The Scarr Study (Not easy reading, but I think needed)

The Scarr Study

Genetic origins of lower Black intelligence can also be seen in a number of studies that chart proportional Black ancestry. One of the first major studies was done as early as 1916 in Virginia. Large groups of Black school children were divided in groups determined by the number of White and Black grandparents. All the Black subjects, pure or partially Black, were raised in the Black community’s environment. The Blacks with four Black grandparents scored the lowest in IQ. Blacks with three Black grandparents and one White –a bit higher; Blacks with two White grandparents –higher still; and Blacks with three White grandparents scored highest in IQ among the Black children. The most recent studies of the 1990s show precisely the same results.

One of the most powerful direct studies of race and environment was conducted by psychologists Sandra Scarr, Richard Weinberg and I. D. Waldman. All three are quite well known for their environmentalist opinions. The study analyzed White, Black and mixed-race adopted children in more than 100 White families in Minnesota. The study was an egalitarian’s dream, because the children’s adoptive parents had prestigious levels of income and education and were antiracist enough to adopt a Black child into their own family. Scarr is a strong defender of racial equality and maintained that environment played an almost exclusive role in IQ differences between the races. Scarr supports the importance of heredity in causing individual differences within a race, but she has argued that the between-race differences are mostly environmental.

The children in the study included adopted Whites, Blacks, and Mulattos as well as the biological children of the White adoptive couples. At the age of 7, the children were tested for IQ and all of the groups, including the Blacks and Mulattos, scored above average in IQ. Scarr and Weinberg published a paper claiming to have proven the almost exclusive power of environment over race in IQ, even though they had to admit that the White children, whether adopted or not, scored well above the Black and Mulatto children and that the Mulatto children scored above the Blacks.

A decade later, when the children reached the average age 17, a follow-up study was conducted that again included IQ measurements. As they matured, Black children had dropped back to an average of 89 in IQ, which is the average IQ for Blacks in the region of the United States where the study was done. The White adopted children scored an average of 106 in IQ, 17 points higher than the Black children, which is consistent with traditional studies of Black and White IQ differences. In line with genetic theory, the half-White, half-Black Mulatto adopted children scored almost exactly between the adopted Whites and Blacks.

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