas the children who were quickly adopted before the age of two scored at normal levels on intelligence tests, roughly a 50-point difference in obtained IQ.
Skeptic: Are such results repeatable?
Sternberg: Yes. Obviously the environment of the Iranian orphanage was pretty bad and that's why you got that level of retardation. But if you look at the kinds of environments some of our least fortunate get, even in the United States, in the inner cities, they are not so hot either. Diamond performed studies on brain mass in rats and found that if you give them an enriched environment, it affects the brain, which becomes heavier and more convoluted.
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Skeptic: How is your more elaborate view of heritability and its limitations different from what Herrnstein and Murray say in The Bell Curve?
Sternberg: The way that book is written is to, I think, say X on page 605 in sentence 8, with an appropriate caution, and then invite the reader to a somewhat more extreme conclusion elsewhere. So if you were to ask, "Is there anywhere in The Bell Curve that explains what heritability truly is?" there probably is. If you were to ask, "What inference do Herrnstein and Murray invite their readers to draw?" they go beyond what they know. For example, with regard to race differences, Herrnstein and Murray invite the reader to conclude that race differences are due to genetics, even though they have no evidence of that, and they know it.
Sternberg: Yes, but there is evidence that they do not review at all. There is nothing in the book that suggests that race differences are genetic. They even say that. But what they do say is that is what we would infer given the data, even though probably somewhere else, they would have one sentence to the effect that there is one study. And they don't cite a number of studies that suggest that race differences are not genetic.
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Skeptic: Which then is your position on the question of race differences in IQ? We all see the 1 standard deviation difference in mean IQ if we give the tests to groups of Blacks and Whites. Is that mean difference the result of genetics, environment, both, or should we say at this point that we just don't know?
Sternberg: What we know is that almost any difference is some interaction between heredity and environment. But in terms of apportioning the difference, we have no idea. And I think that Herrnstein and Murray know that as well as do other psychologists. Like everyone else we don't like ambiguous situations, so some jump to conclusions even though I think at this point we don't have a very good idea of why we get that difference. Although we recognize that it has generally been decreasing over time.
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Sternberg: One example is taking studies that show that within group heritabilities have nothing to do with between group heritabilities and then insinuating that they do. Another example is the issue of causation and correlation. They know, and anyone who takes statistics knows, you can't draw any real causal conclusions from correlational data. Lots of things correlate with lots of things, IQ being one of them. To draw causal inferences from correlational data, which is what all their data are, is statistically incorrect. Another thing that many may not realize is that virtually all their data are based on one study, the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), which was not a study that was particularly representative of the United States population.
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Sternberg: Some years back in the early 1980s the government of Venezuela initiated a country-wide drive to improve the intellectual abilities of the children. They invited a number of researchers from Venezuela and abroad to come in. One program was initiated by Harvard, and Herrnstein was the head of that program. It was successful. They published the results in American Psychologist, which is a leading psychological journal, showing that there had been significant and impressive gains in IQ.
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Sternberg: I am not disagreeing that IQ is predictive of a lot of things. I'm not one of the extreme left-wingers who say that IQ tells you absolutely nothing. I don't agree with that. So to the extent that it predicts some level of success in pilot training, I don't have any argument with that. But I do argue with the idea that IQ is the end of the line. We have been working for about 10 years in the field of practical intelligence, predicting, for example, the success of managers and sales people, which are pretty practical occupations. We actually did a study at Brooks AFB and found that our measures of practical intelligence-that is, measures of how well you can go into an environment and figure out what you need to succeed in that environment and then actually do it-predict job success in managerial jobs and in sales jobs at least as well and arguably better than IQ tests. Moreover they do not correlate with IQ tests, which means that (a) IQ is not the only predictor, and (b) the kinds of predictors we have are relatively independent of IQ. That's not to say that one is important and the other is not. Rather, it says that both are important and that there's more to predicting success than just using IQs. If you want to predict success in jobs, I'm not saying that IQ is worthless, but I am saying that it's not the only thing you can use.
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Basically what this is all saying is that there may be a statistical difference between whites and blacks in America, but that environment is very much a part of that difference. Its more proof that observed differences in intelligence and achievement are not race based, but environment based, and that success is dependant on more than just intelligence, which again should be obvious. Success is dependant on opportunity, a variety of personal skills, education, luck, circumstances, etc.
Again, the average person never moves up in class. The average person born into poverty will die in poverty, the same person born into the middle class will die in the middle class, the same person born rich will die rich, its not a genetic issue. So, since we started out with virtually all blacks in poverty its not reasonable to expect that blacks as a group will be able to move themselves out of that position.
All of this goes back to old European misconceptions about "blood". The Europeans have always put a lot of stock in "bloodlines", with the idea that people are born better than others. That same attitude is still pervasive in America today. People may not think that DNA directly makes you successful, or well behaved, or whatever, but they probably don't really think about what exactly does. It's just a vague idea, like "bloodline". When you really analyze it though you see that there is nothing to the idea at all. Middle Class people don't give birth to "better" kids than poor people, the middle class environment creates better kids. Most people today still don't put near enough emphasis on environment and draw out the full conclusions that almost everything that we call "race" in America is really just a product of the environment, along with all the things that people complain about "blacks", including test scores, language, work ethic, and even intelligence.
