For a long time the most famous case for profound racial differences in intelligence, which we might regard as a prima facie form of racism, had been made by William Shockley (1910-89), an American physicist and Nobel laureate (for the invention of the transistor), who went outside his field to study racial differences as revealed by IQ tests. More recently, public controversey has revolved around a book, The Bell Curve, Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which examines IQ in relation to economic success and also addresses the question of racial differerences in intelligence.
On IQ tests, blacks overall do much worse than whites, as East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, etc.) do much better. Shockley took this to reflect the genetic inheritance of intelligence--high for Asians, middling for whites, low for blacks--and Herrnstein and Murray end up agreeing with him. Explanations for these results and criticism of these views have focused on the notion of "cultural bias" in the tests, e.g. that questions are about things like the proper dress for yachting, which is mostly not part of the experience of non-whites, etc. However, such explanations don't work for many Asian groups that score well on IQ tests and have little more knowledge than blacks of the kinds of cultural bias that might be expected to relate to middle class WASP culture; and, in any case, although for more than twenty years great efforts have been made to eliminate any possible cultural bias in the tests, the characteristic level of scores among blacks, whites, and Asians has continued.
This has resulted in a certain silence falling over the issue, except for political manifestations such as a prohibition of the California public schools giving IQ tests to black students. Even black parents sometimes object to this. A stronger response to such IQ theories, however, may be found in the works of Thomas Sowell, such as Ethic America and Race and Culture, which examine the history of IQ results among various American and International ethnic groups. It is left to the reader to familiarize themselves with Sowell's data, but the argument is a relatively simple one: "innate" mental abilities do not develop spontaneously but must undergo development, which is differentially fostered by different cultures, even when the abilities are general and abstract and do not consist of items of cultural knowledge.
Thus the difference between black and white IQ scores in the United States is comparable to the difference between Protestant and Catholic scores in Northern Ireland, or Ashkenazic and Sephardic scores in Israel, where the question of racial differences is trival to meaningless. Acculturation has actually meant that scores have changed over time, as they have for both Poles (who are now at the national average but were as far below that in the 20's as blacks are now) and Jews (who did poorly on tests given by the Army in World War I but now rank as the most intelligent of all whites) in the United States. Sowell's approach splits the difference between "nature" and "nurture," but is mostly not heard in the press or in politics because of its implications for other political and economic issues. The implication, indeed, is that differences in cultures not only make for differences in economic success but even for differences in intellectual success. This is hard to accept for anyone persuaded by cultural relativism. Much the same point is made by Dinesh D'Souza in The End of Racism.
Just as Gould has a chilling quote from Ussher:
The religion of the papists is superstitious and idolatrous; their faith and doctrine erroneous and heretical; their church...apostatical; to give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion...is a grievous sin. [p. 183]
Jefferson's doubts and desires are no more clearly stated than in a letter of February 25, 1809, to the French Senator Henry Grégoire. The letter also contains a famous statement that even inferior natural understanding would not deprive one of human rights [emphasis added]:
SIR,--I have received the favor of your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so kind as to send me on the "Literature of Negroes." Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me to observe of respectable intelligence in that race of men, which cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief; and to be assured of the sentiments of high and just esteem and consideration which I tender to yourself with all sincerity.
Jefferson introduced a bill to the Virginia legislature in 1778 to end the importation of slaves. It passed. In 1777 Jefferson had worked on a revision of the Virginia criminal code, and he intended that an amendment be offered to consider any children born to slaves after a certain date to be free and for them to be colonized somewhere once they came of age. The result, he says in his Autobiography, was this:
But it was found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition, nor will it bear it even at this day [c.1821]. Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow.
The era of the Revolution was when the Northern states did begin to end slavery. Vermont ended slavery outright in 1777, Massachusetts in 1780, and New Hampshire in 1783. The other Northern states started a phase-out, like Jefferson contemplated for Virginia: Pennsylvania in 1780, Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, New York in 1799, and New Jersey in 1805. New York's phase-out was complete by 1818. Since Jefferson hoped that the process might simply continue in the South, he was alarmed by the Missouri Compromise in 1820--"a firebell in the night"--because it signaled the permanent division and hardening of the country into slave and free and the end of the gradual process that had worked in the North. Jefferson's fear about the polarization of the county and his consequent opposition to the Missouri Compromise is now sometimes given, by historians who delight in trashing the heros of American history, a distorted representation as an advocacy of the expansion of slavery.
That was the most outrageous thing, then and now, about the Dred Scott Decision (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857): the case of Dred Scott, a slave suing for his freedom, was actually dismissed by the United States Supreme Court on the grounds that black people, not just slaves, had no legal standing as persons to sue--they were not human beings in any way that need be recognized in federal law. That certainly seems contrary to the text of the Constitution, which consistently refers to slaves as "Persons"--first of all just as "other Persons," i.e. other than free. As a response to a slave suing for his freedom, it was also contrary to principles going back to Roman law, which held that slaves were indeed merely property and did not have standing before the law except when they brought action to sue for their freedom.
The Southern racism that the Dred Scott Decision embodied was an innovation that came out of recent Southern rationalizations in defense of slavery, that Africans were no better than animals, and out of evolving Southern laws that progressively limited or removed the rights of slaves to own property, to become free, to vote, or even to be free in various Southern States. That kind of racism was not something that any Abolitionist agreed with. The Abolitionists ended up sharing one aspect of Southern belief, however, that the condition of slavery was sub-human. To the Abolitionists that meant that slavery itself was morally intolerable, while to Southerners that meant that the slaves must actually be sub-human.
Since we tend to remember only these extreme views now, it has become astonishing to discover that right down to the Civil War there were in Louisiana (and elsewhere) a considerable number of free blacks who actually owned slaves themselves and even organized a black regiment, with black officers, for the Confederate Army (later they fought for the Union Army, which only allowed white officers for black units). Louisiana, however, was the great exception, ironically because of the conservatism (from its French law) in its views of slavery and race in comparison to what developed across the South; for Roman law, although generally denying slaves the status of persons, nevertheless recognized the customary process by which slaves saved money for themselves and eventually bought their own freedom.
If there was a more "humane" conception of slavery than what developed in the South, it is then a good question whether ultimately there is something actually morally wrong about slavery. For centuries all around the world, most people didn't think so. But the problem with the concept of someone being both a person and property is that it really can't work. Since the person and labor of a slave belong to someone else, even if a slave has the right to own property and have, in a sense, his own affairs, he does not have the right to tend to his own affairs, which requires some minimal control over his time and labor. He is therefore useless to his property, as his property is useless to him, except by the leave of his master. Thus in a practical sense he cannot be a person unless he does actually own his own person and labor. That makes "humane" slavery ultimately self-contradictory. Roman law in that respect was actually consistent, for no master needed to grant to any slave the chance to save money or work for himself. By law, everything a slave was or had was owned by his master. The mitigation of this by legal custom, which provided for slaves purchasing their freedom, is what racism eroded in many places in the South.
An extraordinary judgment of Roman Law itself should be the final word on slavery: that although it was the "custom of nations," slavery was nevertheless "contrary to nature." A "natural law" jurisprudence would therefore rule out slavery as intrinsically unjust and illegal.
e.g. Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), who as a young man almost singlehandedly proved that great glaciers had once covered Europe, originally maintained the view that all humans were one species; but he changed his mind and became an advocate of "polygenesis" after moving to America and actually meeting black people in Philadelphia (of all places).
That is a case where his prejudice now seems more humane and enlightened than the result of his actual experience--a sobering circumstance if we believe that prejudice is always the result merely of ignorance.