One essay by Edwin Young

My How Easily We Hid Bright Lights under Proverbial 'Biblical Bushel'
by Edwin Young

A memory popped into awareness yesterday that, in the light of the wave of African American bright lights flashing across TV screens lately, strikes me as the revisionist idea du jour.

Many decades ago, there appeared an erudite, authoritative article by a renowned psychologist in the American Psychologist. The article was about research conducted on the comparative IQs of whites and blacks. No one was surprised to read that his findings of an average IQ of around 90 for blacks suggested their intellectual inferiority. However, a few sentences near the end of the article reported the puzzling statistic that, proportionate to their respective races, there were more blacks at the very highest end of the Bell Curve (remember, this was many decades ago). I never saw any further research or printed comments about this ‘puzzling’, counter-intuitive, phenomenon. Neither did I ever hear it mentioned by my psychology professors over the years. It faded into the dark corner of psychology archives. Now, isn’t that a surprise.

What then would be that finding’s implications for white racial superiority? Hmmm, not only ‘white men can’t jump’ in athletics but, perhaps, not as many could not jump into the highest fractions of a percentile on the IQ Bell Curve.

Now, of course, we see that the earlier average 90 IQ for blacks was purely an artifact of our centuries’ old ‘white’ cultural bias and educational suppression. It is prominently obvious that the effects of culture with respect to its role in shaping everything about people of different races within our culture (and other nations as well) are that they can be either devastating or powerfully advantageous, depending upon your racial identity.

More than the prior injustice for centuries of slavery requires repair today. What is needed now is a remedial course for white intellectuals (and corporate and political leaders as well) concerning the role of cultural bias in defining and therefore shaping the ‘nature and characteristics’ of races. Where this remediation is particularly is with respect to the design and interpretation of psychological research on racial intelligence and other characteristics.



Author bio:

Edwin Young is working on a book tentatively called, "Can There Be a Paradigm Shift in Psychotherapy?" Links to some of his essays can be found at The Natural Systems Institute.