Discredited phrenology was succeeded by IQ testing defending racial hierarchy

Evidence

The scientific community also served to shore up the foundations of white supremacy. It spawned the nineteenth-century field of phrenology, an entire scientific movement that meticulously measured skull shapes and sizes of different people groups with the goal of providing demonstrable physical evidence for the inferior mental capacity of blacks. When this movement became discredited, some in the field of psychology took up where it left off, trading in their calipers for standardized mental capacity tests. As recently as the 1990s, psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray argued in their controversial book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Public Life that black Americans’ lower scores on standardized IQ tests were innately tied to race. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 60

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the ‘racial science survives its discrediting by relocating’ dynamic seen in Black Marxism’s treatment of how racial ideology re-forms. — connects to: IQ testing discourse explicitly recommended segregating racial and class groups into manual training — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 1106; The SAT was built on racist IQ testing that posited a genetic intellectual hierarchy. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 816; IQ testing legitimated the US 1924 Immigration Act’s racial exclusion (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• IQ testing legitimated the US 1924 Immigration Act’s racial exclusion #expands (0.93)
• The SAT was built on racist IQ testing that posited a genetic intellectual hierarchy. #expands (0.92) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 816
• Standardized testing emerged as pseudo-objective justification for racial discrimination #expands (0.85) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 815
• Postwar IQ testing data grouped immigrant whites into inferior racial ranks #expands (0.82) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1664
• Mixed-race children’s IQ tracks rearing environment, not racial genetics #contradicts (0.80) — Harriet A. Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste, 119
• Applied racial science was not a retreat from but a continuation of racism #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 18
• Racial science gave subjective prejudice a patina of objective authority #expands (0.78) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1711
• Doubting the measurability of intelligence threatened white educational privilege and its machinery #expands (0.76) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1134
• Mixed-race IQ patterns refute claims of inherited racial intelligence differences. #qualifies (0.75) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1288