Black, white and Asian children in this group show the same patterns. However, looking at the larger world around us, it is clear that blacks have been greatly overrepresented in the development of American popular music and greatly underrepresented in such fields as mathematics, science and engineering.
If the abilities required in analytical fields and in music are so closely related, how can there be this great disparity? One reason is that the development of mathematical and other such abilities requires years of formal schooling, while certain musical talents can be developed with little or no formal training, as has happened with a number of well-known black musicians.
It is precisely in those kinds of music where one can acquire great skill without formal training that blacks have excelled-popular music rather than classical music, piano rather than violin, blues rather than opera. This is readily understandable, given that most blacks, for most of American history, have not had either the money or the leisure for long years of formal study in music.
Blacks have not merely held their own in American popular music. They have played a disproportionately large role in the development of jazz, both traditional and modern. A long string of names comes to mind–Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, W. C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker. . .and on and on.
None of this presupposes any special innate ability of blacks in music. On the contrary, it is perfectly consistent with blacks’ having no more such inborn ability than anyone else, but being limited to being able to express such ability in narrower channels than others who have had the money, the time and the formal education to spread out over a wider range of music, as well as into mathematics, science and engineering.
There is no way of knowing whether Duke Ellington would have become a mathematician or scientist under other circumstances. What is clearer is that most blacks have not had such alternatives available until very recently, as history is measured. Moreover, now that cultural traditions have been established, even those blacks who have such alternatives available today, and who have the inborn abilities to pursue them, may nevertheless continue for some time to follow wellworn paths.
In these supersensitive times, merely suggesting that there is such a thing as inborn ability is taboo. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that mental abilities run in families, even when the families are broken up when the children are young and siblings are raised separately and in complete isolation from one another.
When it comes to the role of heredity and environment, a key sentence written all in italics has nevertheless been one of the most ignored sentences in one of the most widely discussed books of our time: That a trait is genetically transmitted in individuals does not mean that group differences in that trait are also genetic in origin. This sentence is from “The Bell Curve,” a book routinely accused of being racist, especially by those who have not read it.
What this italicized sentence is saying, in effect, is that environmental differences between two groups may be much greater than environmental differences between two individuals chosen at random from the general population. Since tests measure developed capabilities, rather than inborn potential, you would expect groups from very different environments to differ in particular capabilities, even if most differences among individuals are due to heredity.
That makes sense when you stop and think about it. What is remarkable is how few people have stopped to think about it before going ballistic. Mention genetics and it will be taken as a code word for race. But, within every race, there are genetic differences among individuals and families.
There are important biological differences that are not genetic. Recent research has indicated that the brain’s physical development is promoted by an environment in which there is much interaction with a baby during the brain’s early formative years. If even half of what has been said about the old-fashioned “Jewish mother” is true, then her busy, talkative attentiveness to her children may have given major lifelong advantages to the very children who later complained about how smothered they felt.
Contrast that with other cultural groups and social classes who pay little attention to small children, replying to their questions with impatient short answers or even telling them to shut up. More than a quarter of a century ago, Edward Banfield’s classic study of urban life, “The Unheavenly City,” said that this unresponsive reaction to children’s questions and comments was characteristic of a lower-class lifestyle and pointed out how stunted the development of such children might be. Now brain research backs him up.
Those who argue that there is no innate difference in the mental abilities of different racial and ethnic groups often conclude that different social results must therefore reflect discrimination by “society.” But equal innate potential at the moment of conception does not necessarily mean equal mental capacity even at the moment of birth, given the many prenatal influences at work, such as the mother’s use of alcohol or drugs.
Add differences in child-rearing practices and the culture of the home and the street, and there can be very large differences among children from different backgrounds before they ever reach the first employer or otherwise encounter the larger society.
