Developing News: Share Your Thoughts

[Tulane BLSA]

By now, many of us have heard about the Harvard 3L whose closed-minded
sentiments were made public through a virally forwarded e-mail. For
those who haven't, you may want to get the backstory from Huffington
Post (http://huff.to/dbpUQl) , or from AboveTheLaw.com (http://bit.ly/
cxiRtk). Reproduced below, you'll find what the student (whose name is
Stephanie Grace, per some reports) had to say.

Read on, and share in an open discussion on this post:

"… I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans
are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I
could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right
variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as
white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things
are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people
are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:)
Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to
prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in
mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some
part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised
apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies
will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or
give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that
controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible
that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I
didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that
cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of
disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income
do account for some raw differences). I would just like some
scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard
given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of
Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might
think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent,
since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the
slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike,
African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little
violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook
white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not
fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic,
and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to
“explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be
some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic
counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in
the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion
in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find
data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants
someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and
raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all
equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like
intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.
Please don’t pull a Larry Summers on me,
[name omitted]"