Race, IQ, And Affirmative Action

Now this is sad. Andrew Sullivan tries to answer my post from the other day. There, I picked through Will Saletan's data and asked, "So what's the point of all this? What're the implications? So far as I can tell, there are none. We don't deal with people in aggregate groups. We deal with them as individuals. If 'individual IQ can't be predicted from race,' then none of this actually matters." Andrew, sensing a challenge to the importance of the "black-people-are-dumber" thesis, strikes:

Two words: affirmative action. That policy asserts as an irrefutable fact that any racial discrepancies in college selection are a function of either college-imposed or societal racism. Once the left put the blank slate on the table, and actively supported racial discrimination as public policy as a consequence, they begged the question of whether they had the empirical data to back up their social engineering. Over to Will. Abolish affirmative action and these questions can and will become less salient. How about it?

Oof. Yes, let's turn it over to Will. Remember, the following comes from Sullivan's ally on this subject:

Hereditarians admit that by their own reading of the data, nongenetic factors account for 20 percent to 50 percent of IQ variation. They think malnutrition, disease, and educational deprivation account for a big portion of the 30-point IQ gap between whites and black Africans. They think alleviation of these factors in the United States has helped us halve the deficit. Transracial adoption studies validate this. Korean adoption studies suggest a malnutrition effect of perhaps 10 IQ points. And everyone agrees that the black-white IQ gap closed significantly during the 20th century, which can't have been due to genes.

So, by Sullivan's own evidentiary support, 20%-50% of the gap is environmental, which is to say, a partial product of the deep inequities afflicting American society, inequities that trace back to the hundreds of years in which we subjugated African-Amerixans, crushed their economic and educational opportunities, and isolated them in impoverished communities where they could seek work and respect from one another. This is why, of course, the great American IQ success story, the halving of the IQ gap during the 20th century, occurred -- because we began to reverse some of these inequities.

Now, I don't know how powerful Sullivan thinks affirmative action is, but it's certainly not 20%-50% of the variation. That said, for Sullivan's own read of the data, 20%-50% of the variation Sullivan claims to want to reverse -- rather than just repeatedly point at -- is environmental, the result of low incomes in African-American community, of poor schooling, of education inequality. It would seem that he should not only support affirmative action, but much more besides. Indeed, the history of IQ in this country, the massive closing of the gap that occurred in the 20th Century, is powerful and inspiring proof that better policies and more opportunity can do much to erase the IQ gap that Sullivan is so concerned by. And yet he seems to think that this data, which, again, shows up to half of the variation being environmental, as proof that all policies meant to rectify cross-racial inequalities are deeply misguided.

It is, to say the least, peculiar.