The Race Problem with IQ Tests

I knew it. IQ Tests are 💩.

I’m about halfway through reading The Big Test by Nicholas Lemann; copyright year is 1999.

And, so far, this book has pretty much confirmed what I’ve long suspected. I think back to High School and first hearing about these dreadful ACT/SAT tests. Their weight made them dreadful. Is this test going to decide my future? I suck at Math though…welp, looks like I’m screwed.

While the book so far has confirmed these suspicions, I’m grateful for it filling in the blanks. Now I know the kind of people first involved that would eventually form the idea of grand testing on a big scale for some virtuous ideas that were a cross between their religion and over time, evolve into an “American” ideal of opportunity. Honestly, it made me think of this old proverb:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

That is the vibe-code of this book so far. The early architects of big testing are people fueled with their way of thinking, culture, ways of life, all happening simultaneously at the time they happen to be living. We get to learn about certain multi-dimensional influences at play here, that include things like:

• Affluence; established, cross-generational wealth = royalty and a condition for their idea of accepted leaders of business and the country

• Protestantism, WASP culture, Puritanism; there is a distinct type of person and religious affiliation going to Harvard/Yale back in the day

• Powerful drive to make money—Big testing was big business 🤑

• Elitism, classism; clearly upheld, defended definitions of social division based on wealth, race, and demographic

• A salient reservation for Catholics and Jews back in the day, in regards to acceptance percentages of places like Harvard/Yale; there was a real effort to limit their presence

• If one could prove family genealogy from the old country of England, or if you could say you had family that came across within The Mayflower itself, then you were also royalty, practically

• Those aforementioned Ivy League schools radically changed from when they first started and at least one of them I learned is an old, old, old, business institution but this is no big secret anymore

Here is the main subject I want to focus on though:

The Testing Industry ran into huge, unexpected social problems when it came to race. This was even more pronounced during the tumultuous times of The Civil Rights Era.

The reason this is important is because for too long, we’ve heard the racist use this testing industry, as a cumbersome bulky weapon to suggest that certain races are inferior as human beings because they are “low IQ”; that their entire intelligence, the end all be all, lies within a test number, based off a test, based off some guys that say that’s what it is, because they make money off it.

Yes, the veracity of what it claims to test, and what it actually tests are different. But since the Pandora’s Box of testing has been unleashed on the world—despite no one voting for it or asking any of us if we wanted to go along with that system—it’s become a monster which has accelerated social division despite its myopic efforts at academic egalitarianism and as a result, manifest versions of their desired social utopias.

It’s like they at first wanted to build this social utopia and just test everybody to see where their talents are in some way so society can guide them to their profession, but at the same time, the Test Makers admit that not every average Joe is going to be President.

Chapter 13: The Negro Problem — whew.

I highlighted most of this chapter, but I want to start with this passage first:

Standardized educational tests created a ranking of Americans, one by one from top to bottom on a single measure. If one analyzed the ranking by social or ethnic group, then at the bottom, always, were Negroes. Living in the benighted, educationally inferior South, consigned to separate schools that operated only sporadically with ill-trained teachers, historically denied by law even the chance to learn to read and write and figure, disproportionately poor, ill-nourished, and broken-familied. Negroes as a group were in a uniquely bad position to perform well on tests designed to measure such school-bred skills as reading and vocabulary and mathematics fluency. So whenever goods were distributed on the basis of test scores, Negroes got a disproportionately low share of them.¹

I knew it. I knew these details all mattered and these are not trivial. These are critically important details that get overlooked in so many race discussions. When there’s violence and people can see skin color with their eyeballs, they’re quick to point to skin color and/or the weapon used, but less quick to ask, Where has the father been?

Does an IQ Test distinguish if you were raised by a present loving mother and father? Can the IQ Test take into consideration being so poor perhaps one could only afford being raised on a diet of over-processed cheap junk foods?

But, the racist well weaponize this idea anyway. The racist will think things like: the Negro is inferior as person because he scored poorly on a (so-called) IQ test.

That, my friends, is the sleight of hand that author E. Michael Jones has pointed out. The racist will correlate morality off of an “IQ test”. Never mind that the IQ test was never designed to be used in the manner we’ve seen in Modernity. It started out small with a certain function for admissions to Harvard or Yale. Then, out of the pursuit of money disguised as a modest public service, the testing industry made big bucks and has been a big buck-making machine ever since.

Then the testing industry became too big too fail—meaning that along its evolution, too many people have put too much money and too much of their reputations on the line for it to go down—consequences of society and that average Joe living in modern times be damned.

The role of fathers and the manner in which they raise their sons is understated in these discussions on race. The role of the family unit: a loving father, husband; a loving mother, wife and the communion they engage in all matter: was it just a hookup? A domestic partnership? Is it a Catholic marriage?

Yes, I believe the way a person is introduced to spirituality, matters and if they’re raised with a family that practices their faith. What they believe in, matters and is an important detail too.

So when all of this is taken into account, the idea of “just study harder” is insufficient in addressing these things. I bet there are plenty that strived through such adversities anyway, and more power to them. But I think those kind of people are the exception.

“I point out that college entrance examinations discriminate against deprived and disadvantaged persons” - John Tower²

The author, Lemann, tells us that the aforementioned quote by John Tower came about through “a cross between a London clubman and an Oxford don”³. Lemann tells us that he said this:

…during the debate on the Civil Rights Act, which was perfectly true but was the sentiment that ETS would least have wanted voiced because it expressed nakedly the elitism that ETS had learned to elide.⁴

ETS, BTW, is the Educational Testing Service (the big testing machine). 🤑

They knew stupid people would equate IQ tests with congenital stupidity

Listen to this:

Coleman wanted to use an IQ test as part of the survey, but Solomon, well acquainted from his years at ETS with the troublesomeness of IQ tests for the testing industry, explained to Coleman that when the Negro children got low scores, people would say that it was because they were congenitally stupid.⁵

And Solomon was right. It’s become a favorite weapon of the racist.

The chapter then discusses national implications of such tests, the idea of using an IQ test for employment as one case in ‘63 involved a black man who was turned down a factory job because of his IQ score but then he filed a complaint with the Illinois Fair Employment Practices Commission and the government made that company hire him, and the beginning of “affirmative action”. The guy who came up with that one-two combo of words chose it because of the alliteration. It was either that or “positive action”.

What do you make of all this? Tell me in the comments!

1. The Big Test - The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann

2. Ibid

3. Ibid

4. Ibid

5. Ibid