I'm not sure what you're hinting at with your remark about racial disparities with regard to education, IQ and culture. Right now your comment looks pretty racist.
But compare the average black man and the average white man. The average black man has a lower IQ (Google it, many citations), somewhat different culture (more likely to have grown up in poverty, more likely to speak in AAVE, more likely to have come from a broken home, etc), and worse education (likely went to worse schools as a kid, less likely to have gone to college, etc).
Maybe I am racist for writing that, but I think it would be more racist to ignore those facts, because that would lead to ignoring the problems and not trying to help disadvantaged groups.
Black people (and other minorities) are being actively discriminated against. In terms of the neighborhoods they live in (white flight), law enforcement (stop and frisk, minimum sentences, racial profiling), employment, housing (mortgage applications) and so on. This active discrimination is an ongoing and constant problem that goes all the way back to apartheid. Black people will do better when white people stop holding them back.
Conflating black culture and active discrimination has racist connotations. For instance appalling Wall Street behavior is not condemned as a failing of white culture, but street crime is erroneously attributed as a failing of black culture. There are a thousand other examples. Black culture: music, food, dance, art, speech are not to blame. No more than white culture is to blame for WW2.
It's part of the racist discourse where environmental factors are described as if they're innate failings of people who are genetically no different from anybody else.
Now I don't believe you're a racist person (you probably don't think group X is inferior to group Y), but the arguments you make have racist connotations for the reasons I gave above.
When white people move out of a black neighborhood, it is "white flight" and it holds blacks back.
White people! Stay exactly where you are!
The effects of gentrification and white flight demonstrate how ingrained the bias against black people and other minorities still is.
And yet, my original post is now deleted, so we can go along pretending these problems don't exist.
In case you really are unaware and averse to Googling, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#United_St...
Rushton & Jensen (2005) write that, in the United States, self-identified blacks and whites have been the subjects of the greatest number of studies. They state that the black-white IQ difference is about 15 to 18 points or 1 to 1.1 standard deviations (SDs), which implies that between 11 and 16 percent of the black population have an IQ above 100 (the general population median). ... Roth et al. (2001), in a review of the results of a total of 6,246,729 participants on other tests of cognitive ability or aptitude, found a difference in mean IQ scores between blacks and whites of 1.1 SD. Consistent results were found for college and university application tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (N = 2.4 million) and Graduate Record Examination (N = 2.3 million), as well as for tests of job applicants in corporate sections (N = 0.5 million) and in the military (N = 0.4 million).
Or you can just ignore the world around you and not be troubled by the problems minorities are facing.
Hey, did you know that the unemployment rate is higher for blacks than whites? Does citing that statistic also make me a bigot? Does it make you feel better to ignore that problem too?
So to be clear: there is no serious debate about race and IQ to be had. There are no insights to be gained from Race-IQ research.
I don't believe -- not for a second -- that a discussion about race and IQ helps minorities. The idea that we have to engage in a discussion on race and IQ which is based on racist premises otherwise "we are not troubled by the problems minorities are facing" is ludicrous.
Also see http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/the-race...
I could replace "IQ" with various other metrics like "SAT scores" or "high school graduation rates" or whatever, since they all correlate to some degree. Do you think that would do a better job of getting my point across? People seem to really dislike IQ tests.
The entire reason why racism is bad is because it affects the opportunities and quality of life of minorities. If racism had no measurable effect on anything it wouldn't be a real thing. So any thinking person would expect racism to have an effect on SAT scores and high school graduation rates.
Talking about race and IQ as if it has no history is like talking about a sauwastika as if it were just a symbol that represents balance. Talking about "SAT scores" or "high school graduation rates" would absolutely help, simply because of historical context.
There are many more things to be aware of in order to talk sensibly about race though. First of which is that the concepts of "black" and "white" are cultural inventions, and have no biological meaning. So the very idea of trying to measure the IQs of black/white people is unscientific silliness.
However,
the concepts of "black" and "white" are cultural inventions, and have no biological meaning
That's not true. If you take a look human genetic data, clusters very clearly appear which correspond with races. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/05/why-race-as-a...
To deny that is unscientific silliness.
This puts it better than I can, so I'll just provide the link: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-... (And I'm aware of the irony)
The answer isn't to just completely discard the concepts of races, species, planets, fruits, colors, and many other things. It's to understand that all of those things are real scientific concepts, but their precise definitions depend on the context of use.
Additionally, the difference is that race is a product of racism, not of science. This is a historical fact. The concept of race has no scientific value. It has historical and sociological importance, though, and we should seek to understand that.
In a perfectly rational world researchers could research anything and the world would only pay attention based on the merit of the research itself. We don't live in that world. Research on race and IQ today has predictable consequences: it legitimizes racist prejudices.
If you want to stop scientists from using the word "race", at least propose an alternative. Like people who don't like that male pronouns are used for gender-neutral cases in English at least propose alternatives such the singular "they", "he/she", etc. If you think scientists need a new word for "race" because other people have poisoned it so much, your cause would probably be more successful if you actually tried to propose and promote that new word. Because scientists aren't going to just stop all research related to "race", that would be ridiculous.
"Broad cluster of people with fairly similar genes relative to other broad clusters of people" doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...
So from my perspective we're making good progress already, although you may not see it as such.
If you had not brought up IQ, and instead educational opportunities and such, there would have been no controversy. Yes, black people are in worse position than white people when it comes to education - this is very uncontroversial. No need to bring up things like IQ in order to make that point.