I’m thinking of mathematics more in the sense of logic and the ability to conceptualize (although if they have to touch things to count them, they obviously can’t conceptualize even on a basic level). In the case of lower class blacks, their language is so reduced to the communication of basic needs and so unable to conceptualize that it probably does affect their ability to calculate. People whose language is so limited simply can’t form the logical concepts necessary for following even basic mathematical rules.
This probably is a remnant of slavery; Africans rarely received formal instruction in English or anything else, they didn’t all speak the same African languages among themselves, and the slaveowners certainly had no interest in letting them communicate with the larger world. By the early 20th century, however, there was a small but solid middle class of blacks who were overcoming their historic disadvantage and in fact suffered primarily from legal discrimination and not from the limitations of black culture. When the legal restrictions were ended, there was every reason to expect that blacks would assimilate into the larger culture and would eventually have the normal range of IQ found in any group.
Unfortunately, the Great Society struck at the same time, and suddenly it became advantageous not to integrate into the larger society. The entire focus of “black leaders” was directed at keeping their flock dumb and isolated and subject to these leaders, and I think much of the poisonous exaltation of the limitations of ghetto “culture” that has been such an afflication to the black community can be traced to these “leaders” and their desire for control, little different from that of the slaveowners.
I think you’d find this linguistic (and hence conceptual) deficit in any group that was isolated and whose life had sunk to nothing but an attempt to satisfy basic needs, particularly when the group in question doesn’t even have to interact with the larger society by working to earn a living. Naturally, it’s also true that this involves other physical factors (lousy maternal nutrition because they live on potato chips and soda throughout their pregnancies, for example) or social factors (non-existence of structured families and hence the inability to relate socially to others on any basis except fear, power or survival advantage, for example).
Years ago, I was on a jury in a case involving a young black woman who had assaulted another young black woman on her block (over a man, of course). The woman’s mother and grandmother appeared as witnesses.
The young woman had grown up in one of the worst ghettoes in San Francisco, her mother had been brought up there shortly after WWII when the ghetto was still new (formed during segregation by Southern black laborers who had come to work in the shipyards), and her grandmother was from Mississippi.
Each generation was more unintelligible than the preceding one. The grandmother had a heavy Southern accent but was basically intelligible and answered appropriately, the mother (who had worked briefly and then been on welfare with her numerous children for most of her life) was difficult to understand but it was still possible, and the young woman could have been speaking some entirely different, non-English language. In addition, she didn’t even appear to understand standard English and the questions to her had to be repeated and rephrased until she could “get it.” It was like watching reverse evolution in action - all thanks to black ghetto culture.
