Review of Putnam’s Race and Reality -- Part 2

Review of Putnam’s Race and Reality -- Part 2

Thomas Allen

    In Chapter 3, Putnam discusses the “statistics regarding the current performance of the Negro as a race in America” (p. 46). He presents evidence that the Black race is not equal to the White race.
    He begins with the following facts:

The American Negro on the average produced per capita eight times as many illegitimate children, six times as many feeble-minded adults, nine times as many robberies, seven times as many rapes and ten times as many murders as the White man. Conversely the Negro race produced one-sixth as many individuals with an Intelligence Quotient over 130, that is, in the gifted person category (p. 46).

These data are early 1960s data. [Unfortunately for the Negro and America, these statistics have not improved. After 50 years of integration, civil rights, war on poverty, special privileges like affirmative action and quotas, the media and scientific propaganda machine promoting racial equality, a court system skewed in favor of the Negro, Blacks have made no real progress.  If anything, these statistics have gotten worse. This 50-year experiment with racial equality has not raised Blacks, but it has lowered Whites. This experiment is destroying the White race, America, and Europe. Has this destruction been the real objective of the racial equality agenda all along?]
    Putnam discusses Haiti, the only completely Black-ruled country in the Western Hemisphere, which has been independent since 1804, and the disaster that it is (pp. 46-47). He offers the inability of Blacks to govern themselves effectively as evidence against racial egalitarians (pp. 47-48).
    He also remarks that the egalitarian likes to confuse evidence with proof. If one piece of evidence in isolation fails to prove conclusively racial inequality, the racial egalitarians claim that racial inequality has been disproved (p. 48).
    His second piece of evidence for racial inequality is the innate differences between the White’s and the Black’s brain. Whites have a more complex brain structure. The frontal region of their brain is larger than that of Blacks.  He quotes Ward Halstead: “The frontal lobes are the portion of the brain most essential to biological intelligence. They are the organs of civilization — the basis of man’s hope for the future” (p 49). Putnam quotes several other scientists who support Ward’s conclusion (pp. 48-51).
    Putnam’s third piece of evidence also deals with innate brain differences (pp. 51-52). According to a study by F.W. Vint, “[T]he supragranular layer of the Negro cortex was about 15 per cent thinner than the Whites” (p. 51). Furthermore, Blacks have “a significant simplicity in the convolutional pattern” (p. 51).
    His fourth piece of evidence is brain weight. The Negro brain weighs less than the White brain. When corrected for sex, body size, and proportion of parts and sulcification, “the weight of the brain correlates with intelligence” (p. 52).
    Putnam’s fifth piece of evidence is the argument that Dr. Carleton Coon presents in Origin of Races (pp. 53-54). Coon presents “the hypothesis that the White race crossed the evolutionary threshold from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ahead of the Negro” (p. 53).
    His sixth piece of evidence is:

. . . the speed of kinesthetic learning from birth to the first years of life — learning, that is, which involved the transition from uterine to infant patterns of muscular reflex and control. This speed seemed to be inversely correlated with the ultimate complexity to be attained by the cerebral cortex, which supported the established observation that in all mammalian life full mental stature develops early in direct relation to cerebral simplicity (p. 55).

Negro infants reach developmental milestones sooner than do White infants (p. 55).
    Putnam’s seventh piece of evidence is the electrophysiology of the brain, i.e., analyzing wave emissions, their cerebral location, and the brain’s electrical response to various stimuli. Blacks show a lower response to the flicker of a high-speed electronic stroboscope than do Whites (pp. 55-56). An impoverished response to flicker implies “‘a failure of the brain to develop, in the areas of imagination, visualization and power of conceptual thought, toward anything approaching maturity’” (p. 56).
    His eighth piece of evidence is the inheritance of racial structure. “Races by definition were simply gene pools of distinguishable and distinctive physical characteristics whose anatomy, insofar as it involved the brain, produced corresponding mental differences. The same could be said of the whole nervous system and of the endocrine glands” (p. 57). Social anthropologists [most of whom are racial egalitarians] claim “that while inherited traits might have some bearing on behavior they were lost in the sea of cultural influences. . . . [T]hrough culture he [man] offset inheritance almost completely” (p. 57). To whom Putnam replies, “social anthropologists never asked the question: To what extent had the culture first been created, and then sustained, by genetic traits?” (p. 57). Studies of twins raised apart in radically different environments show that overall heredity exceeds environment in a ratio of about 3 to 1 (p. 58). [Like socioeconomic status, culture does not cause differences in I.Q. between Blacks and Whites; I.Q. creates the culture, and I.Q. differences are the cause of differences in socioeconomic status and culture. Cognitive ability precedes culture; it does not follow it although once developed a culture can affect cognitive ability.]
    Putnam’s ninth piece of evidence is I.Q. (pp. 58-61). He quotes Dr. Garrett’s summary of the work of Audrey Shuey, The Testing of Negro Intelligence:

    1. The I.Q.’s of American Negroes are from 15 to 20 points, on the average, below those of American whites.
    2. Negro overlap of white median I.Q.’s ranges from 10 to 25 per cent — equality would require 50 per cent.
    3. About six times as many whites as Negroes fall in the “gifted child” category.
    4. About six times as many Negroes as whites fall below 70 I.Q. — that is, in the feeble-minded group.
    5. Negro-white differences in mean test score occur in all types of mental tests, but the Negro lag is greatest in tests of an abstract nature — for example, problems involving reasoning deduction, comprehension. These are the functions called for in education above the lowest levels.   
    6. Differences between Negro and white children increase with chronological age, the gap in performance being largest at the high school and college levels.
    7. Large and significant differences in favor of whites appear even when socioeconomic factors have been equated. (pp. 58-59)

    Putnam also quotes Dr. Garrett’s summary of a comparison that he made of I.Q. data collected by the U.S. government and by Drs. Terman and Merrill:

    1. The average I.Q. of the Negro children is 80.7. The average I.Q. of the White children is 101.8.
    2. Five per cent of the Negroes achieved I.Q.’s above the average White child. Conversely, 89 per cent of the White children achieved I.Q.’s above the average Negro child.
    3. In the High-Average and Superior groups are found 31 per cent of the White children, and 1.1 per cent of the Negro children.
    4. In the Average or Normal group are 46.5 per cent of the White children, and 19 per cent of the Negro children.
    5. The Borderline and Defective groups contain 8.2 per cent of the Whites, and 50.2 per cent of the Negroes.
    6. The average Negro pupil (whose I.Q. is 80.7) cannot go beyond a national-standard Seventh grade curriculum; for half the Negro group, the Fifth grade is the maximum.
    7. Only one per cent of the Negroes are intellectually equipped (110 I.Q. and above) to do acceptable college work (p. 60).

    The egalitarian’s response to this irrefutable data is “the old environmentalist argument that the tests reflected a condition caused by White injustice” (p. 60). [Yet they offer no good scientific evidence or studies to support their assertion. As shown above, twin studies refute the egalitarian’s environmental claim.] Moreover, studies whose purpose was to show that the difference in the intellect of Whites and Blacks was caused by the environment showed the opposite (p. 61).
    Putnam’s tenth and final piece of evidence is the historical experience. The racial egalitarians hold two contradictory and specious explanations to explain the Negro’s backwardness:

On the one hand they argued that the Negro had been isolated by geographical barriers from contact with civilizing influences and that White groups so isolated did no better than the Negro. On the other they advanced claims that the Negro had created magnificent civilizations in Africa, hitherto lost to history but now being discovered as their ruins were unearthed (p. 62).

    To refute the isolation argument, Putnam quotes A.L. Kroeber, a racial egalitarian and environmental (cultural) anthropologist:

All in all, Negro Africa lies open enough to the main Eurasian centers to have presumably experienced a slow cultural “bombardment” that constantly mingled new traits with old, foreign with acclimated, and acclimated elements with those indigenously evolved. Through the centuries and millennia, everything got worked over until it took on the native local color (p. 62).

Since ancient times, Arabs have had contact with Sub-Saharan Africa. For at least the last 500 years, Europeans have been in contact with Sub-Saharan Africa. “[Yet] none of this lifted the Negro out of is primitive condition” (p. 62).
    In response to the claim that the Negro had developed magnificent civilizations that are now lost, Putnam writes, “. . . there had been no “magnificent” Negro kingdoms in Africa in any civilized sense, that such barbaric cultures as existed were almost certainly intrusive, that the Moors and Ethiopians were not Negroes, and that the Nubian dynasty in Egypt was a period of retrogression” (pp. 62-63). He also argues [correctly] that the culture behind the ruins in Zimbabwe, Rhodesia, was not of Negro origin although Blacks probably built them. [Most likely, they were of Arab origin or possibly Chinese as porcelain of the Ming period has been found among the ruins (p. 63).] He quotes Dr. Robert Gayre, who concluded, “[T]here is absolutely no evidence at all that Zimbabwe and the other similar sites were built by the Bantu [Negroes], except as laborers” (p. 63).
    Putnam concludes his demonstration of the fallacies of the egalitarian conflicting proposition of isolation and lost civilizations with a quotation from Arnold Toynbee: “It will be seen that when we classify mankind by colour the only one of the primary races, given by this classification, which has not made a creative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations is the Black Race” (p. 64).
    Some egalitarians assert that climate and disease, i.e., heat and tropical maladies, account for the Negro’s backwardness. To this claim, Putnam replies, “[T]here were many parts of Africa where the climate was good and . . . other parts of the world which had produced great civilizations where the climate was bad. Moreover, for a hundred years the Negro had been free of both tropical diseases and the incubus of climate in the old ex-slave settlement at Chatham, Ontario. Yet his performance there on intelligence tests followed the standard pattern” (pp. 64-65).
    Putnam notes that the leaders of scientific associations, the news and entertainment media, political and religious leaders, and the educational establishment do everything that they can to suppress the truth about race. [They also suppress the truth about the medical system including prescription medication and vaccines, firearms and crime, immigration, terrorism, 9-11, the economy and monetary system, and just about everything else of importance.]
    In Chapter 4, Putnam reviews a court case in Georgia about integration and the events leading up to that case.
    He notes that before Boas and his disciples gained power, no one questioned the “innate race differences, so no one in those days suspected the existence of a Negro ‘right’ to integration in our [White] schools” (p. 67). Indeed, the courts had established that Blacks did not have the right to integrate White schools (p. 67).
    The first task of the racial egalitarians and integrationists was to discredit the biological facts. The Boas dogma of culture, environment, makes the race, not genetics, was ideal for this job. Articles based on Boas’ doctrines filled law reviews and sociological journals (pp. 67-69).
    The first decisive case where Boas’ dogma prevailed was the Covenant Case of 1948, which dealt with racial restrictions in real estate agreements. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of integration and struck down these restrictions (pp. 68-69).
    The Brown decision to desegregate public schools was perhaps the greatest victory of Boas’ dogma (pp. 69-71). In part, the Supreme Court based its decision on sociological material that had not been introduced in evidence. [Such action is a gross abuse of power and duty by an appellate court.] In the Brown decision, the Supreme Court referenced Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, which had not been introduced as evidence and which “was Boas from beginning to end” (p. 70).
    One of the most important pieces of evidence that swayed the Court was the doll study of Kenneth Clark, a Negro. Clark testified that a majority of Black children from segregated schools preferred the White doll to the Black doll and chose the White doll as the one looking most like themselves. He used a sample of 16. [A major way to lie with statistics is to use a small sample. That way, if enough small samples are used, one will eventually get the desired results. The other samples are ignored.] Earlier Clark had performed his doll study with a much larger sample of Black children from public schools in Arkansas and in Massachusetts. He found “the southern children in segregated schools are less pronounced in their preference for the white doll, compared to the northern [unsegregated] children’s definite preference for this doll. Although still in a minority, a higher percentage of southern children, compared to northern, prefer to play with the colored doll or think that it is a ‘nice’ doll” (p. 72). Thus, to the extent that the doll study shows personality damage, segregation is less damaging than integration (pp. 71-74).
    Next Putnam discusses some testimony in the Stell vs. the Savannah Board of Education. During this trial, the defense presented scientists who supported segregation because of the genetic differences between Blacks and Whites. The plaintiff presented no scientists to argue against them (pp. 74-86). [Perhaps the defense knew that the “deck was stacked against the defense.” The defense believed, correctly, that no matter how convincing the scientific data favored segregation, the defense would win on appeal, which it did, if it did not win at trial, which it did not. The school system was going to integrate whatever the outcome of the trial — so much for the rule of law.]
    In Chapter 5, Putnam continues discussing the Savannah court trial, the Stell case.
    During the trial, Putnam observed van der Haag’s thumbnail sketch of a worldwide condition in action:

Indoctrinate a controlling group of scientists in a politically oriented, environmentalist dogma over a period of two generations; make a moral issue out of something immoral; persecute and suppress any dissenters; infiltrate the mass media; and finally persuade the courts by introducing only falsified evidence. Thereafter rely solely, in those courts, on the “majority” view. Never again permit the truth to come to light if you can help it (pp. 88-89).   

    In its decision, the trial court agreed with the scientific information submitted by the defense witnesses. It ruled in favor of the school board, i.e., in favor of segregated schools, and against the plaintiff, i.e., against integrated schools. Ignoring the evidence entirely, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the trial court decision (pp. 89-92). [Such a ruling by the Circuit Court was to be expected. Egalitarians and other statists controlled the higher federal courts. Their job was to expand the power of the U.S. government and control over the States, local governments, and the people. Forced integration has certainly done this.]
    Putnam discusses the Circuit Court’s declaration that assigning exceptional Negro pupils whose abilities exceeded the average White pupil to segregated Black schools was discriminatory. Negroes should be treated as individuals and not as members of a group. Thus, all Blacks should be allowed to integrate into White schools. Putnam applies the Circuit Court’s reasoning to minors. Laws deny minors the right to drive, vote, or marry [or to buy alcohol, tobacco, and firearms] simply because the average minor is not considered wise, experienced, or mature enough to do these things. However, some minors have better judgment, more experience, and more intelligence than many adults. Therefore, following the Circuit Court’s reasoning minors should be allowed to vote, marry, and drive cars [and to buy, own, and use alcohol, tobacco, and firearms] (pp. 92-93).

Copyright © 2016 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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