I guess it was the way I was brought up. My dad owned a gas station when I was a boy, and I would help out, when I wasn’t in school or playing baseball, by pumping gas, checking the oil in customers’ engines, and washing windshields. This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before the Civil Rights Act, before the Black Panthers, back when Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy were still alive.

My dad never commented on the race or ethnicity of his customers — and he had a lot of “steady customers,” as we lived in the relatively small town of Hyde Park, NY. Well, that’s not exactly true; he did sometimes make humorous jibes against fellow Polish friends, all in fun. But aside from that, he treated every customer as an individual, not as a member of any kind of social group, be it racial, ethnic, or whatever. Of course, he liked some people more than others, which is only natural, but his judgments were always based on what people did or said — on their performance — rather than on who they were.

That’s why it always makes me a little uncomfortable when I read or hear commentary such as that in a recent interview given by Laurence Steinberg, a professor of Psychology at Temple University, where he discusses “Why Some Races Outperform Others.” I am sure that such studies are helpful in a variety of ways, and I am certainly not disparaging Dr. Steinberg. I’m sure that he and others who undertake this kind of research are sincere in their quest to provide better education for everyone. Yet something bothers me about grouping people. As a teacher myself, I try to approach each student as an individual, and although the range of diversity in my classrooms is always interesting and often stimulating for class discussions, I try not to let the ethnicity of my students influence my judgment of their abilities. Perhaps that is not always the right approach, but it’s the only one I can take with peace of mind.

Here is the video interview with Dr. Steinberg on the Big Think website: