Even if race science were true, it would still be bad, and here’s why:
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Obviously however good a proxy for IQ skin color is, actual IQ tests are better proxies, no?
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So if we want to TRULY be accurate and fair, and have wise expectations for policy outcomes, we ought to have every child take an IQ test, and separate our population on the basis of low and high IQ individuals.
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So that we can tell who is high IQ and who is low IQ, we should all wear something on our clothes, or perhaps on our foreheads, like a tattoo, that identifies our rough IQ category.
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This, of course, is monstrous, inhumane, reminiscent of Nazis, incomprehensible, and would cause immediate rebellion in any merely morally mediocre society, and probably many morally inferior societies (such as the United States!)
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And YET, some white people who would literally be brought to the point of violent revolution by IQ forehead tattoos think that public policy should incorporate into its expectations and conclusions the idea that my skin color is relevant to predictions of my intelligence.
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My skin, which is “tattooed” not merely on my forehead, but on the rest of my face, my arms, my legs, my torso, my fingers, my toes, my back and backside, crotch, neck, and anything as yet unmentioned. It is acceptable to take my skin into account, in thinking about intelligence.
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It is acceptable because we think that race and racism are somehow more natural, more inevitable, more normal than tattooing someone’s IQ on their forehead. In reality, both are socially constructed, both are arbitrary, both are imposed, both are “unreal.”
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It is racism, and only racism, that causes us to think one is less of a moral outrage than the other.
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And someone will ask: why then, is it alright to stereotype white people as racist, with reasoning that is clouded by racism? And my answer is, because there is a solution to that historically-grounded pattern of behavior: anti-racism!
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Perhaps there is some sci-fi future in which it would be important to determine precisely the extent to which genetics affects one’s IQ, so that, for instance, IQ improving drugs could be distributed equitably to erase this genetic (dis)advantage.
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But at present, we live in no such world. Instead, we live in a world where accepting race as a relevant predictor of intelligence is no more morally acceptable than tattooing IQ on every child’s skin; in fact, the former is probably less acceptable, whether it is true or not.
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End of conversation
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