Certain people like to talk about how different races have different IQs, but there's never been any convincing research that shows that as being the case.
It's not because of racism. It's because it's virtually impossible to establish because IQ has so many variables.
For example, there are some academics and others who have said, over the past decade, that African-Americans have lower IQs than Caucasians. This, of course, is accepted by some people because it accords with their expectations and it makes them feel comfortable - it means that African-Americans are often poor and less successful than white people because they are dumber, not because of long-standing societal inequality and discrimination that frequently denies them equal opportunities.
Intelligence is so hard to capture and it changes dramatically over a person's life. The more educated you are, and the more problems you learn that are similar to those used in IQ tests, the better you do in IQ tests and thus the higher your IQ score is. If you look at people who face systemic discrimination and who come from a background where their parents were poorly-educated and who are going to be poorly-educated themselves, then they're not going to do well on IQ tests. You'd see the same results, or worse, for Caucasian people if you conducted IQ tests in the backwaters of Mississippi or the Appalachian Mountains.
At the risk of wandering off on a tangent, the state school that my children attend does very, very well academically. That's not surprising, as it's located in a small catchment area next to a major university, in a suburb where the average house price is about $800 000. That means that the parents of kids at the school are highly educated and are either academics or fairly successful professionals and they all have a common interest in education. Such people concentrate on getting their kids to read at an early age, they involve themselves with their kids' homework, and most of the children assume that they, too, will follow in their parents' footsteps and go to university and become doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers or academics. Fully 85% of households at the school are in the top 25% of household income nationally. Significantly, the school is also very culturally diverse - there are children in my son's and daughter's classes from South Korea, China, HK, Singapore, Japan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, Germany, France, the US, Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries. Australian-born children are actually in a minority at the school, as 51% of students are from overseas. Annual testing shows that the school's academic results are far above average in all testing areas.
Compare that to a school that my son's school soccer team plays against, about 25 minutes away from my son's school and located in a lower socio-economic area with a lot of blue-collar, unskilled and unemployed parents. The kids are mostly Anglo-Saxon/European/Caucasian background, but their annual test results are far below average. My mother taught at a nearby high school about 25 years ago. Things may have changed since then but I remember that my mother told me back then that there were quite a few kids at the high school who had no real intention of getting a job. Their parents were untrained and unemployed and they, in a sense, expected to follow their parents. There was one boy who told my mum that he wanted to go to university but - and this seemed unbelievable to me - his parents were opposed to it.
That's a very, very small sample, of course, as well as a personal anecdote from the past, and so it doesn't prove anything. What I do think it helps to illustrate, though, is that a person's genetic "race" - a person's physical characteristics such as the shape of their skull, the colour of their skin, and whether they have more fast-twitch muscles - has pretty much nothing to do with their ability to achieve and to be prosperous. That's cultural, rather than physical, and whilst you can generalise about culture, even that is something that can change from generation to generation and individual to individual.
