[Jerry Abbott]

Divine Heritage, Chapter 3, section 5.

I came back to the dorm room after my morning classes feeling very bad. My hips felt as if they were in a vice that was trying to pinch them until my legs fell off. I also felt vaguely nauseous, and I figured that if ever there were a day to cut my afternoon classes, this was it. As I opened the door, I saw that Ruby Pierce had a guest. LaChandra Stints.

As you've probably figured out, blacks make me uneasy. I've never had a good relationship with a black person, and I've found them generally to be a bunch of beggars, cheaters, blame-shifters, and chip-on-the-shoulder makers of many excuses for their own shortcomings. Or else violent predators. So I wasn't expecting LaChandra Stints to be quite a charming girl, as eloquent yet concise in speech as a demi-goddess.

One who wasn't starting her first menses.

Yes, that was what was happening. I hadn't been asleep when Mrs. Joiner had explained to the girls in her elementary school biology class about what to expect. But I hadn't known that I was going to be entertaining when it happened.

"Brenda," said Ruby. "This is LaChandra Stints. She's on the school debate team, and she's really smart, like you. When she found out you were my roommate, she asked if she could come to our room to meet y—"

By this time, I had my suitcase down from the shelf over the closet, had taken the Advil and one of the pads, and was heading back out the door toward the wing bathroom.

"Pleased to meet you. Be back in a minute. I have an emergency to take care of."

Okay, so it was an awkward first meeting. But what was I supposed to do?

As it turned out, I wasn't bleeding yet. But I could feel that it wouldn't be long. The pain had gotten worse. I dragged myself back from the bathroom and into the room, where I lay down on my bed and groaned.

"Should I come back later?" asked LaChandra.

"I can talk," I said. "I just don't want to move, and I'm cutting my classes for the rest of the day."

"I don't suppose you'll be setting the track on fire today, huh?" said Ruby.

"Uh-uh. Is it always this bad?" I hoped not.

"No," said LaChandra. "But the first time often is. Your body isn't accustomed to the prostaglandins, which is why you're having severe cramps."

I nodded, then wished I hadn't. I had gotten a headache, too.

When her genius IQ was discovered by the media, about two years ago, LaChandra Stints had been held up as a symbol of black equality with whites. Um, no. I take it back. The media had strongly implied that she proved that blacks were smarter than whites. When my IQ proved to be much higher still, nothing was said that implied white mental superiority. Not on television or in the press, anyway. As I thought about it, I seemed to remember that following both her burst of fame and mine, there had been an increase in televised images of blacks using computers and electronic gadgets in incidental spots of television programming and in advertisements.

Still, LaChandra was the real thing. I could tell that much as she spoke. Really intelligent people have a precision of diction that less intelligent people can't reach. It comes partly from having a larger vocabulary, and partly from being able to think ahead while speaking. That's not always a reliable guide to someone's IQ, though, as it can be faked by an actor who has rehearsed his lines. That's why most television personalities aren't really as smart as they sound. But LaChandra wasn't reading from a script.

The only class that she and I had in common was the History of the American Revolution. I'd noticed her there, but it was a large class, and I had always been rushed afterward to eat and then run to the college campus for my classes in calculus and physics. I'd never stopped to speak with her. I was raised in Atlanta, which had been a racial pressure-cooker since before I was born. Blacks prey on whites there with theft, assault, and rape, and the authorities mostly let them get away with it. Atlanta's whites, for their part, pretend (in between getting robbed, beaten, or raped) that there's nothing at all wrong with the city, except for a little of the "random" crime that happens everywhere. So you should understand that I hadn't been in a hurry to acquaint myself with LaChandra.

Why was a ninth-grader taking a sixth-grade class in history? Because she'd missed it at her old school, and she had to take it here because it was part of the core curriculum at Brookstone. Not even I had been allowed to skip any of it. Brookstone allowed me to take college science and math courses, but it wasn't going to let me out of the usual sixth-grade science and math courses, even though I obviously already know the subject matter. Rules don't always make sense. Or maybe it would be better to say that the actual purpose of a rule isn't always what its makers say it is.

LaChandra and I exchanged pleasantries while I tried to deal with my first-ever full-blown attack of menstrual cramps. She probably sensed that it wasn't a good time for a lengthy comparison of life experiences, so she left after a few more minutes. She lived in another dorm. Ruby saw her to the wing exit of Mathews Hall, then returned to the room.

"Biology never was my favorite subject," I said. "Now I know why."

Ruby made sympathetic noises. We spoke a while about LaChandra, whom Ruby seemed to consider my mental equal. I knew better, but I understood that Ruby might not see what I could. A higher mind can sort rank among lower ones much more accurately than the reverse. Although my contact with her had been brief, I could estimate that her IQ was perhaps about 140, making LaChandra the equal of Sarah Wiesman. But not mine.

Let me try to convey how rare it is for a black to have a genius IQ.

Although the distribution of intelligence among the members of a race isn't perfectly normal, the normal distribution does make a good approximation of the population distribution when only one race is present. Or, conversely, one of the ways you can tell that more than one race is in a population is if its IQ spread is bimodal or significantly skewed. The reason that the normal distribution makes a good approximation for the distribution of a characteristic like intelligence is related to the way genetic inheritance works. I'll save that discussion for another time.

The fraction, f, of a race having an average IQ of x̄ and a standard deviation in IQ of σ, which is above the minimum IQ of μ, is found from

f(μ) = ½ − [σ√(2π)]⁻¹ ∫(x̄,μ) exp{ −[(x−x̄)/σ]²/2 } dx

You can avoid integrating the probability density function if you have a handy error function to call.

f(μ) = 1 − ½ { 1 + erf [(μ-x̄)/(σ√2)] }

In the equation, x̄ is the average IQ for the race, and σ is its racial standard deviation in IQ. For white US-residents in the year 2040, those numbers were x̄=103 and σ=16.4. For black US-residents, x̄=85 and σ=12.4. The minimum IQ required by Brookstone School for student enrollment is 130. If you set μ=130, you find that the fractions of whites and of blacks who are eligible to attend this school are 0.0498467387 and 0.0001422428469, respectively. In other words, one white student in twenty has what it takes to get into this school, but only one black student in 7030 does.

Since there are about equal numbers of whites and blacks in this part of the United States (Georgia and Alabama), there should be about 350 white students for each black student here. In fact, the ratio is more lopsided than that, since the total number of students in grades six through twelve is about 1400, and there's only one black student in those grades who actually does meet the customary minimum IQ requirement, namely LaChandra Stints. Where are the three other blacks who should qualify? If I had to guess, I'd say they were attending a less expensive school with which their parents are more comfortable.

There are also two other black students at Brookstone who didn't meet the IQ requirement, but were allowed to enroll on a sports wavier. One of them is a player on the Brookstone high school football team, at which sport, I was told, he is quite good. The other wavier had been granted to the fastest sprinter on the boy's track team.

But, as far as I know, there aren't any white students at all who received a wavier of the minimum IQ requirement to enroll at Brookstone, no matter what their athletic merits might be, and that tells the tale as far as I'm concerned. Brookstone School had recently become infected with political correctness. Possibly the installment of a new corporate president had had something to do with that. As yet the consequential troubles were negligible. But that would not continue. It was the first leak in the levee, the trickle that might easily become a flood. Political correctness would eventually destroy Brookstone School, as it has destroyed so many other institutions, unless the entrance standards were strictly enforced, once again.