Introduction
This section of a letter was written to Chad Arment, a publisher of books including the works of Choctaw Indian and author of 13 mystery books written in the 1930-1945 period. "Prejudice Can Sting" deals with an experiment involving Harlem youth, 13 to 17 age range, both boys and girls and almost all identifying as negro.
The original observation that black children seemed to process information faster than their white friends was made during teaching of primarily Korean Tae kwon Do and Japanese Shotokan karate by Nenad (Cuic) Downing, Sho-Dan from the All Japan Karate Federation - Japan received through Sensie Jerry Brown, Ni-Dan, AJKF and 2nd place winner of All Japan Karate tournament, 1964 or 1965 (I believe was one of these years).
I will be posting my certificates in karate (1st Dan, Shotokan, from All Japan Karate Federation); my Nidad (2nd degree in Shotokan. The certificate is actually written in Chinese characters by a Chineese man who was a cook at Joy Young Restaurant in Memphis. I often ate there and as Jerry was dying of brain tumor there was not time for him to send the paper work to Japan. To this day I do not know whether the certificate for 2nd degree black belt in Japanese style karate was translated into a recepe for egg foo young with side order of pork Cantonese Chow Mein, and a small bowel of Won Ton Soup as that is all I ever ordered at Joy Young. I did ask Joy Young, who had become a good friend, if "the spelling" was OK as I did not want to inadvertenly suggest anything improper might have occured - as this could be mistaken when the use of different languages is involved. He assured me everything was "on the up and up" so I bowed to him and said, " I will see you next week. Thank you."
A photo image of this certificate and also San-Dan and Yo-Dan in Tae Kwon Do obtained through recommendation of Sensie Sun Won Chu, 5th Dan, Tae Kwon Do.
The observation that the negro students seemed to "catch on" quicker was made in the context of teaching martial arts to them, along with white counterparts. That is not to say that in all cases the black students excelled ahead of the white students. That is just not the case. Rather, when a black student performed quite well compared to his white counter part in the subject of martial arts, karate and judo - he performed significantly better. It was very noticable. I suppose someone might say this is steriotyping - that we are all equal, For comforts sake, people who believe that all humans are equal in their capacity to achieve in athletics and academically should hold fast to that notion, grip the idea tightly. Delusional thiking often acts as a salve to heal or lesson the wounds that society often bring to us.
What we are talking about in this initial paper is THE PROCESSING of information as contrasted with INTELLIGENCE. In other words, is HOW FAST you learn an indicator of intelligence? Then we should ask, WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE? It is a tricky question for sure, and complicated. I will give you the definition of intelligence given to me in one of many letters traded between a prominant Kansas City, MO child psychiatrist and associate professor, and my self, first as a young child and patient, then as a fatherless and motherless teenage boy and patient, then as an adult working through engineering school withought the comfort of previous highschool other than correspondence and tutoring in higher math by a retired Air Force officer and electronics instructor with an MS in matn.
Let me paste the section of my letter to Chad Arment now and develop the theme more as time allows. I will add that the academic increase in achievement of these young negro boys and girls was such that late President Franklin Roosevelt's wife Eleanor attended the graduation ceremony and this is verified with copies of photos taken at the time. Also, I will add that I did get to meet this gracious lady though there was no pomp and circumstances accompaning my audiance or any of the other young students who were also given the opportunity to meet this famous woman and champion of civil rights during her hudband's entire term as president.
Let me post now and I will expand more later.
Nenad Cuic
Prejudice Can Sting (rev1 2022-04-23)
Prejudice can sting. I think that is the reason why Ruth was so active in the early civil rights movement. The word is empathy. I am told there is an old Indian saying, "Walk a mile in the other person's moccasins before you judge him." But that is common sense. And when I was studying Russian a long time ago, I came across the same expression in Russian. Yet it is true.
You cannot know what it feels like to have excruciating pain until you yourself have felt it. That is why it is true that we cannot understand the plight of the negro in the gettos of NYC and Chicago unless we can somehow put ourself into their shoes, their predicament.
I see much of the negro's outrage as being an expression of the burnt child syndrome. These getto children are taught by their very environment that they are failures and somehow must be intrinsically inferior – or why else can they not accomplish academically what the white man can do.
In 1959 Ruth conducted a research experiment under the auspices of the NYC Community Service Society (CSS) in Harlem. She was the supervisor of the Harlem branch of the CSS. What they did was take about 40 to 50 negro children, primarily boys, age from 13 to about 17, who were chronic failures in school and also discipline problems with many having juvenile records. Then with involvement of both the schools and the community and the boy's mothers ( in most of the cases the father was absent) and the social workers of CSS – these boys received intense INTERVENTION in their life, including such things as tutoring, counseling, etc.
Now the CSS did establish a base line by having each child and teen given IQ tests appropriate for the age. These included such tests as the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, Wechsler Bellevue intelligence test, etc. As you know, tests such as the Binet that measure based on verbal skills are naturally very biased when it comes to evaluating the "intelligence" of a young person in the getto climate.
The testers, licensed psychologists, took into consideration all the factors. Tests such as with the colored blocks, and pattern recognitions are certainly more objective than verbal scores as your environment is going to play a huge role in the level of your vocabulary and also in your ability to express yourself with words.
I will hurry up and bring you the conclusion. After approximately 18 months – the project came to a conclusion and it was published in the social work journal (the original of which I still have along with Ruth's original draft before editing which I feel hurt some of the conclusions she made which at the time were not quite acceptable but are today.
All the boys who completed the project which was most – scored much higher IQ's than when they started. (The base-line). Some actually scored in the "gifted range." 130+ But how can this be?
By the way, at the graduation ceremony which I got to attend (I was 12) no less than Eleanor Roosevelt attended and gave the commencement speech. If I can find it, I still should have the 8-1/2 x 11 photo with her at the podium and Ruth standing just behind her. I have recovered everything else from that evening. I got to meet the lady – but of course I did not know who I was being introduced to by Ruth.
In my years in Memphis teaching karate – after the school was closed, I continued to teach at church gymnasiums that would allow integrated classes. This was after all, 1965. A number of the students were teenage negro boys from the Memphis slums and gettos – to put it frankly as it was. Here is what I observed.
Many, if not most of the black teens processed information much faster than the white boys I taught.
What does that mean? If you understand basic microprocessor technology then let me explain it this way. The early useful microprocessor was the Intel 8080A. Today, for instance, on this laptop which I am using to write to you – it is an Intel generation 10 I7 microprocessor.
Assume I have a large complex spreadsheet with many calculations and both processors have the same instruction sets necessary to do these calculations. The instruction sets of the 8080 may be longer and less efficient – but they will get the job done. The I7 will probably have shorter and much more efficient code.
In the end, the 8080 might take several days to "calculate" the spreadsheet whereas the I7 may take but a few minutes.
So, we know that some people think very fast and others think much slower. But in the end, they achieve the same outcome. Is the speed of learning and the speed of processing the information a valid measurement of intelligence?
It took years for Einstein to develop his masterpiece, The General Theory of Relativity. In a lecture he gave in Germany while he was still struggling to put the pieces together (the mathematics was horrendous – requiring advance Riemann curvature Tensor Analysis. In fact, if my memory at 75 still holds out, it was his former teacher, the mathematician Minkowski who Einstein went to seeking to know what math he needed to handle the mathematics of General Relativity.)
OK. Now to the lecture. In attendance was David Hilbert, no small fry in the world of mathematics. In fact, some mathematic historians assign him the role of the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, and on the same level as Fredrick Gauss, of the 19th century,
David Hilbert, from what I have read (many biographies on Einstein which I still have) and some video documentaries, quickly figured out the whole concept of what Einstein was striving to develop.
And it is said that Hilbert said "I know what Einstein is striving to do, and I can do it better and faster." But Hilbert was a gracious person. Something very rare to find today. Hilbert said, "It belongs to Einstein. Let him finish it."
So, Chad, who was the smarter of the two scientists? The one who figured it out the fastest? Or the one who conceived the original idea (with some clarification since others were working on similar ideas at the time).
What am I trying to say and how does this all fit in with Ruth and prejudice and gettos, etc.
To put it in academic terms, I think IQ measurement is a bunch of crap. It does not measure intelligence at all. It helps to understand how these tests came about – born of the needs of the military, both in France and the U.S. to quickly determine who was suitable to be officers, mechanics, fighting soldiers (usually assigned to the lower IQ ones), etc. The populations were still primarily farmers and rural people and education for the masses was somewhat limited. What the governments wanted to essentially know was "can these recruits learn new things and what do they know now."
What developed was the BELL curve. It is simply a Gaussian distribution curve. Distribution is the key word. For instance, you find that height follows a distribution that when plotted with a large sample - produces a BELL CURVE.
Now, I want you to think about the word DISTRIBUTION and LABOR. And with my AC not working – it is just too hot for me to go into a long development.
What you are actually looking at when you look at the IQ BELL CURVE is A DISTRIBUTION OF LABOR – NOT INTELLIGENCE.
Put it this way. There are as many geniuses as there are morons. I don't think anyone would argue that. I am saying that there are as many cab drivers, plumbers, laborers, etc. who have the same potential intelligence as the physicist or medical doctor. The laborer, cab driver, plumber, etc., are assigned to the left of the median of the bell curve, IQ = 100. Doctors, mathematicians, etc., are assigned to the right of the BELL CURVE median, IQ = 100.
The cab drivers, etc. will have the same intelligence score as the medical doctor, physicist, etc. when the potential intelligence (the physiological – real gray matter intelligence is realized, becomes actuality. And this happens when the factor of OPPORTUNITY and INTERVENTION are accorded to the cab driver, plumber, etc.
What I am saying is that those on the right side of the BELL CURVE have INTERVENTION and OPPORTUNITY entering into their lives. This may be as simple as having rich parents who can afford to provide the environment necessary to stimulate a love of learning.
And such an environment will probably be free of distractions such as gun shots in the night while one is trying to learn academic subjects. If it is a subject such as calculus – it really does take a lot of concentration and time to comprehend the concepts. Unless you have a quick processing brain which simply says you may be an Intel I7 or perhaps I5. But if you have an Intel I3 you will still master the concepts but take a little longer. Who is the smarter?
But I contend that speed of learning is not a function of intelligence. Again, was Hilbert "smarter" than Einstein?
What the CSS study showed (and it obviously went nowhere, even with Eleanor Roosevelt's support) is that children from Harlem, or any disadvantaged child in society, are born with just as much innate, biological intelligence as the children of Scarsdale, NY or the lucky ones who live in Nantucket.
If getto children were given the intervention and opportunity and an environment suitable for learning there would be produced as many Negro and Hispanic and American Indian doctors, lawyer, engineers, etc. as there are now produced by the "upper crust" of our society. But there is an unspoken belief or attitude that these groups simply don't have the "intelligence" to master the subjects necessary to fill professional positions.
I carry many years and have observed a lot. Do I think the situation is intentional racism? NO! I do not believe that this country is racist or that "systemic racism" abounds in our society.
What is it then? We live in a society that is unwilling to distribute its great wealth in the form of intervention and opportunity – to "the lower classes" I think this is intentional. Because, as an example, the more you have of a thing, the lower the cost. If the government seriously sought to provide intervention and opportunity and to create environments that were safe and conducive to learning – you would have tens of thousands more medical doctors, for instance. And this is the last thing the medical profession, as represented by the likes of such as the AMA (American Medical Profession) want.
They don't want tens of thousand of more doctors in practice because then that would push the price of seeing a doctor down. It isn't that they have anything personal against the negro in the getto, or the Hispanic coming up from the south. It is simply they don't want tens of thousands of competition flooding into the profession.
This is also the same with regards to the other professions such as law or engineering, etc.
It is economic prejudice that creates the getto and slums. And it is convenient for the wealthy class to divert their eyes and say to themselves, "well they just don't have it upstairs."
That's it, Chad. This is what I concluded from Ruth's experiment. In a way I think she achieved more than her brother Todd. Though Todd alludes to prejudice in his final book, The Mexican Earth – I think it was because of Ruth's experience of being of Choctaw heritage and the subtle prejudices that she must have often felt – that she started out with the premise that "these children from Harlem – are just as intelligent as the children living on Park Avenue."
She proved her point and published the results. But it would have been a very bitter pill for the privileged of Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue to swallow. Thus, it went nowhere. And the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to make it happen – go instead to buying 11 billion dollar super carriers, and endless "upgrades" to nuclear weapons to get more efficient explosions to kill more people more humanly.
The bottom line is that the ruling power and the great wealth at the top just don't give a damn about "the lower classes" and the IQ argument is often used to sooth their conscience.