9 - IQ, Race, and Genetics

Summary

Many people outside of psychology and biology come to the subject of nature–nurture because of an interest in race. That is unfortunate, but I get it. People, especially in the United States, are obsessed with race, for obvious reasons: American history is indelibly steeped in racial categories. The two foundational failures of the American experience – genocide of Indigenous Americans and enslavement of Africans – happened because of race and racism. Even today in the United States, people of all persuasions think about race all the time, whether as hereditarian racists convinced that there are essential biological differences among ancestral groups, progressives fascinated by personal identity and the degradations that non-white people still experience, or the dozens of racial and ethnic categories obsessively collected by the U.S. census.