'Stupid blacks' book row

BLACK people are less intelligent than white people, and single mothers should be encouraged to breed with higher-IQ males to escape the poverty trap. So runs the wisdom of Chris Brand, a lecturer in psychology at Edinburgh University and author of The g Factor, to be published on Thursday by John Wiley.

"I am perfectly proud to be a racist in the scientific sense," he said yesterday. "It is scientific fact that black Americans are less intelligent than white Americans and the IQ of Asians is higher than blacks."

Mr Brand, who never gained a doctorate but formulated his ideas as a prison psychologist, said his book represents a stand against the "high priests of egalitarianism and political correctness". He argues that under- standing that people have different levels of 'g', or general intellectual ability, could eradicate the problem of single mothers.

"The only way to get away from the explosion of single parenting is to persuade these girls to postpone babies before finding a more suitable husband." They would then widen the gene pool of their offspring with a decent scattering of intelligent ancestry. "They should be encouraged to have sex with higher-IQ boys. There need be no compulsion, but we could teach these girls that it would be highly advantageous."

He is also convinced of the intellectual inequality of different races. For example, "Hong Kong is as advanced as many western cities. Africa, however, remains the utterly dark continent."

But the answer is not mixed breeding to improve the blacks' gene pool. "There are plenty of intelligent African men for black girls to be having sex with. It is just black intelligence is more polarised. There are many very successful blacks, particularly in areas like baseball or music, but at the other end of the scale there is squalor and degradation."

Other psychologists find this not only repellent, but misconceived. Michael Howe, professor of psychology at Exeter University, said: "His views are dangerous, but more importantly, they are wrong. It is true that certain groups score less well in IQ testing than others, but a score doesn't assess the fundamental quality of a person - indeed, the nature of the tests themselves says a lot about cultural expectations."