Wouldn’t this be more of an identity thing?
Before, your motivation to do well in school was to Be a Smart Person. Smart possibly replaced by competent, studious, curious, etc. Since socialization had taught you that those who do well in and go far in academics are Smart People, your motivation was fine. You had trouble in high school in part because you didn’t think they were helping you Be a Smart Person, but you didn’t come to see the goals of the educational system as opposite your own.
But then you did. You thought, “The stated role of graduate school is to make Smart People, I know that’s not what they’re doing, now I have no assurance that merely by being a student I am Being a Smart Person—and I’m afraid that merely by being a student I am making myself WORSE at Being a Smart Person,” so you were extremely uncomfortable.
I don’t know, I think there’s a fairly common tendency to see what one is asked of by society as being in harmony with one’s own goals and well-being. I would assume that’s a big part of how people maintain their social lives—going to church because it’s what their community does and they’ve never questioned it, shaving their body hair and wearing make-up and torturous clothes if they’re women, trying to Be the way they’re supposed to be. But then you realized that a major part of the socially-required aspect of your life conflicted with your deeper values of learning and truth and competence, and you had to restructure your life to stop merely Being and instead see yourself as someone who is DOING something for a particular reason that can’t just be taken whole from society but actually has to be figured out.
But it’s fact that “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours”? That is, not only is there a difference in IQ distribution, that difference is so significant that “all our social policies” are not going to help them.
I remember reading something by Flynn explaining that people with IQs below 70 today still have problems functioning even though they might score in the average range if given an IQ test normed on a population from the same country decades ago. From this I gather that the correlation between IQ and how well someone can function breaks down when you compare different populations.
In order to conclude that Watson’s quoted remark is scientific fact, you must not only prove that Africans have lower average IQ test scores, but you must prove that:
This interferes with our social policies towards Africa in some way.
Any evidence we draw about the capabilities of Africans with a certain IQ must be based on studies on the same population, not on Americans or Europeans or whatnot with the same IQ.
It’s unlikely that such a broad sweeping statement like “all our social policies”, applied to the whole of Africa, is correct, considering the considerable variation both of social policies and across the continent.
Additionally, I find it interesting that people see the backlash against these remarks as merely “politically correct” anti-racism. It seems clear that this is a challenge to an entrenched way of thinking about a wide range of problems including international relations and poverty. Watson is claiming (in a rather nonspecific and unsupported way from what I’ve heard, which is only second hand) that the status quo for trying to help or otherwise influence Africa isn’t working because we make bad assumptions about their intelligence. Now, I’m sure we make many, many bad assumptions about Africans that influence our social policies and that may break many or make them less efficient or keep us from hitting on something that really works. Intelligence is the most controversial candidate, of course, for historical reasons. But some of the backlash is embedded in our very lack of practice in treating any such assumptions as malleable.