Welcome to another episode of Civic Cipher. I'm your host, ramsys jockey is ram Jah.
I am to warden. You are tuned into so exciting.
As you are, and we've got a lot people to stick around for Today. We're gonna be talking about some some stuff that comes up in life, and in particular the past couple of weeks, we've had to have some really strange conversations and we've also kind of encountered some stuff on the Internet that let us know that common sense is not all that common, not even kind of yeah yeah, and that's okay because we're here to learn. So we're not picking anybody apart, We're not, you know,
trying to tear anybody down. But again, stay tuned. We're gonna be talking about this strange question. You know, are our white people smarter than black people? Or are black people less intelligent than white people? You know, and there are people who sincerely feel like they have the full story because they have test scores or whatever whatever it is that they think that they have to kind of validate that belief, and we're going to talk about that today.
We're also going to talk about what we call code switching. But basically, we're going to talk about how black people in this country are inherently bilingual. I think that was something that I heard a comedian said once upon a time.
That's a good way to put it.
Yeah, yeah, so we have to you know, I heard a non black woman recently said that when she was growing up, black people used to speak jive to her. Yeah, So that tells you when she's shout out to the seventies. Yeah, man, sixties and shout out to Cheryl. She's a sweetheart. And we got a whole lot more fee to stick around for as well. But first and foremost, we'd like to start at the top with what we like to call
Ebny excellence. Cute we shall, all right, So this week's Ebony Excellence is sponsored by Hip Hop Weekly Media and the article comes from Marine Times.
It's not a.
Subject we talk about all that off them show, so you know, taking any too many dives in the Military Times. So the article reads, one marine will make Core history by becoming the first black by becoming the first black woman to serve as a two star general in the service. President Joe Biden appointed Brig. Jen Lorna Maylock to the grade of Major General Dependinggon announced on December sixth, and
the Senate confirmed her recently. Maylock is the Deputy Director of Cybersecurity for Combat Support at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Maylock immigrated to Brooklyn, New York at the age of seventeen nineteen eighty five. According to a biography written by Marquette University, she enlisted in the Marine Corps three months later and became an air traffic controller. She received her commission through
the Women Marines Association. She has amassed multiple higher degrees, including two master's degrees and strategic studies from the US Army War College and the Naval Postgraduate School. Marine Corps Times previously reported Maylock nominated to the grade of brigadier general in twenty eighteen, and she became the first black woman to achieve that rank. One of the smallest military branches, the Marine Corps has the lowest percentage of women among
its troops at nine percent. Only three women in the corep history have picked up the rank of lieutenant general, and all three of them are retired. So today we are going to highlight you and applaud you. Lorna Maylock for making black history and for being a shiny example of e any excellence.
Keep going gay, General Lorna Maylock. That's incredible. Indeed it is.
All right, So let's talk about.
How smart we are. Isn't that weird? That's a weird thing to talk about. I talk about how smart RAMS is. Stop. So I don't think it's very strange at all.
Okay, So we Uh, basically, for today's segment, we had to pull some back and forth stuff off of the Internet just to kind of help paint a picture.
But before we get there, I want to get your early thoughts on this topic, Q. I mean, sure, go for it. So my early thoughts on which topic, well.
Specifically specifically whether or not black people are less intelligent than white people or Asian people.
What hasn't all the research already proven that we are by far the lesser of the intelligent creature.
This is sarcasm, ladies and jail. This is sarcasm.
I thought, that's what it is. Sarcasm. This is sarcasm. Well, you know what. I to your point, Q, if you grew up.
In the US, and uh, you weren't educated in a way that prevents a lot of how would I describe it cultural? And uh, let's be honest, white supremacist based ideals to take root in your brain, you might think that, right.
I know this is true for me. Once upon a time I found myself I always took tests well, and uh, you know, I got good, more in class and all that sort of stuff, and eventually they start kind of separating you from the people that are your age into smaller classes where you have there's less students and you get more intense education.
Yeah, it's more engaging.
Sure, sure they call it. When I got to high school, they would call it honors classes. But you know, this has kind of been a story of my life. They would take me out of my normal classroom setting and put me into a special class for gifted kids. Right, And every time they did that, I found that there were.
Less even less.
People of color, and that was a norm for you know school. You know, that was just kind of normal how it went. And I guess if I were to take that and just accept it as face value, I would think that overwhelmingly white children are more intelligent than black and brown children.
Right, But that's not the full story.
And it's strange that you're taught that, and it's strange that people push back against things like critical race theory. When I talked about earlier on, I mentioned that white supremacist ideals and institutions that kind of bolster and fortify
these notions. They don't this attack on CRT, which is effectively American history that seeks to tell the whole story and paints a fuller picture so that people get the nuance and they understand, Okay, opportunities exist in these areas and they don't exist to the same degree in these other areas, and then you have results that reflect that in society. Without that, you end up kind of like me, just thinking that, oh, this is normal, I am in rare air in this classroom.
Right.
So I'll read a bit from the online conversation that we were having. The question was posed, don't most black people have lower IQ than whites? And then it goes on to say that, you know, if you believe in evolution, black folks look different as do Asians and Caucasians. Evolution doesn't stop with skin pigment. In other words, black people are less evolved, right, And it's again, maybe these ideas are the result of a person being hateful ignorant, you
know whatever. But maybe a person who draws a conclusion like this is simply trying to state their reality in playing terms, and they may not question why their reality is the way that it is, which is what we seek to do on this show. Why were we born to be poor and get beat up by the police?
Are we criminal?
You know what I mean? Like you go to Africa, It's not like that, you know, Are we whatever stereotype you think that is true of black people, There's different circumstances in this country that shape outcomes, and those circumstances are often overlooked, which is why on this show at least, we really fought very hard and continue to fight to make sure that the whole story is told and that education includes American history and the origins of the origin
story of black people in this country and everything in between. All Right, So we'll go down to the answer, because now that the question is post, the irony here is extremely painful, suppressing urge to engage in ad hominem. Thomas Soul discovered old military mental test results. Now, just so you know, Thomas Soul is not a person I'm a big fan of. I don't agree with a lot of
his thinking. But just so you know some context, he's a black conservative, very educated man, and just has of what I believe to be a flawed belief system, you know. But he I wouldn't say that he doesn't love his people. I can't say he might not, but I don't know that to be true. I just believe that he and I would certainly take different paths to get to the same results. In other words, I'm allowing this moment for him, because even a broken clock is right, you know, twice
a day. All right, let's go on. Differences in mental test scores among different racial and ethnic groups were taken as proof of genetic differences in innate mental ability during the progressive era in the early nineteenth and sorry, in the early twentieth century, Progressives regarded the fact that the average IQ test score among whites was higher than the
average among blacks as conclusive proof of genetic determinism. Right, So again, if you just take those test scores at face value, well, women lie, men line numbers don't lie.
Right, that's one way to put it.
Yeah, But as we know, and I wouldn't be talking about this if it weren't true. That's not the whole story. In fact, often enough, when there are numbers, there is a much deeper story there, because we've learned on this show that numbers can be made to look any kind of way, especially if you don't tell the whole story.
So I'll continue.
A closer look at mental test data, however, shows that there were not only individual blacks with higher IQs than most whites, but also whole categories of whites who scored at or below the mental test scores of blacks.
H All right, let's keep going.
Among American soldiers given mental tests during the First World War, for example, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Okay, so by that time there was access to education. It was okay to learn how to read, It was not still illegal to teach either current or former slaves anything, et cetera, et cetera.
It's a progressive time, and of course the black people were from progressive cities, right and again the white soldiers from Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, you know what I mean, Their education system may not have matured to the point where it could be competitive with the education system in a big city where the black folks you scored higher than
those white folks. So what you're seeing now is a perhaps geographical correlation with these test scores that is more profound, certainly more striking, and more.
Telling.
Then Okay, black people scored lower, white people scored higher. Right, And from this alone you can see the direction that this is going. And I'm going to say the rest of this reading just for a bit, but you can draw your own conclusions. And for those who may not be able to draw the conclusions all the way out, I'm going to help both Q and I are going to help. So if from that we can agree that where you grow up has an effect on your education,
then perhaps there's something to do with the quality of education. Right, because again, in progressive cities, you know, the school systems seem to educate people better than in more rural areas, less developed you know, states and parts of the country. So again the quality of the education matters. Right, But
let's take it a step further. How is education funded. Well, education is funded with property taxes, right, So you pay your property taxes on your house, that goes to your local education, you know, your school board, and on and on.
Right, So.
It stands to reason that if you have a neighborhood we'll call it, you know, or a part of town where it's more affluent, the houses are nice, her text at a higher rate, etc. Schools are nicer, that that quality education might be more prevalent in the test scores.
It might be reflected in the test score.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, where maybe folks are making less money, maybe those people are working longer hours, maybe those people are dealing with other social issues, socioeconomic issues, et cetera, the education received by the students might be inferior.
Add to that that, you know, I knew a teacher for some years who worked in a rough part of town, and she was a high school too, and she used to ask me, you know, once upon a time, I used to get closed in shoes given to me because I was on the radio, you know, and the companies would send out boxes of shoes.
I'd get for five pairs of shoes, I'm not gonna wear these.
They's sent me a bunch of clothes I'm not gonna wear, all in my size, And I would donate a lot of these to this teacher. Well, she just asked me for it because I was, if I'm honest, probably bragging one day, like, man, I got all this stuff and never gonna wear it. And she says, give it to me.
I can give it to my students. And she said, in particular, I have one student who has to wear the same thing every day, and he's embarrassed to come to school, so he doesn't come because he only has you know, he won't tell me about his home life because he's weared it it'll get worse. So I don't know his circumstances, but I know he's always hungry and
he always wears the same clothes. And so I says, yes, absolutely, here you go, right, And that turned into me giving more, and really it turned into her having a conversation with me, and she says, Ramses, a lot of the students that I teach are constantly in mode that is their reality. One hundred percent of it is survival mode. They don't
have room for education. They don't care what the you know, the Pythagoram theorem of you know, a triangle and the isosceles and you know, none of that they don't care about any of that. They worry about where they're going to eat because they didn't eat yesterday, and they're hungry right now and they can't focus, and they spent all last night crying, and they haven't been home in four days.
Right.
And it's not every student that comes from that environment, but it's a lot more.
For it's not it's not one or two, you know, I mean like, it's not every, but it's a lot, right.
And she believed, just like the United Negro College Fund, that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. And she saw the potential in these students because she was a teacher. She could see that they had the the base level intelligence upon which you can build a brilliant mind. It just needed the knowledge. The framework was all there, but she couldn't pour into a mind that wasn't focused and that was hungry. You know, your brain is a
funny thing. I had to learn this, you know, partially through her, but you know, my own studies kind of revealed a lot of this to me.
And that's that.
You know, your mind is built to protect itself. Your mind will protect itself even if you are under attack. Your physical body is under attack, your mind will just turn off to protect itself from getting damaged, and you need to be awake, you know what I mean. Your mind will it's a higher functioning part of you. It's the mind brain. And if that's not in alignment with your agenda, then you're you're going to lose that fight one hundred percent of a time.
Right.
So with that said, we can still recognize that environment and resources have a lot to do with this, right if we're using test scores as the metric. Okay, let's also account for the fact that in other parts of the world they center education very differently than we do
in this country. Indeed, right, education is of the utmost importance in other parts of the world, in particular in Southeast Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia, where you know, their test scores are often compared to the scores of you know, US students, and and then.
Typically higher across the board of race or gender.
Sure, and again that is a reflection of some cultural differences there. Bear in mind that in this country, the education system I'm drawing from memory now, but the education system was largely built as a result of John D. Rockefeller's expansion of his empire. In New York City. He needed workers to build those skyscrapers, and those workers had to have certain skills, certain knowledge, And this is where
you get the beginnings of standardized testing. You know, once upon you think of little house on the prairie, there was a schoolhouse. All the kids were in the same school, all different ages and grades or whatever, all doing the same thing. Well, John D. Rockefeller comes along and says, look, man, I need people to know these skills so that you know these buildings are built properly.
Who amongst you can do this? Right? Okay? I need all y'all to come with me, right.
Exactly, And he partnered with the Board of Education, or really established the Board of Education in New York, which was then replicated elsewhere in the country to where we ended up with what we have.
Now.
This wasn't always the case. It's always been the case in our lifetime, sure, but it wasn't the case since the sixteen hundreds. That just isn't the way this has come about. And you know the result of that is that the education system had to be.
Built around seasonal work.
A lot of young people still had to go in the summers and harvest with their families because a lot of people, you know, work in farms. This is why we get summers off. In other countries, they don't. They go to school year round.
You know.
They treat school like its work, not like it's something that you have to do in order to you know, not go to jail.
It's work.
You work hard, and you create opportunities for yourself, right and in a lot of these places when you get out, you don't even have those opportunities, Like you know, this is the land of opportunity, they're the land of education. And it's it's strange how that kind of fleshed out. But again, we're talking about test scores, which is the I guess, the accepted method of determining who's smart and who's not.
So it's a lot trickier then it's a simple method. It's an very very olderly simplified, sophisticated method of trying to determine who's smarter who's not. So let me jump back in and read a little bit more here. Among other groups of whites, those with average mental test scores no higher than the average mental test scores among blacks included those in very various isolated mountain communities in the United States, those living in the Hebrides Islands off of Scotland,
and those in isolated canal boat communities in Britain. Looking at achievements in general, people living in geographically isolated environments around the world have long lagged behind the progress of people with a wider cultural universe, regardless of the race of the people in these isolated places. When the Spaniards discovered the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone age level.
And then the conversation and here goes on I which you want to read this because I think it's pretty cool. That's all I'm willing to give you on this question. Using common sense.
You will only be able to determine this properly if everyone is equally given a good education that is consistent across the board and over a substantial period of time. And I don't think we have ever seen that. There are definitely many, many, many black people with higher IQ's than you. I like the sass at the end of that, but also like, yeah, it was, it was. It was petty in the perfect way.
Very specifically petty.
But you know, this is Uh, this is something that's it. A lot of people need to challenge themselves because I know that you've heard this que and I've heard it certainly, you.
Know I like you. It's your people heard oh you talk. I've heard those words specifically, show an exact word that you said.
I believe it. And you know, oh you? Why you talk so nice? Why can't everybody you know talk like you? Why don't your people talk like you?
That's give an example of a conversation like that to a white co worker today, right that we end up in these rooms where that's the conversation that we're being had. And we talk about the over simplification of determining who's smart. I heard someone say it. I can't credit the right person because it's not top of mine right now. But if you judge the intelligence of a fish on its ability to fly, every.
Fish would fail and it been its whole life thinking it's stupid. And this is an injustice to six year old Ramses having lived a life thinking that we were just supposed to be poor. And you know, I was a person that got lucky.
Who knows. We're going to give you guys more on this topic. I want us to look over this interview that Nildigrass Tyson did just on the basis of racism and anthropology, so we'll follow up on that on another episode. Yeah.
Actually, I'm pretty excited to do that as well.