Standardized testing emerged as pseudo-objective justification for racial discrimination

Evidence

In 1916, Stanford eugenicist Lewis Terman and his associates “perfected” the IQ test based on the dubious theory that a standardized test could actually quantify and objectively measure something as intricate and subjective and varied as intelligence across different experiential groups. The concept of general intelligence did not exist. When scholars tried to point out this mirage, it seemed to be as much in the eye of the beholder as general beauty, another nonexistent phenomenon. But Terman managed to make Americans believe that something that was inherently subjective was actually objective and measurable. Terman predicted that the IQ test would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.” Standardized tests became the newest “objective” method of proving Black intellectual inferiority and justifying discrimination, and a multimillion-dollar testing industry quickly developed in schools and workplaces. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 815

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s aim of testing whether ideas precede policy — here the test is framed as an idea manufactured specifically to justify existing discrimination, supporting Kendi’s inversion. — connects to: The literacy test was a respectable cover for racial discrimination — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 602; IQ testing discourse explicitly recommended segregating racial and class groups into manual training — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 1106; Discredited phrenology was succeeded by IQ testing defending racial hierarchy — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 60
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what was the IQ test’s reception among Black scholars at the time, and how quickly did the testing industry entrench itself in public schools?
• SEED: An essay angle on how ‘objective’ measurement tools are socially constructed to naturalize hierarchy — the pseudoscience of the IQ test as a template for contemporary algorithmic bias.