There's selection bias since people choose to join Mensa. It says the US Mensa group has about 40,000 members. It has breakdowns for education, age, and gender, but nothing about race or ethnicity. The relationship between IQ and race has been a taboo topic for a long time.
Over at BET (Black Entertainment Television) they say the US Mensa group has 57,000 members and
362 are black. I'm not sure how BET got this information. Mensa must keep track and provides such info for a fee.
Anyway, 362 is less than 1% of the total.
If we work from the oft-cited figure that black Americans have an average IQ of 85, about 1% will have IQs of 130 and above. And given that black Americans are about 12% of the population, they will be less than 1% of Americans who have IQs over 130.
math breakdown
Standard deviation is 15, 130 is 3 standard deviations above. 99.7% of data in a bell curve is within 3 standard deviations of the mean. 1 - 0.997 = 0.003. 0.003/2 = 0.0015 or 0.15%
362/57000 = 0.0063 or 0.63%
This suggests that a higher percent of black people with IQs over 130 join Mensa as compared to whites.
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