Ruben Bolling On Race And IQ

Posted on December 30, 2007 by Ampersand

bolling_iq.jpg

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16 Responses to Ruben Bolling On Race And IQ

  1. 1
    Charles Brubaker says:
    December 30, 2007 at 5:30 am

    Reason # 1,268 on why “Tom the Dancing Bug” is awesome.

    Speaking of “Tom,” it seems that Washington Post is thinking of canceling the strip in January. If you read the newspaper, I hope you take the time to write to the editors on why this is a bad idea.

  2. 2
    Madeline says:
    December 30, 2007 at 9:05 am

    Ha! Excellent.

  3. 3
    fathima says:
    December 30, 2007 at 3:08 pm

    /grin.

    but where can we see more of this comic? is it not online somewhere?

  5. 5
    pookapooka says:
    December 31, 2007 at 8:21 am

    Exactly.

  6. 6
    pookapooka says:
    December 31, 2007 at 8:28 am

    Oh, and Charles, I loved the truthtelling of this strip so much, I went to the gocomics space and — the Dec. 22 strip pretty much indicts the Post (as well as other lazy/compromised “serious” media) right up the yinyang. No wonder they want to get rid of him. Can’t have the jester speak too much truth in the king’s court with all the sycophantage to hear, can we now.

  7. 7
    Raznor says:
    December 31, 2007 at 8:53 pm

    I can proudly say that I’m the one who sent Ruben Bolling an e-mail asking him about this specific toon thanks to an Alas discussion where I wanted to reference it, but couldn’t find it on the internets. He e-mailed me back saying he’d publish it this week. So, hurray.

    This was the first Tom the Dancing Bug I ever read way back when I was 13. And downright brilliant, I say.

  8. 8
    Glamour Diva says:
    January 2, 2008 at 10:34 am

    Love, love, love this! Brilliant!

  9. 9
    RonF says:
    January 2, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    Hey, when he’s right, he’s right. Good for him.

  10. 10
    Phil says:
    January 3, 2008 at 11:50 pm

    I do think this is funny, although it only partly captures the curious, quasi-scientific nature of IQ measurement.

    If IQ a meaningless number, we should jettison its use across the board. It’s not just meaningless when we compare races, but always.

    If we advance a claim that IQ is only meaningless when we compare races, then it’s not really a scientific claim; it’s more socially nuanced than that.

  11. 11
    Individ-ewe-al says:
    January 4, 2008 at 2:16 am

    Phil, I wouldn’t mind jettisoning IQ measurement altogether, as I do think it is pretty close to being meaningless. The point of the measurement was originally to distinguish between two broad classes of people with special educational needs: those who are able to do most intellectual tasks with the same facility as anyone else but who have trouble with reading and therefore do badly in school, versus those who can’t learn to read for the same reasons that they struggle with understanding many other things that people of their age are expected to be able to understand.

    It is certainly meaningless as a dick-sizing contest to show who’s the “most intelligent” among people who are perfectly competent at meeting educational goals. And it’s certainly meaningless as a metric for comparing the relative “intelligence” of large groups such as races. I don’t think it’s all that hot for categorizing people with intellectual disabilities either, but at least you can put a case for it.

    Even given the most generous interpretation of what IQ measurements can tell you: it’s not meaningful for adults, it’s not meaningful for whole populations, it’s not meaningful for people of normal intelligence or better (whatever that may mean). That’s without going into whether there’s such a thing as intelligence which can be collapsed to a single variable. And I’m not even touching on the question of whether what is popularly understood by “race” actually maps onto anything biologically meaningful.

  12. 12
    Demonspawn says:
    January 4, 2008 at 1:02 pm

    The only question I’d have about this comic is why Ruben seems to think the only people who were enslaved in the history of the world were black. If slavery was the cause of lower IQ scores, shouldn’t all previously-enslaved people have lower IQ test scores?

  13. 13
    Phil says:
    January 5, 2008 at 7:59 pm

    Individ-
    Agreed; I can see how IQ could be a tool for understanding/teaching children who have a learning disability unrelated to intelligence. And I think there is such a thing as clinically low intelligence; I suppose IQ is one of the best gauges we have to determine if a defendant lacked the intellectual capacity to know what they were doing.

    That said, if we put intelligence on a continuum of scientific things we understand (water freezes at 0 degrees celsius) and things we don’t understand (say, ESP, if it even exists), I’d say intelligence is somewhere in the vicinity of acupuncture and “the purpose of dreams.” It’s a big, multifaceted thing.

    That said, I think it will be years or decades before this can be even discussed without dogma interfering. As you said, “race” is not a cut-and-dried biological concept. Our social construction of “races” is actually just a collection of genetic traits which are likely to occur in people whose ancestors were at one time on geographically separate parts of the globe. We take it for granted that some traits are genetic and are linked to our ancestors: being prone to sickle-cell anemia, having longer eyelashes, having red hair, etc. If intelligence is linked to our genes (and it’s a big if), then there isn’t a reason yet to assume that all of our socially constructed groupings of peoples must nonetheless have equal average intelligence.

    However, we’re not at a place where even intellectuals and scientists can discuss such a possibility without political ramifications, because the misinterpretation of the data is so unsavory, with so many potential social side effects, that it makes even people who think the data are accurate to be a little queasy.

    Crucially, I’d say the average American (no pun intended) doesn’t understand a lot about statistics and what they really mean.

  14. Pingback: White privilege, as drawn by Ruben Bolling « white noise

  15. 14
    sylphhead says:
    February 11, 2008 at 10:12 pm

    Assuming your query was in good faith, Demonspawn, the notion of politically and economically disadvantaged minorities scoring lower on IQ tests is actually quite common:

    Yet Japan has not overcome its divide. For if the three million burakumin, amounting to a bit more than 2 percent of the population, are now rarely burdened by overt discrimination, they face the same problems as some minority groups in America: disproportionate poverty, high crime rates, low education levels, many single mothers, dependency on welfare benefits and resentment from a public that believes they are getting special help.

    The issues are those that Americans associate with race; in Japan the burakumin are not a different race at all.

    They are an occupational minority group rather than a racial one. Indistinguishable in appearance from other Japanese, they were discriminated against simply because they were the descendants of people whose jobs were considered ritually unclean, like butchering animals, tanning skins, making leather goods, digging graves and handling corpses.

    A 35-year-old study in Japan found that buraku children had lower I.Q.’s than non-buraku children in the same public schools. Scholars who examined the data say the differences reflect general apathy and lack of self-esteem, a result of discrimination and contempt from society as a whole.

    The fact that burakumin aren’t even a separate racial or ethnic group make them an interesting case study.

    As you said, “race” is not a cut-and-dried biological concept.

    I think you’re being far too generous. Racists make hay about social science and anthro, as if there was something wrong with social science and anthro, but biologists would be the first to tell you that human ‘races’ simply do not meet the taxonomic criteria of subspecies used for every other animal species when we refer to ‘race’. (The human race, strictly speaking, is far more genetically homogeneous than normal, most likely due to the Toba bottleneck.) Molecular geneticists go even further.

    What’s disheartening, of course, is why all this should matter. Personally, I think that if dolphins are self-aware, they should be given special protection, and if a computer program achieves the same, to delete it to something amounting to murder. That our agreement on the concept of equal rights actually depends on a slight bump on some statistical numerical scale is truly frightening. On the other hand, I’ll admit I take comfort in the fact that science has confirmed that dishonest, immoral asshattery is also stupid and pointless.