Igbos, most brilliant black Africa race –US academic report

                                           Harold Ekeh                   Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna

 Two Igbo students get admissions in 8 Ivy League Schools

Ekeh scores 2270 out of 2400 on his SATs
Uwamanzu-Nna scores 101.6 GPA

A United States academic report for 2015 has suggested that the Igbo of South Eastern Nigeria are the most brilliant black Africa race. According to the report: “a search through the promotional materials of school for a black student – all schools and colleges would always show some black faces in their promotional materials if they have any – reveals that they have had at least one black student, and it was, unsurprisingly, a Nigerian Igbo.”

This is just as two teenage Nigerian high school students, Harold Ekeh and Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna, have broken a record of being accepted by eight Ivy League schools in the United States.For the second year running, Elmont Memorial high school, a public school serving a small community of around 33,000 in Long Island, New York, has produced what few schools could ever dream of: a student who has gained admittance to all eight Ivy League schools.It is extremely rare for students to get into all eight Ivies – rarer still for two to do so from the same school. Schools within the Ivy League are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University.

Last year, Harold Ekeh also swept the Ivies – and ended up opting for Yale.
Ekeh was born in Nigeria and came to the United States when he was eight. He wrote his main college essay about the struggle to adjust, including being clueless in U.S. history classes at school.
His parents had told him they moved to America for things like the educational opportunities.

Meanwhile, Uwamanzu- Nna, who also has found herself in the same situation, told MSN News that she has a big decision to make soon. The Elmont High School valedictorian, who was accepted into all the eight Ivy League schools, also gained admission into Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Uwamanzu-Nna is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, who said her parents instilled in her the value of education. “Though I was born here in America, I visited Nigeria many times. And I’ve seen that my cousins don’t have the same opportunities that I have.

So, definitely, whatever I do, I want to make sure that it has an impact on Nigeria,” she said. She also said her own tenacity and persistence helped shape her into becoming a great student. But as with a lot of students, she did face hardships with some classes.

“I struggled with numerous classes in the past. But I guess what allowed me to be successful, ultimately, in those classes, is my persistence and my tenacity,” she said. Though Uwamanzu- Nna hasn’t decided on which college to attend, having scored a GPA of 101.6, and with a recent invitation to the White House Science Fair, reports indicated that there’s no doubt that she would continue her academic excellence.

The report that suggested the outstanding academic performance of the Igbo revealed that if only environmental factors were responsible for the different Intelligence Quotients (IQs) of different populations, the world may expect to find some countries where Africans had higher IQs than Europeans.

The report cited empirical backup using theories propounded by eminent scholars such as Richard Lynn, a British Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster and Arthur Jensen, who was a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

The report’s findings also revealed that while the fact remains that black immigrants to the U.S have shown achievements that were superior to native black Americans, studies had also shown that it had been a phenomenon studied since the 1970s at the least.

Using Lynn theory, who was also an assistant editor of the controversial journal Mankind Quarterly, who is known for his views on racial, ethnic and national differences in intelligence, the report revealed that: “Failure to find a single country where this is the case points to the presence of a strong genetic factor.”

For Jensen, the report said: “Regression would explain why Black children born to high IQ, wealthy Black parents have test scores two to four points lower than do White children born to low IQ, poor White parents.” The report also stated that at first, it was just the Caribbean blacks who were a subject of this unexpected outcome.

As black Africans kept immigrating into the U.S, they showed even higher levels of achievement than the native blacks. Many scholars theorised on the reasons for these differences, from Thomas Sowell’s proposal that this disproved the validity of discrimination against native blacks as an explanation for their underachievement (Sowell, 1978), to other scholars who suggested that these immigrants were just the most highly driven members of their home countries as evidenced by their willingness to migrate to a foreign country (Butcher, 1990).

What most of these theories failed to predict was that the children of these immigrants would also show exceptional achievements, especially academically. It is only in recent years, as the immigrants have stayed long enough to produce a sufficiently high number of offspring, that it had been observed that they are over-represented among high academic achievers, especially when compared to native blacks, particularly at very elite institutions.

What has been missed in the IQ debate is the full logical implication of these achievements: they have effectively nullified any arguments for a racial evolutionary explanation of the well-known IQ test score gap between blacks and whites.

Even more fatal for the racial hereditarian side of the debate has been the corroborating data of school children performance in the UK, particularly when the black Africans are divided into their respective nationalities and tribal ethnicities.

Arthur Jensen gave at least two empirical tests that could potentially falsify his thesis of a race based genetic explanation for the black-white IQ gap.

source:newtelegraphonline.com