🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 08 Feb 2001 07:58:56 GMT, sammy_ray@my-deja.com wrote:

> Now, say i had grown up in the middle of
>Detroit and never seen a person fish in my life, had no real clear idea what
>the kid was doing with sticks and string in water? 

Bad example. Between movies and TVs, anyone who grew up in the USA
would know what this meant. If Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are
still required reading in Detroit schools, the illustrations used in
those books would also clue any kid as to how to interpret the
questions. The cultural references that stump minorities are far more
subtle and harder to weed out of a test.

There have been attempts to have culturally neutral IQ tests. They are
generally useless as one of the indications of a high IQ is the
ability to learn culture. While there are finishing schools to teach
culture, most of it is learned "on the street" as it were.

You can certainly have IQ tests that are culturally tuned to the test
taker. That gives you a good measure of their intelligence. However
the real problem here is not intelligence but cultural knowledge. If
you are black and know black culture well you can be very successful
within the black community. However that is a small community in the
USA. So opportunities are more limited and any success is not going to
be as big.

This means that while a white culturally biased IQ test is not a good
measure of a black's intelligence, it is a good measure of whether he
knows enough white culture to be successful or not in the large white
community. 

A very real example is knowing what fork to use in a formal dinner. At
the highest leadership levels such as CEO of a major corporation, such
cultural knowledge is mandatory. One of the functions of the CEO is to
represent the company in many public forums such as fundraisers for
politicians, BBB award dinners, etc. A faux pas there will reflect
badly on the executive among the "inner circle" of his peers.

Another real example is knowing how to play golf. This is culturally
the sport of CEOs in the USA and many a partnership or deal has been
made on the golf course. That is why women executives fight so hard to
get into male only golf clubs. Being able to play golf is a
requirement to get hooked into the "good old boys" network in
business.

These are just two of many cultural requirements to be successful in
the larger mainly USA white community. Any black (or any other
minority) who insists on acting according this his culture with no
concession to the larger white culture is either doomed to failure or
only being a small success. This cultural bias is not limited to the
USA or the whites. In countries such as China a white who insists on
acting according to white USA culture is not going to be very
successful as many American companies have found to their grief.

Danny