Acting White blogger James Collier believes that African Americans need to take a greater interest in addressing the I.Q. test scoring gap between Black and non-Black ethnic groups. This is one point on which I agree with Collier, and for two reasons.

1. Some I.Q. fundamentalists (those who believe that intelligence is genetically determined) would like to see governments and other institutions revise and limit social programs and outreach initiatives based on their beliefs. If most Black people are genetically incapable of improving their academic performance, the thinking goes, then why should colleges practice affirmative action, and why should governments fund Head Start and other targeted enrichment programs? This particular set of beliefs may seem extreme, but even seemingly outrageous notions can quickly gain traction under the right conditions, especially during times of economic strife. Black people need to become active participants in the race and intelligence debate, before the I.Q. fundamentalist agenda becomes mainstream. See Gladwell.com for a discussion of I.Q. and I.Q. fundamentalists.

2. The low average I.Q. scores of Black children do not indicate fixed genetic differences between Black and non-Black people. They do, however, indicating key gaps in Black children’s education. The Black/non-Black scoring gap is a red flag indicating crucial disparities that must be addressed in order to provide our children with the greatest possible opportunities for advancement, self-determination, and success.

The conclusion that I draw from the scoring gap between Black students and their non-Black counterparts is that there are crucial gaps in the early childhood education of many children of African descent, particular in the development of abstract thinking skills, particularly those nurtured and developed during the first 4 years of life, before a child enters school. In order to address this deficit, I recommend the following:

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The term “model minority” gained popularity during the 1980s, when it was used throughout the media, on college campuses, and in political discourse as description for Asian American communities, whose scholarly, cultural, and economic achievements and practices were believed to be superior to those of other ethnic minority groups.

Origins of the Model Minority Myth

The term “model minority” first appeared in 1966, when it was used in “Success Story: Japanese American Style,” an article by sociologist William Peterson. This article, published in the New York Times Magazine, argued that by maintaining solid family values and a strong work ethic, Japanese Americans had been able to succeed academically and economically, despite significant anti-Asian prejudice throughout the U.S. Peterson argued that strong family values and an abiding belief in the merit of hard work are inherent to Japanese culture, and that these features have enabled this small maligned ethnic community to achieve economic stability and to avoid the stigma of being a labeled “problem minority.”

The widespread application of this term to the broader Asian American community did not, however, take place until the early 1980s, when several cover articles in national magazines depicted Asian American high school and college students as academically gifted, a conclusion extrapolated from measures like the S.AT. and A.C.T., on which students of Asian descent outperformed all other U.S. ethnic groups. Feature articles in national magazines attributed Asian students’ achievements to the existence of an undisclosed cultural or genetic proclivity toward academic success. This sampling of titles from national magazines reflects the widespread fascination, throughout the 1980s, with Asian Americans’ perceived intellectual prowess:

• “Asian Americans: ‘A Model Minority,’” Newsweek, 1982.
• “The Drive to Excel,” Newsweek, 1984.
• “America’s Greatest Success Story: The Triumph of Asian Americans,” The New Republic, 1985.
• “America’s Super Minority,” Fortune, 1986.
• “The New Whiz Kids,” Time, 1987.

The Trouble with the Model Minority Myth

Almost since the inception of the term, Asian American activists and community leaders have spoken out against the categorization of this diverse and growing population as a model minority. Asian American opposition of this term has been confusing to many outside of the community, who see the stereotypes associated with U.S. Asian identity (high-achieving, intelligent, studious) as harmless and even flattering compared to the stereotypes associated with other racial minority groups.

Over time, Americans both within and outside of the U.S. Asian community have joined together to resist the perpetuation of the model minority stereotype, which is considered objectionable for the following reasons:

1. The widespread association of Asian Americans with superior intellectual and economic abilities and achievement reinforces the invisibility of the social, economic, and academic struggles of many within this identity group, thus decreasing access to and availability of aid to assist community members in crisis.
2. Implicit in the praise for Asian Americans as a population whose cultural values enable them to succeed in the face of prejudice is the suggestion that discrimination against U.S.-based Asian communities can go unaddressed.
3. The depiction of Asian Americans as academic and economically superior even to members of the dominant ethnic group (U.S. whites) is interpreted by many as justification for anti-Asian fear of domination by the ethnic “other.”
4. The singling out of Asian Americans as the model minority (the right kind of minority, the acceptable minority), further marginalizes other non-white populations, and alienates those people-of-color groups not seen as “models” from creating meaningful and productive alliances with men and women of Asian descent.
5. The internalization of the model minority stereotype by Asian American men, women, and children leads the marginalization within U.S. Asian communities of young people whose abilities and interests diverge from the high-achieving, socially and economically conservative, family-oriented stereotype.
6. The characterization by the national media of Asian Americans as sharing the economic, academic, and cultural interests of white people in terms of academic and economic pits the perceived interests of Asian communities against the interests of other less economically privileged minority groups, on key political issues like welfare reform, crime, and affirmative action.

A New Model Minority?

Even as Asian American activists and community leaders speak out against the negative impact of the model minority stereotype, other ethnic groups are beginning to see the term applied to their own economic successes. Notable among those ethnic groups newly noted as model minorities are black African immigrants to the U.S. and Great Britain. To read my earlier blogpost on this subject, click HERE.

In 2000, the London Daily Times revealed their finding that black Africans were the most educated members of British Society. More recently, U.S. news outlets have begun to publish similar reports. A number of U.S. newspapers have pointed out that African and Caribbean immigrants and the children of African and Caribbean immigrants make up a disproportionate number of the black students at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities; and in 2008 African American columnist Clarence Page elaborated on black African immigrants’ status as the U.S. population group with the highest education attainment, outstripping even the performance of the previously designated model minority group, Asian Americans. Page offered up the title “the new model minority” to describe African immigrants’ extraordinary success.

Despite the growing recognition of black Africans’ impressive achievements in the U.S. and Great Britain, it is unlikely that this group will displace Asian Americans’ as that non-white population most widely associated with intellectual ability. It will be some time before the centuries’ old association of blackness with ignorance and savagery gives way to other less pejorative notions.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

The Fisk Jubilee Singers, circa 1870

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The Fisk Jubilee Singers, 2007-2008

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Inger Meredith Daniels, UVA’s first African American Ph.D. in Mathematics

Though the spring graduation season is long past, it’s never to late honor those Black students, faculty, and alumni whose pioneering achievements have opened doors for future generations.

With that in mind, Black on Campus congratulates Dr. Inger Meredith Daniels. On May 18, 2008, she became the first African American to graduate with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Virginia. The Delta Sigma Theta Charlottesville Alumnae blog describes the significance and extent of her achievements:

Dr. Daniels joins the ranks of about 2.5 black American women who graduate with Ph.D.s in mathematics each year nationally. Her dissertation is entitled “Wellposedness of a Nonlinear Structural Acoustic Interaction with a Boussinesq Plate Equation.” Her work has been published in the Journal of Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems. She is currently pursuing a career in financial engineering by completing a Master of Science in Computational Finance at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, PA.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

The term Historically Black Colleges and Universities refers to a group of 105 U.S. colleges and universities founded with the primary mission of educating people of African descent.

In the Higher Education Act of 1965, the federal government formally recognized 105 colleges as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). To qualify for this designation, institutions had to fit the following criteria. Each school had to have been:

• Accredited by a national or nationally recognized regional accrediting agency.
• Founded before 1964.
• Founded for the purpose of educating black students.

Colleges that have been recognized as HBCUs under the Higher Education Act are eligible for federally-subsidized grants and other forms of funding. These moneys have been set aside specifically to insure equitable funding for U.S. colleges and universities, regardless of the ethnic makeup of population served. HBCUs may be public or private, 4-year, 2-year, graduate or undergraduate institutions.

For most of the history of the United States, HBCUs were the only option available for African Americans seeking a college education. Until the late 1960s, most institutions of higher learning were closed to black students. The earliest HBCUs were founded during the slavery era or antebellum period, but in northern, “free” states. The oldest, Cheyney University, was founded in 1836, in Pennsylania. In addition to Cheyney, two other HBCUs were also founded during the antebellum period. They are Lincoln University (1854), also located in Pennsylvania, and Wilberforce University (1856), located in Ohio.

After the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the U.S., a number of HBCUs were created throughout the South, in order to educate newly-freed black people. Almost one fourth of the nation’s HBCUs were founded during the period of Reconstruction (1865 – 1877), including several of the nation’s most widely known, including:

• Howard University (1867)
• Morehouse College (1867)
• Fisk University (1866)
• Hampton University (1868)
• Alcorn State University (1870)
• Meharry Medical College (1876)
• Prairie View A&M University (1877)

By 1932, there were more than 100 HBCUs, located in 20 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Who Can Attend an HBCU?

Historically Black Colleges and Universities are open to students of all races and ethnicities. Although few non-black students attended HBCUs before desegregation, the last three decades have seen the enrollment of increasing numbers of white, Asian American, and Latin American students on many historically black college campuses. It is estimated that white students comprise roughly 17% of all students enrolled at HBCUs today. A small number of the original HBCUs, like West Virginia State University and Lincoln University of Missouri, are now majority white. HBCUs also continue to enroll significant numbers of international students.

HBCUs Today

Today, the overwhelming majority of black students (roughly 84%) attend majority white universities. While HBCUs constitute only 3% of U.S. colleges and universities and enroll only 16% of all black undergraduates, however, they graduate nearly a quarter of all black bachelor’s degree holders. HBCUs also achieve disproportionate success in these areas:

• HBCUs graduate more than half of all black professionals in the U.S.
• HBCUs graduate more than 50% of all black men and women who go on to become public school teachers.
• HBCUs graduate more than 70% of all black men and women who go on to become dentists.
• Of the ten colleges and universities whose black graduates are most likely to go on to earn a Ph.D., nine are HBCUs.
• Just two historically black women’s colleges, Bennett College and Spelman College, graduate more than half of all African American woman who go on to earn Ph.D.s in the sciences.

While the federal government continues to limit the HBCU designation to U.S. colleges and universities founded before 1964, there currently exist a number of majority black institutions that do not fall under that heading, either because they were founded after 1964 or because they did not become what the federal government calls “predominantly black” until after that time. Many of these institutions are public colleges and universities located in northern U.S. cities with substantial black populations. The following is just a brief sampling of the roughly 75 institutions that qualify as predominantly (but not historically) black:

• Chicago State University
• City University of New York – Medgar Evers College
• Sojourner Douglas College, Baltimore, MD
• Atlanta Metropolitan College
• Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Sciences (Los Angeles)

Recent legislation has been proposed to create a specific funding category for these colleges and universities as well as their counterparts that serve the Native American, Latin American, and Asian American communities.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Kobena Mercer (b. 1960)

Universities reflect the history of race relations in the two countries; because the US was a segregated society, official institutions have had to deal with race in a way they haven’t in Britain.

It’s hard for me to find an institutional niche home in Britain, partly because my work cuts across disciplines, and I’ve found an audience here. But the tradeoff is that while America recognises work like mine as a legitimate area of study, the culture is still dealing with a legacy of segregation.

–Kobena Mercer, quoted in a “Gifted, Black…and Gone,” from “Race Issues in the UK: A Special Report, The Guardian, May 30, 2000

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Biographical Notes: Kobena Mercer is a writer and cultural critic living in London, England. He earned a B.A. in Fine Art with honors from the St. Martins School of Art. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of London Goldsmiths’ College. He is the author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, a groundbreaking study on the image of the Black male in U.S. and British popular culture and. Mercer has edited and contributed to a several essay collections, including Discrepant Abstractions, Cosmopolitan Moderisms, and others.He has also published a great number of articles and reviews in both scholarly and mainstream publications.

Mercer has taught at Middlesex College, NYU, UCLA, and UC Santa Cruz. He has served as a Senior Fellow at NYU’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University, and a Humanities Research Institute fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Mercer has received numerous honors and awards, and in 2006 he became one of the first recipients of the Clark Prize in Arts Writing (with Linda Nochlin and Calvin Tompkins).

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Grace Alele-Williams (b. 1932)

As long as we are celebrating a woman vice chancellor because she is the first or a woman chief judge because she is the first, then we have not arrived. We look forward to the time when we will have many women in such positions and we will be celebrating so many of them.

(Dr. Grace Alele Williams, the first woman to be appointed Vice Chancellor of an African University, in a 2004 talk a Lagos State University.)

Biographical Notes: Grace Alele-Williams was born in 1932, in Warri, Nigeria. She was educated at the Government School in Warri, Queens College in Lagos, and the University College of Ibaden (now the University of Ibaden). In 1963, Grace Alele Williams earned her doctorate in Mathematics Education from the University of Chicago, becoming the first Nigerian woman to earn a Ph.D. In 1965 she joined the faculty of the University of Lagos. In 1974 she became the University’s first female professor of mathematics education. In 1985 Dr. Alele-Williams became the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Benin. In 1987 she was awarded the Order of the Niger. She is the first woman to hold that position at an African university. She is a director of Chevron Nigeria Limited.

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The cover of The Black Elite, 2nd edition.

Being a black American, at some level, poses the dilemma of prioritizing being an American and being black.

…

The dilemma of choosing our identity is an ongoing progress that forces us…to decide consciously or unconsciously the direction in which we will expend our energy.

(Lois Benjamin in The Black Elite [page 6])

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Biographical Notes: Dr. Lois Benjamin is Endowed University Professor of Sociology at Hampton University. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Benjamin is the author of several books, including:

The Black Elite: Still Facing the Color Line in the Twenty-First Century

Dreaming No Small Dreams: William R. Harvey’s Visionary Leadership

Three Black Generations at the Crossroads: Community, Culture and Consciousness

Black Women in the Academy: Promises and Perils (Editor)

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In my last post I wrote about blogger James Collier (Acting White) and his call for greater Black engagement with the issue of race and intelligence. While I agreed with the need for African Americans and other people of African descent to pay closer attention to issue of race and intelligence/aptitude, I had a problem with Collier’s emphasis on “the gap in intelligence between blacks and non-blacks (emphasis mine).”

In using this language, Collier seems to be stating quite plainly that Black people in America are, on average, not as smart as non-Black people. Fortunately, he clarifies his position in a subsequent post:

I do not believe that race or genetics drives the disparity in intelligence between blacks and non-blacks. However, the disparity is real, by modeling and empirical observation, and most visible by race. This visibility, through the convenient lens of race, leads us to focus on superficial physiology differences as evidence of the drivers of difference, even though they drive nothing.

…

While the lens of race distorts our understanding of intelligence, it (measured intelligence) nonetheless accurately captures outcomes of performance for groups relative to each other, and for this reason should not be dismissed. However, inherited intelligence is only one factor influencing the level to which a person can be educated and contribute to themselves and society. Once we are past the distortion of race views, perhaps we can better go about the effort of supporting development of all people, and away from the notion that one size of education fits all. (Acting White, 7/31/08)

This last bit, which comes at the very end of Collier’s post, is part of the essential message that Black people are uniquely equipped to insert into the public discussion of race and “ intelligence.” The emphasis on the correlations between race and lower performance on intelligence tests obscures the larger issue – that certain young people spend their formative years in surroundings that do not stimulate them sufficiently to develop many of the intellectual skills (abstract thinking, etc.) that are essential for success in 21st-century America.

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The Acting White blogger James Collier has called for an end to what he calls the “taboo” within the Black community on discussing race and intelligence:

Well first off, any solution has to recognize and offset the gap in intelligence between blacks and non-blacks. This subject must be un-tabooed. The universal one standard deviation difference in intelligence makes blacks non-competitive with their socio-economic counterparts of other races, and all that follows this disparity. (Acting White, 7/24/08 )

While I agree with this blogger’s call for African American engagement with this subject, I disagree with his assertion that this subject is “taboo” among Black folks in America. A closer evaluation of most Black people’s general refusal to engage with this subject would quickly reveal not a wider social prohibition or taboo, but rather a tendency among Black people to dismiss and ignore any debates that seem steeped in the American predilection for racializing everything (from intelligence to desire to alcoholic beverages to eyeglass frames and more). For U.S. Black people, this tendency to dismiss transparently racialized associations between unrelated issues coexists with the belief that the relationship between race and intelligence is just one more topic obsessed over by people (mostly white) who have a personal investment in supporting white supremacy.

That said, I do agree with the substance of what Collier has to say. Indeed, there is a gap between the average performance of Black people on certain intelligence tests and the average performance of white and Asian people on those same tests. I would shrink away from using the word “intelligence” to describe this difference, however, and I am troubled by Collier’s use of the word in describing what he calls, “the gap in intelligence between blacks and non-blacks (emphasis mine).”

What Collier calls a “gap in intelligence” is actually a gap in acquired skills. This is a fact that many on the conservative end of the race and intelligence debate do not wish to acknowledge. IQ and other intelligence and aptitude tests do not, in fact, test intelligence or aptitude, but rather those skills that in the U.S. have become conflated with intelligence, particularly skills like abstract thinking. Malcolm Gladwell (and many others, I’m sure) refer to such hardcore genetic-basis-for-intelligence advocates as “IQ fundamentalists,” and he describes their beliefs as follows:

To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious to environmental influences. (“None of the Above: What I.Q. Doesn’t Tell You About Race,” New York Magazine, December 17, 2007)

When IQ is understood for its true function, as a measure of one’s mastery of certain forms of problem-solving, at particular moment in the subject’s academic life, it is a harmless and even helpful tool for diagnosing educational deficits. Unfortunately, IQ is more often read as an indicator of one’s intellectual destiny, with those scoring in the “dull-normal” range (80 – 90) relegated to a sort of academic no-man’s land (special education or similar tracks), in which expectations and opportunities range from low to non-existent.

The understanding of IQ as an indicator of one’s lifelong potential (as opposed to one’s current skill level) is based on the IQ fundamentalists’ rejection of the very strong evidence that IQ is not fixed, but instead can change dramatically, depending on shifts in the environment of the test taker. Many IQ fundamentalists are either unaware of this perspective or they resist it, even though it is strongly supported by both research and anecdotal evidence.

Posted by Ajuan Mance