Black people’s IQs may be OK but do they solve challenges?

Last week, an advisor to British prime minister Boris Johnson resigned over remarks he made many years ago suggesting that Black people had lower average IQs than White people. The advisor, Andrew Sabsky, is also alleged to have said that compulsory contraception could prevent “creating a permanent underclass”.

Several prominent White people have made similar comments before. In 2006, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.

A year later, American famed scientist James Watson—he won a Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA—asserted that Black people were intrinsically less intelligent than Whites.

Some scientists say there is no scientific evidence to support assertions that Black people are less intelligent than White people. For example, the neurobiologist Steven Rose once told the British newspaper, Daily Telegraph: “No evidence that claimed to find people of African descent were less intelligent than Europeans or other racial groups had stood up to scientific scrutiny.”

But individuals who say Black people are less intelligent than Whites are also scientists. That does create confusion, especially for us non-scientists. It is hard to know who is telling the truth. And many people—scientists and non-scientists—have said that IQs are not a reliable measure of intelligence.

I do not care which race or country has higher IQs. I do think that what matters is that people, wherever they are and regardless of their skin colour, can use their intellectual ability to anticipate humanity’s needs and solve problems. We cannot run away from the fact that some people’s intellect is the reason we have products and services that enable us to lead decent lives.
You may go to a hospital to consult a doctor, and you may praise the doctor for doing a great job.

But—depending on the nature of your illness/condition—the doctor is sometimes going to have to rely on sophisticated diagnostic equipment such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to carry out a proper diagnosis. The doctor will also prescribe medicine made by pharmaceutical companies. They employ highly skilled professionals to develop drugs.

When you have people capable of making MRIs or drugs to help healthcare professionals do their job properly and save lives, you have to appreciate their intellectual ability. Those are the kinds of people any country, any society needs.
But Black people generally do not fare well on this front, and anyone who disagrees with this knows next to nothing about the world we live in.

The intellectual ability the world relies on and has relied on (for centuries) to anticipate humanity’s needs and cater to those needs and solve seemingly insurmountable challenges is not from Black people. Black people’s contribution has always been negligible. There are no two ways about it. Perhaps that is what makes some people say that Black people are less intelligent.

If, for example, you took away all the accomplishments of science and technology, of which there are precious little in places teeming with Black people (the exception being the United States), and to which Black people have made little contribution (comparatively speaking), you would have a totally different world and a world that is hard to live in.

There would be no doctors but witch doctors—or charlatans we see on lower-end market TV stations, claiming to cure high blood pressure yet they do not even know a normal blood pressure reading. There would be no hand-held computers we call smartphones, no computers proper, no cars, no transport faster than horses, no newspapers, no mechanised farming apart from subsistence peasant farming.

If all the achievements of Black people were wiped out tomorrow, the difference, I think, would be palpably negligible. Of that I do not have the smallest doubt.
This article is not trying to say that Black people are not intelligent. They are intelligent. If they were not, they would rely on non-Black people for everything.

However, if you have intelligent people using their intellectual ability like Black people, you are likely going to have a hard time fixing problems in this world.
The World Health Organisation (WHO), for example, says that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancer, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, strokes, chronic respiratory diseases, etc. are the leading cause of mortality in the world. But if you were looking for a solution to NCDs, you would not find it in countries with Blacks.

The writer is a journalist and former Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
[email protected]
@kazbuk