The fact that black immigrants to the United States have shown achievements that are superior to native black Americans has been a phenomenon studied since at least the 1970′s. At first it was just the Caribbean blacks who were a subject of this unexpected outcome. As black Africans kept immigrating into the US, they showed even higher levels of achievement than the native blacks. Many scholars theorized on the reasons for these differences, from Thomas Sowell’s proposal that this disproved the validity of discrimination against native blacks as an explanation for their underachievement (Sowell, 1978), to other scholars who suggested that these immigrants were just the most highly driven members of their home countries as evidenced by their willingness to migrate to a foreign country (Butcher, 1990).
Arthur Jensen gave at least two empirical tests that could potentially falsify his thesis of a race based genetic explanation for the black-white IQ gap. Firstly, if the gap is caused by genetic racial differences, the blacks with more white admixture should tend to show a higher IQ than blacks with less whiteness. Secondly, “regression to the mean” implies that children (or siblings) of extraordinarily high IQ blacks should tend to a lower IQ than the children or siblings of similarly high IQ whites. Social experiments concerning the first test have not been decisive, especially due to the difficulty of separating out environmental factors since lighter American blacks have historically faced more favorable socioeconomic conditions.
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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: The IQ Gap Is No Longer A Black and White Issue
