Standardized tests were designed by segregationists to legitimize racial exclusion

Evidence

The biggest irony and tragedy of the Regents v. Bakke case—and the affirmative action cases that followed—was not Allan Bakke’s refusal to look in the mirror of his age and interviewing prowess. Instead, it was that no one was challenging the admissions factors being used: the standardized tests and GPA scores that had created and reinforced the racial disparities in admissions in the first place. The fact that UC Davis’s non-White medical students had much lower Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores and college GPAs than their fellow White medical students, but still nearly equaled their graduation and licensing exam passage rates, exposed the futility of the school’s admissions criteria. Since segregationists had first developed them in the early twentieth century, standardized tests—from the MCAT to the SAT and IQ exams—had failed time and again to predict success in college and professional careers or even to truly measure intelligence. But these standardized tests had succeeded in their original mission: figuring out an “objective” way to rule non-Whites (and women and poor people) intellectually inferior, and to justify discriminating against them in the admissions process. It had become so powerfully “objective” that those non-Whites, women, and poor people would accept their rejection letters and not question the admissions decisions. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1065

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core evidence for Kendi’s inversion: the tests were created to justify exclusion, not to measure merit; direct usable ammunition for placing any argument about standardized testing into the segregationist bucket. — connects to: The literacy test was a respectable cover for racial discrimination — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 602; A literacy test aimed to cut southern and eastern European immigration in half — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 602; Literacy tests and poll taxes were written to let local officials disenfranchise black voters — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2063
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing move — that the tests’ ‘objectivity’ became so powerful that the excluded themselves accepted the verdict — is a dense, genuinely paradigm-shifting observation about how a legitimating idea self-reinforces even among its victims.
• SEED: An essay angle: every debate about affirmative action and test scores flips once you ask what the tests were built to do versus what they are said to measure — the design-intent framing.