Mismeasure of Man Book

19th century physicians used the sheen of science to justify racism. American naturalist Samuel Morton believed that white people had the largest brains and that this was evidence of superior intellect. He finagled his results in order to confirm his prejudice: excluding small white skulls to raise the mean size of his own group. German anatomist Emil Huschke argued that Black people and white women were biologically undeveloped like white male children, "living representatives of an ancestral stage in the evolution of white males" (144). Ableism was about racial hierarchy: white men were supposed to be neurotypical, if they weren't it was because they were racially underdeveloped. Accordingly, John Down's original name for Down syndrome was "Mongolian idiocy." Scientists argued that bodies were a blueprint for society. In 1866 Lombroso wrote that the feet of sex workers resembled those of apes and that's what led to their behavior.

In the 20th century, the idea that behavior was innate persisted with new criteria: genes. Now the scientific narrative was that white people were superior because they had the best genes. Lewis Terman agreed with 19th century scientists that criminality was innate, but believed it was demonstrated by low IQ, not physical features. Eugenicists like him believed that class hierarchies existed because of innate intelligence: the elites reflected the biological superiority of the population. He argued that the US identify "feeble-minded" citizens "whose intelligence [was] too low for any effective life" and detain and/or sterilize them in order to preserve the race.

American psychologist Henry Goddard brought the first IQ tests to the US. He believed that people with mental ages from 8-12 posed the gravest threat as criminals, alcoholics, and sex workers. Eventually, a committee of psychologists created an intelligence test for army recruits. They used this data to make wide-sweeping claims that Black people / Jewish people / immigrants were "morons" because their IQ was not as high as "Nordics." IQ gave the guise of statistical legitimacy to racism and antisemitism. These tests inspired standardized tests across the US, including the SATs.

In reality, these tests didn't actually measure "innate intelligence. They reflected people's familiarity with US American culture and access to education. Many recruits could not even hear the examiner, and some had never taken a test or held a pencil before. Obviously the people who had prior access to formal schooling would score better than people who didn't. But these social factors were ignored. IQ tests were used by policy makers to ban immigration, criminalize miscegenation, and legitimize racial segregation.

Intelligence is fluid and irreducible to a number. In the 19th century scientists used physical bodies to naturalize inequality. In the 20th they used IQ. In the 21st, what if we actually ended biological determinism, not just refashion it?