Maggie's Farm

Re African IQ, this is more of a cultural thing, but it is interesting.

Years ago Wretch at Belmont Club wrote:

"Years ago when traveling in the Congo, I boarded an airplane bound for one of the interior towns. The aircraft was an Ilyushin and before it took off a very strange thing happened. Several dozen passengers went forward to look inside the pilot’s cabin, including the man, an African gentleman in a business suit, who sat beside me. My wonder at the strange proceedings increased when my rowmate returned an announced in a satisfied voice, “homme blanche”. The pilot was a white man and it was safe to travel on the airplane.

The pilots, upon further inquiry were apparently Slavs, whether from Russia or another one of the Slavic countries, I could never determine. Not exactly people who would inspire automatic confidence in a Western airport. But the incident got me to thinking about what my seatmate meant by the “homme blanche”. It turned out to mean something rather different in that setting. For example, if you were black but a black American, you might be the “homme blanche” in Africa.

And it’s not limited to African Americans. In that setting, the Japanese for example, are homme blanche as well. It’s hard to describe, but you will soon get the drift. Once abroad one comes face to face with the fact that the West still has a legend. The fact of Western-ness is a de facto assumption that you are qualified to lead. The doors of the local elite will open to you on the strength of your culture. And if you fit the bill and show your quality, then right, you are the white man, whatever your skin color. The mystique of the West has almost magical qualities. I remember someone calling me long distance once and asking me to look up something on the Internet. When I asked, over the crackly connection, why he didn’t go to some Internet cafe and look it up himself, he replied “the Internet is different there.” A large part of the power of the West derives from the memory of its once-dominant competence."

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/10/03/the-power-of-legend/

This was also interesting:

The Evolution of One Person’s Views
on Racial Differences in Intelligence

Lawrence Auster
February 1995

With the publication of The Bell Curve, we see the fascinating phenomenon of mainstream journalists and intellectuals wrestling, most of them for the first time, with the uncomfortable facts about race differences in intelligence. While this is a historic event, it can also seem rather disappointing. Apart from the writers who demonize the book’s co-authors, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, which was to be expected, even those more thoughtful liberals and conservatives who (grudgingly) admit the subject of race and intelligence into discourse hedge it around with so many qualifications as to make it almost meaningless. Thus William Buckley acknowledged the reality of the racial IQ difference, but then quoted Murray and Herrnstein to the effect that it’s not important. Scott McConnell in the New York Post said that IQ can be changed. Jacob Weisberg of New York magazine, a true liberal die-hard, threw even more fences and evasions and escape hatches around the subject. Unfortunately, Murray and Herrnstein had already set the stage for this intellectually unserious treatment of their work by downplaying the idea of race differences even as they promoted it. Murray, in his many appearances on television, has been appallingly evasive about the true content and purport of his ideas. (Here is a letter I wrote to Murray about this.)

As disappointing as this hedging is, we need to recognize that it is a natural and predictable stage in an unfolding of thought that will take some time to reach clarity. It does not happen all at once, but necessarily goes through several stages. This is because the question of race and intelligence does not consist, as people seem to imagine, of just one idea, it consists of a constellation of ideas, which must be grasped one at a time until the larger scene comes into view. To illustrate this, I would like to tell the story of the involvement of one non-specialist—namely myself—with these ideas. The experience as I’ve lived through it can be compared to looking at the world through slightly out-of-focus lenses, then slowly sharpening the focus until what was hazy becomes clear. Or it is like something in the background of one’s field of vision slowly moving into the foreground.

In this process, rationalizations and evasions slip away, sometimes gradually, sometimes through startling insights that revolutionize one’s whole way of thinking. In telling about my own experience of these ideas as they came to me, one by one, I can perhaps give the reader a more comprehensive, if non- systematic, approach to understanding this subject.

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001132.html