Don Cheadle sas Miles Davis in Miles Ahead
Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead Sony Pictures Classics

This is how I began thinking about Miles Ahead, a new film that stars Don Cheadle and portrays the brilliant black American intellectual Miles Davis as a mere thug with a trumpet. (Jazz musicians are, like all classically trained musicians, intellectuals.)

When the Greek economy collapsed in 2010, German and French newspaper were in the habit of describing the country's citizens as lazy and lacking the kind of stern work ethic that made Northern Europeans rich and prosperous. From this view of the situation, the crisis had nothing to do with banks making bad loans (meaning, it takes two to make a bad loan); it was a matter of race and culture.

Now, back in the 19th century, many Englishmen held the opinion that the Irish lacked “docility” (not easily taught) and “intelligence” (can't think straight). This, they believed, was an obvious explanation for the high levels of poverty and economic misery on that island. As for the fact of England’s raw exploitation of Ireland’s labor and land, this could be ignored. The Irish were poor because they were Irish, and the Irish were Irish because they were stupid.

When the Europeans entered Southern Africa in the second half of the 19th century, all they could find were lots and lots of stupid people. They were on the hills, in caves, cooling off in the shade of balancing rocks, and, most absurdly, living off the good land. There is nothing more stupid than stupid people on good land. The Europeans cleared this muddle by relocating the Africans to bad land and forcing them to work for extremely low wages.

It should surprise no one to learn that black Americans made such good slaves because they were racially inferior—in intelligence, in feeling, in imagination. This judgment did not end with slavery. It continued into the 20th century and this century. In 2007, James Watson, the eminent scientist who participated in the discovery of DNA’s structure, said blacks were not as intelligent as whites. He even claimed the genes that will show, once and for all, white intellectual superiority would be found in a decade.

So this kind of thing is far from over, and it profoundly and oppressively structures the world most blacks live in. Many white teachers and administrators see us as inferior, which, for them, explains our bad grades; many in the business and corporate community effortlessly couple blackness with incompetence; and society as a whole thinks it’s perfectly normal to fill our prisons and not our universities with black males.

Speaking of universities, let's take a quick look at this cultural/fictional figure: Montgomery "Scotty" Scott.


Why is the chief engineer of the USS Enterprise Scottish? This is a very good question because it has an excellent answer, which is found in the 18th century. What happened is this: The ancient universities, Cambridge and Oxford, educated upper-class Englishmen in the classics and a few other things that were deemed good at reproducing the features/distinctions of the English upper classes. As for the sciences? That was of no use to them, and so it was not in the curriculum of their top universities. But two Scottish universities (in Edinburgh and Glasgow) did. They were able to offer classes in the sciences because the Scottish aristocrats did not have the influence on their institutions that the English aristocrats had on theirs. The ancient universities did not included science in their curriculums until the second half of the 19th century.

This is the reason why we have the Scottish Enlightenment and not the English Enlightenment. Why the first book in economics is by Scotsman. Why in the 18th and 19th centuries, Scots are overrepresented in professions such as medicine, botany, and, yes, engineering. This is where we get our Scotty on Star Trek. He is a dub echo of those olden days and ways.

But back to my theme of race and intelligence: Are the Scots, as a race, smarter than the English? If you went back to the 19th century, and you saw their dominance in the sciences, and knew nothing about the nature of the top universities in England and Scotland, your answer would be: Yes.

(My facts about the Scots and their universities were drawn from an excellent book, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens, by Lucile H. Brockway.)