The Return of Arthur Jensen

His new study promises another battle over race and IQ

Which is the smartest race on earth? Many nominate the Jews, whose intellectual achievements are out of proportion to their small numbers. C.P. Snow thinks the Japanese may be even brighter. Such musings are best muttered at late night bull sessions. In public, ranking races by intelligence is apt to smack of simple racism.

A decade ago, Arthur Jensen discovered that fact the hard way. Jensen, then a little-known professor of educational psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, created a furor and became a target of abuse by publishing an article in the Harvard Educational Review. Its claim: based on IQ tests, whites may be naturally smarter than blacks. Now, battered but unbowed, Jensen, 56, is returning to the fray. In a book to be published in December, he concludes that the IQ tests showing blacks scoring lower than whites are fair, accurate and not--as critics suppose--skewed by culture.

Jensen's original argument was based on a disquieting set of facts: during two generations of IQ testing, blacks have consistently scored 15 points lower than whites, and no one has yet designed a reputable test on which blacks do as well as whites.* He estimated that a quarter of the IQ gap was due to environmental and cultural differences, the rest to genetics. Liberal academics and blacks denounced Jensen as a racist. Margaret Mead and others staged an unsuccessful fight to strip the professor of his status as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In the uproar over the Jensenist heresy, one black psychologist angrily called IQ testing "a multimillion-dollar supermarket of oppression," and the National Education Association urged a moratorium on all IQ tests of the young.

This time Jensen is armed with a massive technical analysis that he considers the last word on racial testing. Titled Bias in Mental Testing (The Free Press), the book is not concerned with genetics or the causes of the black-white IQ gap, but only with the merits and validity of the actual tests.

Among Jensen's conclusions:

> The argument that whites do better than blacks because they have larger vocabularies is wrong. In fact, blacks do slightly better on verbal tests than on nonverbal ones.

> IQ tests, both verbal and nonverbal, are not expressions of "white culture" that penalize blacks. Surprisingly, blacks do better on "culture-loaded" tests than on "culture-fair" tests that are carefully constructed to root out references more familiar to middle-class whites than to blacks.

> The idea that culture-fair tests framed by whites will inevitably favor whites is also wrong. In a Japanese language version of the U.S.-conceived Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Japanese youngsters outscored American whites by an average of six points.

> The major tests used by schools, employers and the armed forces are very accurate in predicting future success or failure for native-born English-speaking Americans.

> When white and black children of equal socioeconomic status are tested, whites score an average of twelve IQ points higher than blacks.

The race and sex of the examiners who conduct tests seem to have little or no bearing on the lower scores of blacks, and Jensen insists that his analysis shows no sign that the tests are missing anything important. The graph curve that shows the number of blacks who have achieved each score in the IQ range is the same shape as the curve showing white achievement--except that it is displaced lower on the scale. And the ranking of test items in order of difficulty for blacks, he says, is exactly the same as the ranking for whites. "This means the items are working the same way, measuring the same things," says Jensen. It also strongly suggests, he thinks, that blacks and whites comprehend the world in much the same way, despite arguments that "black culture" is so different from "white culture" that separate tests should be constructed.

Cross-cultural testing can show widely different patterns in answering IQ questions, but no such differences show up between black and white children in the U.S., according to Jensen. Says he: "There is no way to discriminate or distinguish between the average ten-year-old black and the average 8 1/2-year-old white. The tests look the same, but the black child has a lower mental age. It looks more like a developmental lag than a cultural difference."

Those who belittle the tests because whites do them better than blacks, Jensen says, are evading the issue that all attempts to make the tests fairer have failed to raise blacks' scores. His conclusion: "None of these attempts to create highly culture-reduced tests has succeeded in eliminating, or even appreciably reducing the mean differences between certain subpopulations--races and social classes--in the United States."

Jensen's findings clearly have horrendous implications. Indeed, they come close to saying that blacks are a natural and permanent underclass--an idea so shocking that the book is likely to spark the most explosive debate yet over race and IQ. While his critics will not have their shots until his book is published, their job, according to Jensen, is simple enough: disprove the evidence or learn to live with it. But he is confident that his evidence will stand. "I think I have shown that the black-white differences are real, not artifacts of the test system." he says.

Jensen says he might be willing to oppose IQ testing in elementary schools, because such tests seem pointless, except to scan for the occasional bright underachiever who needs special help. Later on, he says, testing is essential to assure fairness in competition for college and good jobs. "It's better to rely on a test than on the whims of an interviewer or employer. The tests are color blind, and that should be reassuring.''

*Black psychologists have constructed a number of tests that depend on a knowledge of ghetto slang.

One of them, apparently a spoof, is called the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (BITCH).

It has an inevitable offshoot, the S.O.B. test.

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