Changes in the ‘‘face’’ of America demand that individuals try to understand developmental processes operating in children from varying
racial and ethnic backgrounds. (Tony Arruza/Corbis)
with extreme protest from many researchers who felt
their claims were exaggerated, if not completely false.
Critics suggested that Herrnstein and Murray’s re-
search was not scientifically rigorous. All findings re-
lied upon a single data set, ignoring a century of
research in the social sciences; the standardized tests
used in their research measured academic instruction
rather than inherent ability; the comparison groups
were poorly designed; and they repeatedly overinter-
preted weak relationships in the data. Moreover, The
Bell Curve failed to explain within-racial-group differ-
ences in IQ. Similarly, neither the genetic hypothesis
nor Herrnstein and Murray’s theory of intellectual
performance could account for multiracial children’s
IQ scores or the scores of adopted children.
The last and most compelling proposed explana-
tion for racial differences in intellectual performance
is that differences are the result of environmental cir-
cumstances. The subject of racial differences cannot
easily be separated from the subject of socioeconomic
class. Racial and ethnic group membership, in fact, is
highly related to socioeconomic stratification. There
is a direct correlation between parental income and
education with standardized test scores. The scores of
minority test takers tend to be lower, because minori-
ty children and adolescents on average come from
families with lower incomes than do European-
American children and adolescents. Furthermore,
poor children and children from minority groups,
who are more likely to be of lower socioeconomic sta-
tus, are more likely to grow up in circumstances that
do not favor intellectual development. Lack of access
to resources and economic hardship can affect intel-
lectual growth. Poor nutrition, poor health care, and
living in chronic poverty or violent neighborhoods
are just some of the factors that can combine to pro-
duce less than optimal learning environments.Cultural Differences vs. Racial
DifferencesThe direction of research on racial differences is
beginning to move away from the race-comparative
framework, which has cultivated the deficit perspec-RACIAL DIFFERENCES 341