A recent immigration study by the Heritage Foundation brought to light a controversial dissertation by one its writers, Jason Richwine. This dissertation essentially concluded that Hispanics (and blacks as well) have naturally lower IQs than their native Caucasian counterparts, and that this is not a disparity that goes away within 2 generations and may in fact, simply not go away. In other words, Latin Americans are essentially less intelligent than their native counterparts ( native as in American-born Caucasians, not Native Americans). He correlates with the low national IQ of Mexico and other Latin American countries and concludes that this is simply an ingrained (probably genetic) trait. While he does casually address racism and other natural disadvantages Hispanics generally face, he writes them off with sloppily connected correlations. I will address those disadvantages in a more in depth manner than the straw man version he glossed over. But first I’d like to address what I believe holds us Mexican Americans (and Hispanics in general—and I’m sure many black Americans will recognize this scenario).
I am a second generation Mexican American. Since I’ve been old enough to understand that I was different and darker than my light-skinned friends, I have lived with a nagging inferiority complex that has never gone away. I grew up with countless stereotypes, whether it was the notion that I was like a really fast mouse with a thick and stereotypically Mexican accent, or a thug. Whatever I was, I was not like my white counterparts and certainly not like the Asians who we all grew up knowing as smart and extremely good at math. Not too place too much blame on outside stereotypes, many of the negative (and probably most damaging) influences have come from other Mexican Americans.
Whether it was a Mexican American generation who both reinforced the idea that Mexicans are thugs (and compared to their Asian counterparts, do very little to push their children to excel scholastically) or my Mexican American peers at school who often hung out in groups and made fun of people like me for “acting white” and being a “school boy,” there was no real pressure for me to excel scholastically (my own parents were ‘strict’ by Mexican American standards, but they were satisfied so long as I kept a B average, and so that’s what I did). On the other hand, there existed all the peer pressure in the world to disengage from being this Mexican American kid who had more in common with his white schoolmates than with his fellow Mexican Americans whose ‘approval’ I wanted.
This is what Richwine gets wrong. He believes the Mexican American disengagement from academic excellence is the result of some inability to compete with their Caucasian counterparts. But his theoretical framework is far removed from reality. This disengagement begins before we even know whether we can compete without white peers. What’s more, it’s been shown that IQ is overwhelmingly (if not entirely) determined by economic factors, and familiarity to culture and environment.
I must add, that this inferiority complex, while having never fully having gone away, has resurfaced since reading Richwine’s dissertation. Through years of praise by friends of all ethnicity as ‘being smart’ I’d largely forgotten the feelings of inadequacy I grew up with. No matter how sloppy Richwine’s correlations may be, I am once again worried how widespread these beliefs are. When I’m conducting interviews for new hires for our department, are interviewees dissuaded by the thought of working for a Hispanic? If I put my resume out there, does my last name inspire employers to overlook me due to the assumption that I am probably less intelligent than the Smiths, Guptas and Kims (there is strong evidence that blacks deal with such a bias)? This is the sort of insecurity that’s haunted me for most of my life. And I am once again reminded of it.
In any case, I have laid out the reasons I believe Richwine’s conclusions are in fact, quite sloppy.
- Hispanic children face numerous stereotypes, which aren’t helped by lax parents who don’t push them the way their Asian counterparts do
- National IQs are mostly predicted by factors like the prevalence of infectious diseases/parasites and income inequality
- Evolution-wise a divergence of intelligence among humans dispersing across the globe doesn’t make sense
Hispanic Rage 