Standardized testing and prisons both grew into imagined-necessary racist institutions

Evidence

In the early 1970s, many Americans were imagining a world without prisons. In the early 1980s, many Americans were imagining a world without standardized tests. But racism had progressed since then. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision in 2004, a world without standardized testing seemed to many as unimaginable as a world without prisons, despite both keeping millions of Black young people behind bars. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1188

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that testing and prisons are parallel institutions, both naturalized to the point of being ‘unimaginable’ to abolish, is a dense, load-bearing inversion of the reader’s causal model: policy precedes and conditions what becomes thinkable.
• XREF: Strongly extends the reader’s interest in institutions (law merchant, bourses, diamond trade) as self-reproducing infrastructures that outlive the interests that created them.