Is Race Real?

Does IQ Tell Us Anything About It?

It should come as a surprise to no one that the human species has, throughout most of its existence, not been consolidated in one geographical area. It should also be fairly obvious that disparate geographical areas have required the human body to respond to disparate challenges. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, when different groups of humans migrated to distant corners of the globe, they were forced to adapt to the particular demands that their respective climates and conditions imposed upon them—and in a demonstration of its remarkable malleability, the human body developed the necessary physical characteristics for survival, leading to phenotypic differences between groups. But perhaps the body is not the only thing that diversified itself when humanity dispersed: philosopher Nathan Cofnas suggests that perhaps the brain adapted, too.

Cofnas’s preferred position is one of race realism. Of course, there are a few senses in which one could use the term “race realism,” but Cofnas is concerned with only two: a) the position that racial classification makes sense and is rooted in a biological reality, and b) the position that race is correlated with sociologically significant traits, such as intelligence. Cofnas endorses both. But in attempting to answer any question about the reality of race, it seems there is a different question we must also answer: what actually is race? According to Cofnas, it primarily comes down to semantics. There is no objective truth to how we should understand race, he claims; all we know is that the guiding principles should be biology and genealogy. After all, these are the principles seemingly at play when we identify and speak about “race” in an everyday context. We know that our racial classifications aren’t entirely arbitrary, or else we could divide race along lines that have little or nothing to do with each other; we know that racial classifications don’t respond merely to skin color, since this would imply that albino Black people are not actually Black. In common-sense semantic usage of the term “race,” then, Cofnas argues that we are largely tracking genetic ancestry—and it is this idea of race that we should understand as being real.

Once race has been identified as a semantic thing, though, an immediate objection arises. Most people do not actually know all this genetic information about strangers. When we meet new people and group them into racial categories, we do so based on how they look to us; that is, we group people along phenotypic lines, not genotypic ones. So, semantically speaking, it might seem strange to think that our usage of racial terms and categories is based on ancestry in the way that Cofnas claims. This concern is strengthened by the fact that humans do not have any built-in mechanisms to help us determine strangers’ biological makeup: even if we wanted to categorize race along biological lines, we necessarily could not. How, then, can race be both a semantic thing and also the type of thing that reliably tracks genealogy or ancestry?

Cofnas offers three responses to such an objection. First, he argues, we must distinguish between common-sense (or “folk”) definitions of race on the one hand, and scientific definitions on the other. Even if folk concepts of race are not beholden to biological principles, this doesn’t mean that our scientific concepts of race should forsake biology. Second, Cofnas claims that even the average person has enough of an understanding of ancestry and DNA to track race somewhat scientifically. For example, most people know, at the very least, that White people are largely descended from Europeans. Third, Cofnas argues that just because sociocultural considerations influence folk concepts of race, this does not mean that an objective way of understanding race does not exist. After all, sociocultural considerations influence plenty of other objective things. For instance, language is the type of thing around which we draw very blurry boundaries in most contexts, and yet Mandarin and English are clearly objectively distinct languages.

If there are real differences between racial groups, what are they? Are they essential, or are they context-dependent? Cofnas contends that most racial differences can be explained by invoking natural selection. All sorts of different types of thinking and intelligence, he claims, are subject to natural selection; so, some kinds of intelligence are enhanced and some are disregarded in particular racial groups, depending on the demands of those groups’ respective environments. But according to Cofnas, these differences in type and level of intelligence do not disappear even when environmental differences do. Instead, they become racial features, leading to widespread racial differences in socioeconomic status. Put simply, Cofnas argues that people of different races really do have different mental capacities, and that this is merely a feature of biological development. And he goes further: if these differences do exist, we shouldn’t pretend that they don’t, lest we encourage racial tensions based on outcome inequalities that are in some sense natural. We should, though, maintain some sort of quota system in important governing institutions, in order to ensure that all races are represented equally when it comes to making policy decisions.

It is worth noting at this point that Cofnas’s position rests strongly on empirical evidence, and in particular, empirical studies that have found significant differences in the IQs of Black and White subjects. But there have been very widespread and harsh criticisms of these studies, suggesting that Cofnas’s empirical premises are perhaps not as sound as he argues. One serious criticism leveled against such studies is that they only measure “general intelligence,” or G, which is deeply culturally dependent: for instance, an American will likely have a far easier time answering questions on an assessment of G than someone from the Philippines, even if the two are equally intelligent. This is because Americans, on average, exist within sociocultural contexts that equip them with the necessary resources and knowledge to answer such questions—but people living in other areas might not have the same sorts of resources. Additionally, it’s unclear that G is a reliable measure of intelligence in the first place, since it measures intelligence only in a very narrow sense; there are many types of intelligence for which G does not and cannot account.

It might be true that people who do not perform well in G are still very intelligent, Cofnas concedes, but this doesn’t mean that the general intelligence quantified by G would not be good for them to have. Moreover, he claims that “culture-fair” IQ tests have also failed to show equal results across populations, because cultural backgrounds will always influence our intelligence in important ways; thus, the best way of eliminating these sociocultural differences is to simply compare intelligence across different racial groups with the same backgrounds (e.g., Black and White populations in the United States). And according to Cofnas, even after accounting for environmental factors, it seems that we still cannot find equal scores across racial groups in the same cultures, which gives us reason to think that race really is correlated with intelligence.

Of course, some objectors may hold that it’s nearly impossible to take environmental and societal factors off the table, given the long history of racial discrimination in the United States. In fact, it seems implausible that we could ever fully address these things in our research on intelligence: racial prejudices are so pervasive that we simply cannot identify and eliminate all their effects as biasing factors. Furthermore, it may be unclear why we take the subjects of these intelligence studies to be good representatives of their racial groups, on average. What if we are, even by mere accident, choosing particularly unintelligent subjects? But Cofnas does not find these concerns too pressing. If it were true that our subjects were not good racial representatives, he argues, we would see differences in IQ from a very early age—instead, though, we start to see disparities when subjects reach their early 20s, when Cofnas claims that heritability of IQ increases and environmental factors become less causal. Additionally, even if it’s tenable that the environmental thesis could one day be saved by the right sorts of calculations and formulas, why would we wait for such a day? According to Cofnas, there’s already another thesis—that of race realism—that both makes sense and can explain results. And even if it turns out to be the case that intelligence is not influenced by race itself, but rather by some racially-correlated genetic factor, Cofnas argues that his position still holds: after all, race would still be correlated with intelligence on this account.

Even if there do turn out to be empirically incontestable differences in intelligence across races, one might think that we still have sociopolitical reasons to ignore these differences. After all, acknowledging them could enforce pernicious racial hierarchies and biases. But Cofnas rejects this idea. If we can see racial disparities but not acknowledge genetic causes, he claims, we will start creating societal tensions where there should be none. And we already give plenty of attention to “lower intelligence” groups, at least in the United States, through funding special education programs. Why would we stop caring about these groups if they turned out to be caused by racial backgrounds? The best solution, Cofnas suggests, is to simply address intelligence differences in the first place.

Cofnas’s position does not commit him to promoting any sort of racial segregation or prejudice. Nonetheless, many will find it deeply unappealing, not least because it relies so heavily on empirical premises that are as yet highly contentious. But perhaps it’s worth addressing the possibility that Cofnas is correct, even if only to disagree more precisely. After all, it seems that this is one area that academics and scholars have heretofore neglected—and perhaps this mistake should be corrected in order to better understand, if nothing else, the reality of racial tension.