Output details

Race and Intelligence : Science's Last Taboo

'Race and Intelligence' was commissioned and broadcast by Channel 4 in the wake of Nobel laureate James Watson’s controversial remarks that Black people were intellectually inferior to White and East Asians, and that there was copious evidence for this in the [IQ] “testing”. The feature-length documentary, on which I was director, producer, cinematographer and co-writer, was both exploratory and participant-observational in form. As an exploration, the film started with the proposition that there is little evidence that differences in mean intelligence scores between White and Black people are the result of faulty test design or of environmental factors, and there is no empirical support for genetic “interpretations”. During preproduction I also researched the “Flynn effect” – a trend discovered by the American philosopher and psychologist James Flynn in which IQ scores in the general population seemed to be rising after World War Two, and in which scores among Blacks appeared to be rising faster than Whites. As a work of participant observation, the film was presented by a black journalist – the former BBC correspondent, Rageh Omaar. His role as interviewer was not the conventional, dispassionate one characteristic of much television reportage, but rather was immersed in the issues “both as a journalist and as a Black man”. His interview method was deliberately non-confrontational, and exploratory, while seeking to draw practical, and sometimes personal, consequences of “race realist” research in particular. The film was confronted with a puzzle: if faulty test design, or genetics or environment cannot account adequately for differing “bell curves” in Black and White IQ scores, what other explanations exist? An answer, suggested by an extended sequence shot in a high school in the South Bronx, is somewhat akin to Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”. The film won the Grierson Award for Best Science Documentary in 2010.