Summarize Your Sources
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textbook.docxChapter 3
3.2 Race, Cultural Ability, and Intelligence
Discriminatory treatment of socially defined "racial" groups is generally rationalized by the idea that different races are biologically endowedwith different abilities. Yet there is no scientific evidence that any racial group is superior or inferior to any other in its innate cultural abilities. Neither is there any evidence of racial differences in individuals' abilities to learn and adequately participate in any cultural system when they are given an equal opportunity to learn the necessary skills.
Anthropological researchers who have studied human ways of life around the world have reported again and again that biological differences seem to be no barrier to sharing a way of life. They report that common ways of living, customs, and values are sometimes spread over several regions occupied by peoples of different biological backgrounds. How people go about their lives is determined by their experiences in life andtheir opportunities to implement what they learn through that experience. A child of British parentage whisked away at birth and raised by adoptive Chinese foster parents will learn and value the customs of his or her Asian peers and speak an Asiatic language with the same accentas his or her Asian playmates. Nothing in the biological makeup of such a child would impel him or her to value the British political system or to speak with a British accent.
As early as 1911, anthropologist Franz Boas (1911) critiqued the biases inherent in intelligence tests and debunked the myth that "primitive" people were culturally or intellectually inferior to White people. Instead, he emphasized panhuman shared traits and cultural relativity. Yet the argument continues to arise that some races are inherently less capable of full participation in a particular society. In the United States, the form of logical thought that is measured by intelligence tests is a highly valued social skill, and much has been made of the fact that some so-called "races" seem toscore higher on these tests than others. When IQ (intelligence quotient), the scores on intelligence tests, are grouped by race, there is a difference of approximately 15 points between the averages of Blacks and Whites on most tests of intellectual skills commonly used in the United States. In this section, we will look closely atnonbiological factors that may influence this discrepancy in test scores, including differences in education, language, socioeconomic background, motivation, and cultural biases in the tests themselves.
The Instability of Test Scores
Contrary to popular belief, an individual's IQ score is far from a stable measure of an unchanging trait. In fact, anthropologists, psychologists, and others fail to agree on what even counts as intelligence. Intelligence can include various cognitive abilities: verbal, linguistic, mathematical, spatial, even social; and each ability may reflect a particular kind of intelligence, some of which are required in some cultural contexts more than others.
Nevertheless, beginning in the early 20th century in the United States, there was aquest to measure intelligence differences, particularly between Blacks and Whites. Such efforts built upon the misguided efforts of the previous century, when scientists likes Samuel Morton tried to show that the skulls of White people were larger, and thus that their brains were larger than other "racial" groups. Such work was based on flawed science, poor sampling, and the erroneous belief that skull size correlates with intelligence (it does not).
More recently, studies have shown how social context and environment affect intelligence. For instance, during World War I, when the U.S.Army carried out a massive intelligence-testing program of personnel from many civilian backgrounds, it found that Blacks in some northernstates scored higher on IQ tests than did Whites in some southern states. Several studies have demonstrated that environmental factors are able to affect IQ scores by much more than 15 points in individual cases. In one study of 12-year-old Black New York City school children, most of whom had come from southern states, it was found that those who had lived in the city for more than 7 years scored 20 points higher on IQ tests than those who had lived there for 2 years or less (Downs & Bleibtreu, 1972). It has also been demonstrated that our IQ continues to rise while we attend school and begins to decline again when we leave the academic setting. The school environment keeps students actively engaged in the use of precisely those skills that are called on when they take an intelligence test. A group's average IQ score is therefore influenced by the quality and length of its education.
The fallacy that IQ test scores reflect an inborn level of mental ability is best illustrated by the rapid changes that have occurred in average IQtest scores throughout the world in the past half century. Data has shown that IQs worldwide have increased by about 0.3 points per year since IQ tests began to be administered. Does this mean that we are all getting smarter? Actually, according to James R. Flynn (2009), the gains inintelligence primarily reflect people's ability to perform better on a specific group of questions: questions about similarity (e.g., "how are dogs and rabbits alike?"). Such questions test our ability to think in terms of abstract categories, which is arguably more a product of modernization than a product of increased intelligence.
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Stereotypes assert that all members of a group share thesame attributes. Often, even positive attributes can beracist.
Flynn also addresses racial disparities in intelligence. He finds that the cognitive testing of Black and White infants shows no differences in intelligence. But, by age 4, the average Black IQ is 95.4, which is 4.5 points lower than the average White IQ. Between ages 2 and 24, Blacks lose 6/10 of a point each year, such that by age 24, their IQ scores have dropped to 83.4. This change does not reflect a decrease in "innate" intelligence; rather, it is better understood as the product of particular school and domestic environments, economic circumstances, and social conditions (including racism). In effect, IQ tests can be said to simply measure performance on those tests, and not true intelligence.
Language Effects on IQ Scores
Dialect or language differences may be another important variable affecting the average intelligence test scores of different groups. Even when tests are not specifically about one's knowledge of spelling and grammar, taking intelligence tests requires the use of language skills simply to read any written instructions or understand the test questions. Itis only to be expected that immigrants whose native languages differ from the one in which the tests are written would perform poorly on such tests, regardless of race.
Chandler and Platkos (1969) clearly demonstrated the language bias in intelligence testing in one California school district by reevaluating the intelligence test scores of its Spanish speaking children with a Spanish-language intelligence test. Most of the children who had previously been classified as "educable mentally retarded" on the basis of the earlier English- language tests achieved a normal score, and some of them achieved above-average scores. In the United States, the centuries of social segregation of Blacks from Whites has led to the development of a distinctive Black English vernacular that differs greatly from the Standard American English that is rewarded with high grades in schools and invariably used in tests of intelligence. Since the Standard American English has much more in common with the dialects spoken by most Whites than it does with the Black English vernacular, there is a strong linguistic bias against Black students built into intelligence tests used today.
Social Background and IQ Scores
Those who hold different racial statuses in the United States historically have had unequal opportunities to achieve highly valued social positions and high-income occupations. As a result, the races are socially and economically stratified in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Whites possess a disproportionate share of the higher socioeconomic statuses, and non-Whites are disproportionately relegated to low socioeconomic positions. Because intelligence tests are generally designed by well-educated, well-paid professionals, such as psychologists who have doctoral degrees, those who do best on such tests are generally those who have the most in common with the authors of the tests. By contrast, social groups who have been strongly segregated and otherwise denied participation in the mainstream of U.S. culture tend to receive lower scores on such tests.
If socioeconomic class differences are held constant when evaluating IQ scores—that is, if persons of similar social, educational, and economic backgrounds are compared—all socially designated races generally achieve equivalent IQ scores. For instance, Zena Blau (1981) carried out astudy of 579 Black and White mothers and their fifth- and sixth-grade children in Chicago area communities. When she compared Black children with White children of similar social and economic rank, the difference in the average scores of the two groups was reduced by 40% to adifference of only 4 points. Among high-socioeconomic–status Protestants and nondenominational and nonreligious children, there were no IQ score differences between Black and White children. Religious background is a major factor in IQ differences. In particular, the anti-intellectualism and opposition to science and to secular education of the more conservative religions have a negative impact on IQ test performance. Although the Black–White IQ gap has grown smaller over time, Black Americans remain more likely to be affiliated with the historically more conservative and evangelical denominations than are White Americans. This religious influence on Black–White IQ differences remains an important one.
Cultural Bias in IQ Tests
IQ tests themselves are not flawless. For most of their history, intelligence tests have been popularly perceived as scientific measures of an individual's innate intellectual potential. Yet from the beginning, they have contained questions that assumed knowledge of societal experiences, practices, values, and ways of thinking that were characteristic of the higher socioeconomic classes. For instance, an intelligence test once used to measure the mental abilities of grammar school children included question: "Pick the word that doesn't belong: (a) cello, (b) harp, (c) drum,(d) violin, (e) guitar." Some 85% of the high socioeconomic class children recognized that "drum," the only nonstringed instrument, was the item that "did not belong." However, 45% of the low socioeconomic class children, who were less likely to have ever seen a cello or a harp, failed to answer this question in the way the testers perceived as correct. The test authors had not recognized this potential class bias in the question.
Similarly, during the economic Depression of the 1930s, elementary school children of poor families in the United States were said to be less intelligent than children of families with higher incomes, when in response to an intelligence test question "The color of milk is: (a) white, (b)black, (c) red, (d) blue," they selected the answer "blue." According to the psychologists who prepared the test, that was an incorrect response.Yet these children were simply describing reality as they had experienced it: From economic necessity, poor families during the Depression were apt to be consumers of skim milk that does, in fact, have a slightly bluish cast. In the dialect of the day, skim milk was called "blue John." Thus, their answer was not incorrect, based on their own experience. A few years ago, a colleague working in the African state of Malawi found the following item on a test that was being used to assess the intelligence of Malawi students: "If ten crows are sitting on a fence and you shootone, how many will be left?" The response "nine," based on the arithmetic operation of subtracting one from ten, was scored as the correct response and was considered evidence of a student's intellectual skill. It was finally noticed, however, that many of the children who were tested failed to answer this seemingly simple arithmetic problem correctly and that they tended to respond with the same "incorrect" responseof "zero." The reason for their "error" was their rural background, which gave them a more realistic appraisal of the behavior of birds—which flyaway when shot at—than was held by the author of the test, who had selected the answer based purely on an academic frame of reference.One could not ask for a better example of the effects of different life experiences on the ways of interpreting a test question.
Intelligence Labeling as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Scores achieved on tests of intellectual skills are often used as criteria for making judgments concerning school children that may influence theirfuture academic careers. They may, for instance, lead to assigning students either to accelerated classes or those for "slow learners." Once assigned, the original categorization of students as "superior" or "slow" may continue for years. Such labeling may later influence teachers'expectations about students.
It is not difficult to imagine how labels such as "slow learner" or "superior student" may hinder or aid their bearers through their school careers. Students who are labeled "above average" are apt to receive endless encouragements to "live up to their potential" and enroll inintellectually valued subjects that lead to a college career and highly valued occupations. Students labeled "below average," on the other hand, are more likely to be encouraged to enroll in subjects that are less intellectually stimulating; when they fall behind in their work, they are less likely to be pushed because it is believed they will grow "frustrated" if more is demanded of them than they are capable of doing. These students are likely to end their scholastic careers earlier and with less training. Thus, intelligence tests, which lead to labeling and expectations, may serve as vehicles for inhibiting social and economic mobility.
The Impossibility of Culture-Free Testing
Recently, psychologists and educators have attempted to salvage the use of intelligence tests by redesigning them to minimize their mostobvious cultural biases. They have hoped to create so-called "culture-free" intelligence tests. However, even if the specific items in a test do reflect knowledge available to one segment of society, their life experiences may lead to differences in the ways they respond to the tasks.Cultural learning affects the way we perform any task. If one style of response is regarded as more appropriate than others, even a "culture-free" test will result in higher scores for members of the society who respond in that style, similar to the biases of older so-called "intelligence"tests. It is impossible to create a measure of pure, environmentally uninfluenced, biological intelligence, as all human beings are raised in asocial environment that will influence their behavior. Culture, in other words, is not just in the tests; it is in the test takers as well.
What happens if we remove the influences of U.S. culture on the performance of Black and White children? Klaus Eyferth (1959) carried out aninteresting study of children born in Germany after World War II to German mothers and fathers from the occupation troops. Because the children were reared in Germany, the differences between Black and White U.S. subcultures were not present. When Eyferth compared the IQscores of biracial children whose fathers were Black with those whose fathers were White, he found that the two groups were virtually identicalin their IQ test performance. This study strongly indicates that U.S. Black–White IQ differences are not racial in origin, but are rather the results of being reared in different U.S. subcultures.
Chapter 4
Since languages are symbol systems, they are highly susceptible to change. Language change may occur as the language is passed, by learning, from one generation to the next. A language may also change as its speakers are influenced by their interactions with speakers of other languages. In the following sections, these processes of linguistic change will be described in detail.
Changes Over Time
Since the sounds used to form the verbal symbols of a language have no necessary connection with the meanings of those symbols, it is possible for both the sounds and the meanings attached to them to change as time passes. Likewise, the customary ways of organizing theverbal symbols into meaningful word order to communicate relationships between the concepts may also change as time passes. Thus, with the passage of time, languages may change in their sound system, their semantic or meaning system, and in their grammatical system.
Processes of Change
Use of Specialized Words
· Think about the ways that language changes. What aresome of the English terms adopted by these people fromHong Kong? What are some of the words from otherlanguages that we have adopted into our own dailyvocabularies?
Change in language also occurs when words are borrowed by the speakers ofone language from other languages with which they come in contact, especially those spoken by their politically and economically more powerful neighbors. For instance, following the Norman invasion of England in 1066, English speakers began to be influenced by the Old French language of the more powerful Normans. Today, about half of the vocabulary of the English language traces its origins to borrowed Old French words.
Those English speakers who had the most contact with the Norman rulers began to adopt Old French terms for elements of Norman life. The speech of the English commoners was less influenced. For instance, contemporary English has inherited a distinction between the cooked and live forms ofseveral meat animals. Mutton, pork, and beef were adopted into English fromOld French (moton, porc, and boef) for use when serving foods to the Norman rulers. When the animals were still alive and in the keeping of theEnglish peasants, they were called by their original English names, sheep,swine, and cow (Leaf, 1971).
Borrowing tends to happen more often from the languages of politically and economically dominant societies to their neighbors than the other way around. This can be seen today in the large number of words that have been borrowed from American English into other languages. Today, when printing information about computers, German newspapers refer to "der Computer," "der Code," "das Display," "das Web-Design," and "der Cursor." However,such Anglicisms are not limited to computer terminology. German newspaper readers may also encounter words such as "der Trend," "der Cash-Flow," and"der Trainer," English words that have displaced their German equivalents in some publications.
Dialects
Changes in language occur gradually with the passage of time. Yet, at any given time, the need to communicate effectively within a social group necessitates a certain degree of mutual sharing in the sounds used to form words, in the meanings of words, and in the grammatical patterns for combining them. Consequently, a language changes in more or less the same way for all members of the group. However, when a group is subdivided, either geographically or socially, the members of each subgroup tend to communicate more frequently with one another than with outsiders. One result of such isolation is that new ways of speaking that arise in one subgroup do not necessarily pass over into others. Thus, a language originally spoken in the same way by several groups can gradually change until it is made up of separate dialects, or mutually intelligible variants of a language shared by different social groups. For instance, the English now spoken in Great Britain differs from the varieties of English spoken in the United States and Australia, although all three forms developed from a single language spoken but a few hundred years ago by residents of and emigrants from Great Britain.
African American Vernacular English
William Labov (1972) studied the everyday speech of African Americans in Philadelphia, New York, and other urban centers in the United Statesand recorded the patterns of their English dialect, which is now technically referred to as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) but wasonce called Ebonics. AAVE differs in several ways from Standard English (SE), the dialect taught in U.S. schools and used by most people in the United States, at least on formal occasions.
One notable difference between AAVE and SE is the structured omission of forms of "to be" in AAVE, an omission that Lanehart (1999) argues can be traced back to the dialect's West African roots (p. 217). This rule allows a statement such as "You are fast" to be expressed more succinctly as "You fast." Although this deletion of "to be" is not found in Standard American English, it is not at all unusual in other languages. For instance, subject and predicate complements are not joined by a "to be" verb in Russian, Hungarian, or Arabic. Absence or deletion of the"to be" verb in these languages and in African American Vernacular English causes no ambiguity, as it carries no meaning in this context that would be lost when it is deleted. Its deletion is not, in other words, a random or illogical dropping of a word that is needed for clear communication. Rather, the deletion is rule-governed and predictable. In fact, AAVE drops the "to be" in exactly those sentences in which it maybe contracted in Standard English. Thus, "He is happy" may be contracted as "He's happy" in SE, or the verb may be completely dropped toform "He happy" in AAVE. In those grammatical constructions in which "to be" cannot be contracted in SE, it cannot be deleted in AAVE. African American Vernacular English also makes use of various forms of the double negative. For instance, the Standard English "There wasn't much Icould do" becomes "Wasn't much I couldn't do" in AAVE, and "When it rained, nobody knew it did" becomes "When it rained, nobody don't know it didn't." Again, by distributing the negative throughout the sentence rather than restricting its expression to a single place, African American Vernacular English follows a pattern found in many other languages of the world, and doing so does not create misunderstanding among speakers of any of those languages or dialects.
According to Labov, African American Vernacular English is a dialect "that is more different from most other English dialects than they are from each other" (p. 36). However, like any other dialect, most of its grammatical rules are those shared by all dialects of English. Its difference from Standard English is one of degree, not kind. In sum, the distinguishing characteristics of African American Vernacular English, like those of every other dialect, are simply a matter of differences in what Chomsky has referred to as the Surface Structure of a language. African AmericanVernacular English has the same universal Deep Structure characteristics as all other languages and dialects. Nonetheless, those differences have important social, political, and economic ramifications for AAVE speakers, which linguist John Rickford (1997) argues can be addressed through educational strategies that help AAVE speakers master Standard English.
Standard English is not a superior dialect. It and African American Vernacular English function equally well in meeting the communication needs of their speakers. However, SE is the prestige dialect in the United States, meaning it is the one used in education, the workplace, the mass media, official discourse, and most professional communication. The privileging of Standard English in academic settings has serious implicationsfor AAVE speakers, whose performance may not be accurately assessed by SE-speaking teachers who lack an understanding of AAVE, possibly stigmatize AAVE as a speech form, or fail to value the linguistic diversity AAVE speakers add to the classroom. Many teachers and most students also fail to recognize AAVE as an expression of personal identity and cultural heritage, which can impact AAVE speakers' confidence, self-esteem, and motivation for learning. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that many AAVE speakers fail to master SE. Once out of school, that can hinder their ability to secure well-paid or high-status employment. Rickford (1999) suggests that improving AAVE students' ability to communicate effectively in SE may lead to their improved socioeconomic status later in life.
The question of how AAVE speakers should be accommodated in the classroom remains a thorny one, as exemplified by the so-called EbonicsControversy of the mid 1990s. In December 1996, the Oakland (California) School Board passed a resolution recognizing AAVE as the primary language of some African American students and mandating that district schools develop programs to address their needs (Monaghan, 1997).Students who participated in the new programs, which provided a bridge between AAVE and SE, progressed more rapidly in their ability to read Standard English than those who did not. Unfortunately, the project proved so controversial that the board abandoned it after a few months. Similar strategies for addressing the needs of AAVE-speaking students in other parts of the country met with the same fate. In the Oakland case, the school board's attempt to elevate the status of AAVE from a stigmatized type of "broken-down English" to a legitimate speech form with along and rich history was badly misunderstood (Monaghan, 1997). Some people wrongly assumed the board wanted AAVE taught in the classroom, others were outraged by what they saw as the elevation of slang to a legitimate way of speaking, and yet others perceived the move as pandering to under prepared students who simply needed to get with the game and learn "proper" English. In reality, all the board was tryingto do was better meet the needs of African American students, which the early evaluations indicated they were doing. Although not objecting to the proposal as such, linguist John McWhorter felt the low performance of African American students could be better accounted for andmore productively addressed in terms of the overall failures of underfunded intercity schools (Monaghan, 1997). Linguist Roy Kephart also thought the problem extended beyond the classroom. He noted that "gaining greater command of the standard language will not help unless society is willing to adjust its attitudes toward those involved." He suggested that this may be "where anthropologists and linguists have their most important work to do: raising public awareness and understanding of what linguistic, cultural and biological differences mean, and most importantly, what they don't mean"(qtd. in Monaghan, 1997, p. 9).
Dialects of the same original language can gradually become so different that they are no longer mutually intelligible. English and German, for example, were once a single language. Called Proto-Germanic by modern students of language, it was spoken on the mainland of Europe in what is now northern Germany by peoples known as the Angles and the Saxons. Those who left the mainland about 1,500 to 2,000 years ago became a separate social group in the British Isles, where their isolation allowed the language to change in different ways than it did on the mainland. Since the process of change was systematic in both groups, one finds a system of consistent parallels between the two "daughter"languages, German and English.
Basic Vocabulary
The part of a language that best reflects its internal history consists of words learned by individuals early in their lives in their home setting.Such words are used frequently in normal speech situations. The habit of their use is not easily overcome, and foreign terms are not likely to supplant them (Gudschinsky, 1956). The part of a vocabulary that has these qualities is known as the basic vocabulary of a language. It includesthe words most commonly used to express such concepts as father, mother, brother, sister, head, hand, foot, eat, water, drink, fire, house, earth,sky, sun, moon, and star, as well as others that designate basic elements of people's social, biological, and physical environments.
