Skin Color and Intelligence in African Americans

“Most recently, Lynn (2002) and Rowe (2002) analyzed data from large, publicly available, archival data sets, which show that groups of mixed-race individuals have mean scores intermediate to unmixed groups of Blacks and of Whites.”

“Normative data have been used by social scientists, such as Richard Lynn, Arthur Jensen, and Richard Herrnstein (e.g., Hernstein & Murray, 1994; Jensen & Lynn, 2002), whose research agendas lead to dangerous and irresponsible biological and genetic interpretations.”

“Others have attributed the gap in test scores to differences in innate cognitive ability (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Lynn, 2002), although there is great dispute over the size of the effects of cognitive ability on achievement (see Johnson, 1993), as well as the causes of those effects.”

“Going beyond the traditional three macro-races of Africans, Europeans, and East Asians, Lynn organized the data according to the ten “genetic clusters” (population groups) identified by Cavalli-Sforza et al. [15] in their 1994 History and Geography of Human Genes.”

“For example, they cite one study by Lynn (2002), which found a correlation of .17 between self-report of skin color as “very dark,” “dark brown,” “light brown,” or “very light” and a 10-word vocabulary test score.”

“Skin color lightens with higher IQ and socioeconomic status (Krieger, Sidney, & Coakley, 1998; Lynn, 2002).”

“…than Whites (Jensen, 1969) and incrementally “smarter” than other Blacks on the basis of the percentage of “White genes” in their biological makeup (Lynn, 2002).9 Because light-complexioned Blacks tend to have higher levels of educational attainment than dark-skinned Blacks (Allen et al.,…”

“Additionally, replicating and extending the results of Lynn (2002) [18], Fuerst, Lynn, and Kirkegaard (2019) found that biracial status and color were associated with crystallized intelligence among African Americans [19].”

“To make the various results comparable, Lynn adopted an IQ of 100 (with a standard deviation of 15) for Europeans in Britain as a bench mark and adjusted the results for Flynn effects, which vary with different tests (e.g., 3 IQ points a decade on the Wechsler tests from the mid-1930s to the 1990s, and 2 IQ points per…”

“Finding a modest yet statistically significant correlation between skin tone and vocabulary test scores among African Americans, Lynn (2002) concludes that “intelligence in African Americans is significantly determined by the proportion of Caucasian genes” (p. 365).”

“Lynn (2002a) [1] analyzed the 1982 General Social Survey (GSS) and found a small but significant correlation between interviewer-rated skin color and Wordsum vocabulary scores in the self-identifying African American population (r = 0.17, p 0.01, N = 430) [1].”

“When the amount of European ancestry in American blacks is assessed by skin color, dark-skinned blacks have an IQ of 85 and light-skinned blacks have an IQ of 92 (Lynn, 2002a), and there is a statistically significant association between light skin and intelligence.”