DNA & Racism

The DNA Age

In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice

By AMY HARMON

Research is exploring how DNA explains racial differences, but it could give discredited prejudices a new potency.

Today's front-page New York Times piece above continues to frame the challenge that people of color and those challenged by poverty must constantly overcome as we search for the "uncommon common ground: New Dimensions on Race in America."  This point was made by Manuel Pastor Jr., at a recent Aspen Ideas Festival.  By that Pastor meant that Americans must avoid appealing to the lowest common denominator by pitting one group against another.  Long before the "Bell Curve" noted in the NYT's "In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice," long before Arthur Jensen's absurd assumptions about race and intelligence, and long before the recent comments of Nobel Laureate James Watson (described DNA), stated that African and blacks in particular are not as smart as whites, influential people in power have argued that black Americans of African origins are innately less intelligent than white Americans of European origins. 

It remains perplexing that those who forecast learning potential from IQ results incessantly fail to understand the degree to which social environment and educational opportunities can affect results.  Many researchers argue that it is nearly impossible, then, to discern any influence of preexisting genetic differences.  Yet regardless of the overwhelming evidence against using IQ as a suitable measure of learning capacity, scholars from William Shockley, and neoconservative foundations such as Smith-Richardson, Bradley, Olin, Pioneer, Scaife, and others have poured millions into pushing the idea of racial superiority of whites over nonwhites. 

Sadly the effects of this form of negative social engineering enables some to believe in their ability to grow smarter, and others to assume their intellectual abilities are fixed at birth; consequently, these students come to school with the attitude, appearance and expectations of detached observers. It is critical that we teach schoolchildren and youth to redefine personal intelligence as a power they can control, and over which they have personal responsibility. 

It has been said that Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.  To this day, social and educational interventions do not take into account the shifting demographics in America, or the 21st-century reality that our education institutions face.  Nor do a sufficient majority of Americans demand that those responsible for policy development and financial support provides sufficient funds and qualified teachers to serve all sufficient to enable each American high school student prepared to enter a college or university of their choice.  This resistance to face reality is occurring while the mix of America is changing. 

Maybe America, in its incessant return to IQ and race, does meet the criterion of Einstein's definition of insanity.

Eric J. Cooper

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