The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Harvard historian Orlando Patterson, in the slyly titled “For Whom the Bell Curves,” reminded readers that the frayed legacies of slavery, racism, and bigotry had deepened the cultural rifts between whites and African-Americans so dramatically that biological attributes across races could not be compared in a meaningful way. Indeed, the social psychologist Claude Steele demonstrated that when black students are asked to take an IQ test under the pretext that they are being tested to try out a new electronic pen, or a new way of scoring, they perform well. Told that they are being tested for “intelligence,” however, their scores collapse. The real variable being measured, then, is not intelligence but an aptitude for test taking, or self-esteem, or simply ego or anxiety. In a society where black men and women experience routine, pervasive, and insidious discrimination, such a propensity could become fully self-reinforcing: black children do worse at tests because they’ve been told that they are worse at tests, which makes them perform badly in tests and furthers the idea that they are less intelligent—ad infinitum.