Postwar IQ testing data grouped immigrant whites into inferior racial ranks

Evidence

Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association, and the corps of distinguished psychologists who aided him in the United States Army’s new psychological testing program, gathered a mass of data on the intellectual ability of Negro, native white, and foreign-born soldiers. Published after the war, their studies showed what other investigators were simultaneously learning in testing school children: that northern Europeans scored almost as well as native whites, whereas soldiers born in Latin and Slavic countries averaged significantly lower. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1664

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s inquiry that racialization is a transitional form of an ‘enemy’ category — Northern/Western Europeans scoring well while Slavs and Latins fall below shows rival white groups quietly resegregated into the out-group without losing white label. — connects to: IQ testing legitimated the US 1924 Immigration Act’s racial exclusion; Southern and eastern European immigrants were racialized before entering whiteness after WWII — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 227; European immigrants’ racial difference had to be intellectually manufactured — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 768 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• IQ testing legitimated the US 1924 Immigration Act’s racial exclusion #corroborates (0.82)
• The measurement of race differences justifies rather than discovers inequality #expands (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1141
• Southern and eastern European immigrants were racialized before entering whiteness after WWII #corroborates (0.78) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 227
• European immigrants’ racial difference had to be intellectually manufactured #expands (0.75) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 768
• Early-1900s American intellectuals classified Southern and Eastern European immigrants as racially inferior #corroborates (0.75) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 239
• Mixed-race children’s IQ tracks rearing environment, not racial genetics #qualifies (0.72) — Harriet A. Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste, 119
• Military service in WWII cemented European immigrants’ American whiteness #contradicts (0.72)
• A literacy test aimed to cut southern and eastern European immigration in half #complicates (0.70) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 602