Black Americans and Intelligence

For a great deal of my adult life the topic of intelligence and race has intrigued me. I remember well many discussions (typically they were heated arguments) with colleagues over the matter, with quite a few of those colleagues citing the results of standardized tests and SAT/ACT scores by race to "prove" their opinion that blacks just didn't have it intellectually, a point I refused to accept since I thought those differences were cultural and were related to inadvertent bias in test construction.

For the last several days I have been reading about the professional research of Claude M. Steele, a prominent American social psychologist whose life's work has been into that very topic. His book, Whistling Vivaldi, was mentioned by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me, which prompted my interest. Although Steele is currently the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost of the University of California -- Berkeley, when he was actively engaged in full-time research his work focused almost entirely on self-image, self-affirmation, stereotype threat, and identity threat, all of which turn out to be closely related.

Since the book, Whistling Vivaldi, is basically a summary of nearly four decades of empirical research by Steele and many colleagues in the U.S. and Europe, I can’t possibly do it justice in a scant paragraph or two in this post. But, it is a breathtakingly significant work that demonstrates through those decades of research that when stereotype and identity threats are removed, racial as well as gender differences in test scores simply disappear. He also demonstrates that those threats are related to higher incidences of elevated blood pressure in black Americans, physiological conditions that do not characterize black Africans and that are almost certainly caused by the tensions characteristic of black-white relations in the U.S.

I know most people lead very busy lives but I fervently hope readers of this post find the time to examine Steele’s groundbreaking research. Although his book was not a quick read for me because it addresses unfamiliar topics in social psychology, it is an extraordinarily powerful work that is critical to a more complete understanding of the real world elements of race in America.