ABSTRACT
Most persons experience some difficulty in discussing the topic of race differences in intelligence – a difficulty over and above that which is ordinarily inherent in the scientific study of any complex phenomenon. There is an understandable reluctance to come to grips with the problem, to come to grips with it, that is to say, in the same straightforward way that we would try to approach the investigation of any other problems in the behavioral sciences. This reluctance is manifested in a variety of ‘symptoms’ found in most writings and discussions of the psychology of race differences, particularly differences in mental ability: a tendency to remain on the remotest fringes of the subject, to sidestep central questions; to blur the issues and tolerate a degree of vagueness in definitions, concepts, and inferences that would be unseemly in any other realm of scientific discourse; to express an unwarranted degree of skepticism about reasonably well established quantitative methods and measurements; to deny or belittle already generally accepted facts – accepted, that is, when brought to bear on inferences outside the realm of race differences; to demand practically impossible criteria of certainty before even seriously proposing or investigating genetic hypotheses, as contrasted with extremely uncritical attitudes toward purely environmental hypotheses; a failure to distinguish clearly between scientifically answerable aspects of the question and the moral, political, and social policy issues; a tendency to beat dead horses and to set up straw men on what is represented as the genetic side of the argument; appeals to the notion that the topic is either really too unimportant to be worthy of scientific curiosity or too complex, or too difficult, or even forever impossible for any kind of research to be feasible, or that answers to key questions are fundamentally ‘unknowable’ in any scientifically acceptable sense; and, finally, the complete denial of intelligence and race as realities, or as quantifiable attributes, or as variables capable of being related to one another, thereby dismissing the subject altogether.
