Hot potato
Hot on the heels of that last post comes a Channel 4 season of films, Race: Science’s Last Taboo and in particular last night’s documentary presented by Rageh Omaar on race and intelligence.
The film tackled the taboo question of whether there is a racial hierarchy in intelligence, with Asians, Europeans and Africans in roughly that order.
Omaar and a few academics brave enough to go on camera established that if there is an intelligence gap between different races it is more a factor of class, environment, education and upbringing than of genetic racial difference. But to reach that conclusion, by way of lots of serious science (always difficult on television), Omaar had to face down a couple of serious (white) experts who insisted there was an intelligence gap and it was all down to inferior (black) racial genes or brain size. The eugenicists were no doubt sharpening their pencils in the background.
All of which reminds us - as with so much research whether it’s nutrition or the environment - that “seek and you will find”. As one academic pointed out, the whole question of which race is more or less intelligent than another is only relevant in an inherently racist society. Go back a step and ask why the question is even being asked.
Discounting a few clunky shots of screeching trains when the scientific arguments reached a crunch point, this was a brave and rigorous film. And how wonderful to end with Obama, hoping that the black children of America will aspire to be scientists, engineers, presidents of America. Omaar is great, but Obama is the orator du jour.
