IQ and Race

There's a good piece here about IQ and race, and helps explain how a genius like James Watson stepped, unnecessarily, into a minefield. We do have these prejudices built into our society--my Asia-born daughter is often assumed to be a math and science natural (only partly true). I have heard a couple Asian-American parents complain that that assumption about their children works against them when they're actually struggling in a subject. On the other hand, that assumption isn't as bad as the opposite, that, based on their skin color, kids can't achieve.

From the article:

There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education, and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else’s—coming in somewhere around 103. Having worked their way into the upper reaches of the occupational scale, and taken note of how much the professions value abstract thinking, Asian-American parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore scientific spectacles. “Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high I.Q. rather than the reverse,” Flynn concludes, reminding us that in our discussions of the relationship between I.Q. and success we often confuse causes and effects. “It is not easy to view the history of their achievements without emotion,” he writes. That is exactly right. To ascribe Asian success to some abstract number is to trivialize it.