WHAT DERBYSHIRE SHOULD HAVE ADDRESSED

One of his preposterous claims is the old Herrnstein-Murray misrepresentation in The Bell Curve that blacks are genetically inferior because as a group they have lower IQs. Stephen Jay Gould did a wonderful job criticizing this these in The Mismeasurement of Man and I recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.

I think a real issue is the underperformance of black students on measures of academic achievement and ability. I did a little research into this after reading a Tyler Cowen that mentioned this and I found an interesting paper from the College Board:

A Historical View of Subgroup Performance Differences on the SAT Reasoning Test
Jennifer L. Kobrin; Viji Sathy; Emily Shaw;

One of the graphs by the authors contrasts performance on several types of tests:

of black students with everyone:

The authors also provide SAT scores which help put these standardized scores into perspective.

Here are the average scores for blacks on the Verbal/Critical Reading sub-test from 1987-2006:

The are the scores for the Mathematics sub-test: