Acting White: What Is Your Race-IQ?

This post is not about the IQ of any particular race, but rather about race-IQ, or assessing how intelligent a person is about race. Judging from what I witness day-to-day, most people, white, black or other, have very low race-IQ’s. The greatest indicator of this is how often events show misplacement of the line distinguishing discretionary rights of association versus non-discretionary behavior pertaining to the freedoms and rights of others.

I describe Racial Intelligence (RI) as the ability, capacity, skill, to identify, analyze, and manage the intersection of one's discretionary rights and behaviors having to do with race, and those choices and behaviors, again, about race, that intrude on the rights of others.

Many minorities, and a lesser percentage of the majority, pretend that racism is always reprehensible. It is not. The conundrum of racism is not the ‘why’ of it, but rather that its existence is both reprehensible and natural, even desirable, in some cases. By example, black and white parents can each want their kids to marry within a given ethnicity, all the while unwilling to call this show of acceptable racism by name, compared to the obviously (to most) unacceptable racism such as detaining someone merely for the color of their skin.

In my experience, majority members, in the case of whites in America, tend to err on the side of over-extending the exercise of discretion into the actual rights of minorities, when asserting their majority influence. Minorities, on the other hand, tend to err on the side of over-extending the accusation of racism onto the discretionary exercise of rights by the majority, from their minority viewpoint. Call it a standoff. This makes each side guilty of displaying low racial intelligence, as we ‘game’ race interactions into a zero-sum result, and at the cost of not maximizing benefit for everyone.

These disparities of viewpoint and approach may be natural and expected, but does not mean that they should go unattended or unchecked. However, the crude labeling of all racial distinction/preference as bad, while shoving it into the closet labeled racist does little for progress. We see proof of this every day.

James C. Collier

READ MOST RECENT POSTS AT ACTING WHITE...

Technorati Tags: Acting White: What Is Your Race-IQ?, Intelligence, Minorities, Discrimination, Racism, Acting White