1. First and foremost, why in the world would my pride--such as it is--need to have anything to do with the color of my skin? One had thought that self-confidence came from a sense of strong identity, and that (by the very logic argued for by those who got all bothered about that cartoon) generally speaking, one was supposed to take pride in a) one's country, b) the achievements of the human race. Sure, "race," is tangled up with this--but taking pride in the achievements of white people is just silly.
2. The whole concept of, "race," is biological. It is largely a fallacy. "Ethnicity," is what us kids are talking about; it has to do with culture and with history.
3. Ran into this "bell curve," stuff back when was an undergrad and studied behavioral genetics with a guy named Robert Plomin. (Look him up.) it may be useful to mention actual science here: a) "intelligence," is quite difficult to define and to measure, being very situation-specific; b) to the extent that intelligence can simply be measured as, say, problem solving for certain kinds of problems, the consensus is that its heritability depends on a complex of genes; c) there appear to be larger variations in IQ that can be directly attributed to education, experience and to culture than to genes--the famous example is that IQs for Northern Irish Catholics test out as being as much lower than Northern Irish Protestants as "African-American," IQs test as being lower than those of, "white," people; d) all info from genetics, at best, tells you something about groups and nothing about individuals.
4. The history of the concept of intelligence, and of the heritability of intelligence, suggests strongly that the "science," remains hopelessly contaminated with class and "racial," bias. See Gould, "Mismeasure of Man;" see Galton's, "g," and the origins of the Binet IQ test in the French Army circa WWI.
5. It is absurd to claim that African-Americans and other minorities have, as groups, precisely the same access to education that groups of "white," middle-class people have. A look at very simple, very obvious population data for colleges, universities, prep schools, elite schools at all levels, will show you that. Generally speaking, the actual scientific take on that is that African-Americans, as a group, tend to have lower levels of income and to live in places that offer fewer educational advantages at all levels. The generally-accepted interpretation is that the effects of some 300 years of systematic, pervasive racial structuring of society do not go away in one or two generations, even with everybody thinking the best thoughts imaginable.
6. It is odd--or perhaps not so odd--that a discusssion of a cartoon rapidly turned into an attempt to provide scientific bases for a claim that African-Americans are less smart. Funnily enough, these discussions never seem to mention that by the same tests, Asian-Americans are smarter than white folks--until of course somebody brings up the goofy idea that it's unfair that, "they," get all the schools and the jobs just because, "they're," smarter and work harder.
7. Again: the folks who get all hot and bothered by that cartoon don't understand who their real enemies are. The issue isn't "race," but social and economic class; the problems don't lie with poor black people or even with illegal immigrants, but with the likes of Bush, Hannity, Limbaugh, Leykis, and the rest of the guys who do very, very well by more-or-less open race-baiting, and very open support for the advanced capitalism that's really your problem.
I don't know what to say.
