Friday, July 10, 2009

Comparisons: Biracial Children and Intelligence.

While many unfounded notions are commonly expressed by the various black female IR bloggers, one that has been on my mind recently is the notion that interracial relationships between black women and white men are superior to relationships between black men and white women. One way that they tried to promote this was by citing a study indicating that marriages between white men and NON-WHITE women tended to last longer than marriages between black men and non-black women. Somehow, the term "non-white" became synonymous with "black" in there minds, totally disregarding the fact that 3/4 of white men in interracial marriages are with Asian women. Thus, wouldn't this study be more of an indication of how well white men and Asian women do?

Now lets look at some comparisons of interracial couplings that are actually supported by the research. While surfing the web I stumbled across this particular study that did a comparison between black female/white male relationships and black male/white female relationships. The comparison was that of the IQs of the offspring of such unions. The findings are interesting:

Mixed-Race Children Born to Either a Black or a White Mother
If the Black–White IQ gap is largely hereditary, then children having one
Black and one White parent should have the same IQ on average, regardless of
which parent is Black. But if one assumes that mothers are particularly important
to the intellectual socialization of their children and if the socialization practices
of Whites are more favorable to IQ development than those of Black mothers,
then children of White mothers and Black fathers should have higher IQs than
children of Black mothers and White fathers. This could of course not have a
plausible genetic explanation. In fact, it emerges that children of White mothers
and Black fathers have IQs 9 points higher than children with Black mothers and
White fathers (Willerman, Naylor, & Myrianthopoulos, 1974). This result in itself
suggests that most of the Black–White IQ gap is environmental in origin. But
because mothers are not the only environmental influence on the child’s IQ, the
9-point difference might be regarded as a very conservative estimate of the
environmental contribution to the gap.
What do Rushton and Jensen (2005) have to say about this study? Because the
White mother–Black father pairs averaged 1 year more of education than the
Black mother–White father pairs, they conclude the study is uninterpretable! Of
course, there can be no basis for assuming that 1-year’s difference in education on
the part of the parents could possibly translate into an expected 9 IQ point
difference for the children.
306 NISBETT


Here is some further information on this subject:

Lee Willerman and his colleagues compared children with a black mother and a white father to children with a white mother and a black father. The cleanest comparison is for mixed-race children who lived only with their mother. Mixed-race children who lived with a white mother scored 11 points higher than mixed-race children who lived with a black mother. Since the black-white IQ gap averaged about 15 points at the time these two studies were done, they imply that about four-fifths of that gap was traceable to family-related factors (including schools and neighborhoods)


So basically what is being said here is that whites of both genders tend to have more favorable practices for the intellectual socialization of their children and since mothers of both races tend to play the most significant role in the intellectual socialization of their children, the children of black men and white women tend to have quite noticeably higher IQs than children of white men and black women. When men are totally eliminated from the equation, what we have is a further gap with half black children of single white women possessing an average 11 points higher score than half black children of single black women.

Of course the most notable possible example of this tendency is the fact that the first black President of the United States was raised by a white woman.

And to be fair, white men probably similarly have more favorable practices for the intellectual socialization of their children. Yet, since this intellectual socializer role is taken on to a far less extent by men, the favorable practices of white men are far less utilized for that purpose. Men place far more imphasis on serving as disciplinarians, coaches, authoritarians, playmates, role models, etc.

Also of note is that the "White mother–Black father pairs averaged 1 year more of education than the Black mother–White father pairs". This is supported by the study I cited in an earlier post showing that the black men who black women marry tend to have more education than the white men that black women marry. Since the more education a black man has, the more likely he is to marry white and other non-black women, black men who marry white women are probably on average more educated than black men who marry black women.

So before these ladies try to make their preferred interracial pairings out to be superior to those involving black men, they should really do their homework.