Educability-and-Group-Differences-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen

10 Educability and Group Differences
was derived extends beyond his family to the racial group with
which he is identified and to the social status into which he is
born. You are not your race; you are not your group. You are you.
That is, if you are talking genetics. If you are talking sociology or
politics, that may be another matter. You may be psychologically
tied to and influenced by whatever groups you happen to identify
with. If you are either elated or depressed about yourself because
of such identification, don’t attribute this to genetics. It in fact
contradicts this kind of typology which compels so many persons
to identify with various groups as if the statistical attributes of
the group determined their own characteristics. Racism and social
elitism fundamentally arise from identification of individuals with
their genetic ancestry; they ignore individuality in favor of group
characteristics; they emphasize pride in group characteristics, not
individual accomplishment; they are more concerned with who
belongs to what, and with head-counting and percentages and
quotas than with respecting the characteristics of individuals in
their own right. This kind of thinking is contradicted by genetics;
it is anti-Mendelian. And even if you profess to abhor racism and
social elitism and are joined in battle against them, you can only
remain in a miserable quandary if at the same time you continue
to think, explicitly or implicitly, in terms of non-genetic or antigenetic
theories of human differences. Wrong theories exact their
own penalties from those who believe them. Unfortunately, among
many of my critics and among many students I repeatedly encounter
lines of argument which reveal disturbing thought-blocks
to distinguishing individuals from statistical characteristics (usually
the mean) of the groups with which they are historically or socially
identified. I know professors, for example, who cannot bring
themselves to discuss racial group differences when any persons
from different racial groups are present, and the fact that I am
able to do so perhaps makes me appear insensitive in their eyes.
I was once bothered by this too. I got over it as I studied more
genetics and came more and more to appreciate its real implications.
If one must think of individuals not in terms of their own
characteristics but in typological terms according to the supposed
or real average characteristics of whatever group one classifies
them as a member of, then one will have to pay a price for one’s
erroneous thinking, which is often quite discomforting fear and
embarrassment and feeling like a ‘bad guy’. This is the guilt of