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.[87]
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.[88]
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.[89]
Scarr and Weinberg reluctantly published their data from the follow-up survey, but they waited close to four years to do
so, almost as if they were embarrassed by what they had found. Through a tortured reasoning process, they still argued
that environment played a dominant role in IQ. But in their follow-up survey, unlike their first paper, they also
admitted that genes had an important impact as well. Both Richard Lynn and Michael Levin effectively showed in their
reanalyses of Scarr’s own data, that genes clearly comprise the dominant role in intelligence levels of those adopted
children.[90] [91]
My Awakening - David Duke
