Are niggers more irrationa

1. The claim’s history: intelligence testing, eugenics, and the baggage of early studies

Assertions that Black people are inherently less rational or intelligent have a long history grounded in early 20th‑century intelligence testing that was used to justify eugenics, segregation, and racist policy; historians and reviews document how Army test results and subsequent interpretations were leveraged by eugenics advocates, and how anthropologists and critics later exposed methodological and social flaws in those arguments ^[2].

2. What some researchers have claimed: evidence for group differences on tests

A body of research—including work cited by Jensen, Rushton, and others—reports mean differences across racial groups on a range of standardized cognitive measures, and some authors have argued these patterns are robust across many studies ^{[1] [7]}. This literature is cited by people who claim group-level test gaps exist, but those findings are limited to averages and do not establish innate differences in rationality for individuals.

3. Why averages don’t answer the question of innate irrationality

Mean differences on cognitive tests are statistical patterns, not proof of genetic or innate causes, and do not imply uniformity within groups; critics emphasize that focusing on deficits can obscure within-group variation and the strengths rooted in social and cultural contexts ^{[3] [7]}. Legal and social science frameworks also warn that using group traits to predict individual behavior or capacity is both legally fraught and analytically dangerous ^[8].

4. Environmental pathways: discrimination, stress, education and cognitive performance

Contemporary empirical work finds that experiences of racial discrimination, socioeconomic disparities, and cumulative stress are associated with worse performance on cognitive assessments, providing plausible mechanisms by which social conditions—not innate differences—drive observed group gaps ^{[4] [9] [6]}. Studies using instrumental-variable approaches and longitudinal data link higher reported discrimination to lower cognitive scores, underscoring environmental causation pathways ^[4].

5. Measurement, sampling, and the biases of the research enterprise

Psychology’s own scholars note that much cognitive research has historically sampled predominantly White participants, that editorial and authorial demographics shape what gets studied and published, and that a deficit framing in race-focused research distorts interpretation; these methodological and institutional biases compromise claims about racial differences in rationality ^{[5] [3] [10]}.

6. Philosophical and ethical dimensions: racism as irrationality and the limits of “rational” explanations

Philosophers and theorists have long argued that racism itself can be irrational—based on stereotyping, moral failings, or misapplied group statistics—and that appeals to "rational calculation" using race as a proxy are both ethically problematic and often legally suspect ^{[11] [8]}. This reframes the question: treating a whole group as inherently irrational is indistinguishable from the very forms of racist reasoning the literature criticizes.

7. Bottom line for the claim in the question

There is no scientifically defensible support for the sweeping claim that Black people are "more irrational" as an innate group trait; while some test-score differences between racialized groups are reported in the literature, the evidence implicates social determinants, measurement issues, and research bias rather than a settled biological verdict, and scholars caution strongly against deficit-based interpretations ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}.