Differences between races exist. So what?

What makes someone smart? The answer to this defines what we value in society.

For decades, our discussion on racial differences has been guided by a book titled “The Bell Curve,” written by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in 1994. The book claims to empirically research the racial differences in IQ. Most notably, the book finds that black people have lower IQ scores than white people in the U.S. According to an article by Eric Siegel in Scientific American, the book “spurs readers to prejudge by race” and never actually come up with policy prescriptions that address the gap. It describes a difference between the races but might not account for how that happened.

True testing of intelligence between races is difficult because there is no educational equity. Assuming the U.S. has achieved perfect equality is required in order for the conclusions of “The Bell Curve” to mean anything.

To take the ideas at face value and not consider their underlying implications is irresponsible. First, the research behind “The Bell Curve” assumes there is only one kind of valuable intelligence, and it is measured by an IQ score. The other assumption is, because there’s a difference in IQ scores between races, the group with a lower IQ score should receive no help because they are inherently inferior. This misses the point because there’s always one group that decides what’s valuable: the one with the institutional power.

Our ideas about what’s valuable are skewed by how we’re socialized. For example, there’s a reason why traditionally male jobs like engineers and doctors are paid better than traditionally female jobs like teachers and nurses. The fact that the kinds of careers chosen by men and women are different doesn’t change the fact a pay gap exists. In fact, it should raise questions: Why did they choose those careers in the first place, and why is one valued more than another?

Similarly, intelligence and success are determined by the group with institutional power. It’s important to question where research comes from and what the background of it is. What we value does not happen in a vacuum. Murray does not just have empirically researched ideas on race, but he also has views about policy and his writing comes with political context.

To allege that Murray has been somehow iced out of policy discussion is just wrong — he recently published a successful book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.”

Many people think his research and policy conclusions are legitimate.

“The Bell Curve” is still discussed today, often without context about Murray’s true political goals — to have people with lower IQs have fewer children. Matthew Yglesias writes in Vox that Murray is a policy writer rather than a scientist who has had a substantial influence on American immigration policy. Murray believes there are fundamental differences between people, and people should be judged as individuals, not members of a group. This disregards a lot of the reasons why one group might do worse than another, like the legacy of slavery, or “stereotype threat,” which is the idea that once a person is told a member of their group won’t succeed at a task, it negatively affects their performance.

Ultimately, we can’t take information about race out of context. An uninformed approach might say that any documented differences between races are completely warranted — that each race has equal opportunity to succeed — but this is not the case. Research about the differences between races has to consider the institutional inequities between groups and consider how those might be fixed, rather than just documenting those differences.

Nicole Dan is a UF journalism and political science senior. Her column focuses on race and culture.