Statement #3: The difference in IQ test scores between African Americans and non-Hispanic white Americans can be attributed almost entirely to different patterns of socialization and environmental factors.
The history of the race and intelligence controversy concerns and focuses on the historical enlargement of a debate, mainly in the United States of America, with the indication to potential explanations of group differences in scores on intelligence tests or IQ tests. Also the correlation between race and intelligence has been a major matter of debate in both the popular science category and academic research since the early 20th century. Even though it has in no way been decided if there are systematic differences between …show more content…
The very first test researchers conducted showed dramatic differences in IQ test results between different population groups in the United States and it was the actual tests of United States Army recruits in World War I. “In the 1920s groups of eugenics lobbyists argued that this demonstrated that African-Americans and certain immigrant groups were of inferior intellect to Anglo-Saxon whites due to innate biological differences, using this as an argument for policies of racial segregation. Soon, other studies appeared, contesting these conclusions and arguing instead that the Army tests had not adequately controlled for the environmental factors such as socio-economic and educational inequality between African-Americans and Whites.” (Shilpa 2006). The debate came out once again in the year 1969, when Arthur Jensen championed the view that for genetic reasons Africans were less intellectual than whites and that education for African-American children was therefore doomed to be ineffective. In the year 1994, the book called The Bell Curve, disputed that social inequality in the United Sates could largely be explained as a result of IQ differences between races and separate individuals rather than being their main cause, and regenerated the public and …show more content…
Predominantly touchy in the ongoing debate has been the meaning of both the concept of "race" and the concept "intelligence", and especially whether they can in fact be independently defined and operationalized and continue to work. While several environmental factors have been shown to affect group differences in intelligence, it has not been established that they can inform the entire disparity of the situation. On the other hand, no genetic factor has been conclusively shown to have a causal relation with group difference in intelligence test scores. Recent summaries of the debate call for more research into the topic to determine the relative contributions of environmental and genetic factors in explaining the apparent IQ disparity among racial groups. The following environmental factors are some of those suggested as explaining a portion of the differences in average IQ between races. These factors are not mutually exclusive with one another, and some may in fact contribute directly to others. Furthermore, the relationship between genetics and environmental factors may be complicated. “The differences in socioeconomic environment for a child may be due to differences in genetic IQ for the parents, and the differences in average brain size between races could