sports, race, and IQ... • 'Blacks' do not have a genetic advantage in sports. • 'Blacks' do not have a genetic intellectual disadvantage. • Human races do not exist. • The IQ literature is a series of frauds. BOOK SUMMARY Some academics and others peddle pseudo-science in order to allege that blacks are good at sports and bad at thinking. Resurrecting Racism answers them with proper science. The first half of the book shows that blacks do not have superior sports ability and that biologists, using the latest genetic data, have concluded that human races do not exist, contrary to what racists would like to believe. The second half of the book (beginning in chapter 6) traces the history of IQ testing, documenting that the IQ literature was built by committing outright fraud. IQ 'research' has been used to allege that blacks have inferior 'intelligence,' but those who developed the IQ literature turned the purpose of the original tests upside down, twisted their statistics, made up their math, and invented nonexistent researchers, publishing fake studies under phony names. These 'researchers' were also the major propagandists of the eugenics movement, which movement is responsible for creating the German Nazis. This is also documented in the second half of Resurrecting Racism, as is the fact that today's IQ 'researchers' continue this fraudulent and dangerous tradition. |
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Resurrecting Racism: The modern attack on black people using phony science. © 2004 Francisco Gil-White Table of Contents: http://www.hirhome.com/rr/rrcontents.htm |
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Chapter 8 Eugenics and the
World War I ‘intelligence tests’ in the US Army There was nothing in the previous chapter about Jon Entine, and you may have begun to miss him. But here we shall encounter him again. As you may recall from the previous chapter, the most extreme of Charles Davenport’s eugenic organizations was the Eugenics Research Association. The ERA was created in 1913, and the next year World War I exploded, lasting until 1918. The US stayed out of the war until April 1917. By that year, eugenics had become quite mainstream, thanks especially to the efforts of ERA member Henry Goddard, even if the landmark forced sterilization of Carrie Buck had yet to be endorsed by the US Supreme Court. Thus, when the US began preparations to enter the World War, it did so along eugenic lines. This chapter will explain how that happened.
Psychologist Robert Yerkes was quite cozy with the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations that funded, as we saw above, much of the pseudo-scientific eugenics ‘research’ with the blessing and supervision of the US government.[1] In addition, Yerkes was a member of the Eugenics Research Association. None of this was coincidence, because “Yerkes’ biology professor Charles B. Davenport (1866-1944) was the leader of the eugenics movement in America. …Yerkes was early ‘converted’ by Davenport, and became an outspoken supporter of the eugenics movement.”[2] This outspoken supporter of eugenics and member of its most radical wing is precisely whom the US military felt it needed as it prepared to enter the First World War. And so Yerkes, and other psychologists whom he recruited, created a phony ‘intelligence testing’ structure for the military. “When the United States entered World War I in April of 1917, the psychologist Robert Yerkes (1876-1956). . .induced the APA [American Psychological Association] Council to establish twelve committees for exploring various possible military applications of psychology. Yerkes himself was primarily an animal psychologist. . .[but] he named himself chairman of the committee charged with developing proposals for the psychological testing of army recruits. To form his committee Yerkes called on all of the leading American intelligence testers, including Henry Goddard and Lewis Terman... From the outset, Yerkes had big plans for his committee... ‘We should not work primarily for the exclusion of intellectual defectives,’ he declared, ‘but rather for the classification of men in order that they may be properly placed in the military service.’ ...[In other words,] not only screening out the mentally retarded...but also identifying candidates with superior ability for officer training and higher military responsibilities.”[3] Henry Goddard was an obvious choice for Robert Yerkes, but so was Lewis Terman, also a member of the ERA, and a man for whom Francis Galton was an intellectual hero. Terman, in fact, “. . .wrote long papers at Indiana [University at Bloomington] on ‘degeneracy’ and ‘the great man theory’. . . Then, in the midst of his job search he received an unexpected offer of a graduate fellowship for Ph.D. study at Clark University. With a substantial loan from his family, Terman was able to accept, and to study under the eminent G. Stanley Hall as Henry Goddard had just finished doing.”[4] Not coincidentally, G. Stanly Hall’s interests “included the controversial portrayal of the putative differences in the natures of women and men as well as the unsavory concept of racial eugenics.”[4a] The effect of the Yerkes-Goddard-Terman army program would be obvious. As we saw, the Binet-Simon materials were designed to test ‘stuff learned’ in a particular culture—the culture of the French school system. The French public schools, famously, have always been quite good. So the culture that matched this best in the United States—and especially in segregation-era America—was the culture of the schools in which middle- and upper-class whites were brought up, because the schools that others had access to, especially blacks, were dreadful (still are). The Binet-Simon tests were readily adapted for the upper-class white American population and then used for the assignment of recruits to various army jobs. In this way, the ruling class ensured that, by means of a procedure that on the surface was sold as meritocratic, but which in reality was simply a fraud designed to discriminate against the working classes, it could assign the worst jobs in the US army to blacks and other minority recruits, thus neatly reflecting in the armed forces the disenfranchisement that existed for so many all over US civilian society. These efforts not only continued the American tradition of willfully misrepresenting what the Binet-Simon tests actually measured, but also, in some ways, did away entirely with the tests themselves. “[T]he sheer numbers of recruits who would have to be assessed ruled out the individual test procedure required by the Binet-type scales, with a single examiner for each single subject; instead a group test would have to be developed, capable of being given to large numbers of subjects at the same time... Yerkes’ committee quickly put together two prototype tests, one for recruits literate in English, and another which did not require reading, for the large numbers of illiterate recruits and recent immigrants who could not read English... The two tests, revised and named Army Alpha for literate subjects and Beta for illiterates, were soon being administered at the rate of 200,000 per month.”[5] So the careful individual administration of the test was abandoned, and for those who didn’t speak English, a different test was created. In other words, the Binet-Simon’ tests were administered as part of the most careless, roughshod, mass process—precisely what Alfred Binet had explained could not be done with these tests. In Binet’s words, “Obviously, this way of measuring [i.e. the administration of the Binet-Simon test] cannot just be entrusted to anybody; it requires tact, finesse, experience with how those errors that must be avoided come about, and a clear understanding of the effects of suggestion; moreover, there is nothing automatic about this; we cannot compare it to the scale one uses to measure a person’s weight, where it suffices that we step on it for the machine to give us a printed number. This is not a method one can carelessly delegate, and we warn the harried doctor, who would like to have his nurses take care of its application, that he will be sorely disappointed. The results of our test are of no value if they are severed from all commentary; such results require interpretation… Far be it from us to turn this into an assembly-line process!”[6] And yet that is precisely what Yerkes-Goddard-Terman did: create an assembly-line where the mangled remains of the Binet-Simon scale were “administered at the rate of 200,000 per month.” This was useful not only for reproducing the class inequalities of American society—and especially its racist component: anti-black segregation—inside the armed forces; they were also quite useful for pushing the superior ‘Nordic race’ argument that had become so popular with the American ruling classes, and would later seduce the German Nazis. The result? As the Encyclopedia Britannica explains, “Some 200,000 blacks served abroad [i.e. in addition to those who served on US soil], though most were restricted to labor battalions and service regiments.”[7] But that lonely sentence in Britannica leaves out quite a bit that matters: “…over 400,000 African Americans would serve in this conflict, more than double the number that had served in the Civil War… Black volunteers and draftees…encountered pervasive and unrelenting racial discrimination, official reluctance to fully train, equip, and use them, and black women’s attempts to offer their services as nurses were refused. …[T]he majority of black men were relegated to the Services of Supply, mainly serving as laborers and stevedores…”[8] This prevented the army from having an equalizing effect. When it comes to showing courage, keeping your cool, and making rational decisions in the face of the enemy, some will do the right thing and others will make mistakes or lose their nerve, and it becomes obvious to everybody who’s who. That sort of thing could quickly erode the sense of white superiority when ordinary whites got to observe up close that in the heat of combat black people were not any less capable. For example, “[Some African Americans] were in active combat units like the 369th Infantry Regiment, a National Guard outfit also known as Harlem Hellfighters; they were the first Americans, black or white, to reach the combat zone in France, the first to cross the Rhine River in the offensive against Germany; and the Harlem Hell-fighters were in continuous combat for 191 days, longer than any other American Unit.”[9] Not only that, “On September 29, 1918, in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the 369th took the city of Sechault, France and dug in. They managed to take the city after it had been pounded by artillery... In the attack the 369th lost about a third of its soldiers due to casualties, but did not have a man captured. Because of this they became known as ‘the regiment that never lost a man captured, a trench, or a foot of ground...’”[10] Foreigners were quite appreciative of these soldiers accomplishments. “The ‘Hell Fighters’…earned the Croix de Guerre for their actions in combat,”[10] and all in all
But the Harlem Hellfighters were not merely accomplished in battle; they also had a tremendous cultural impact all over the world:
In order to prevent this kind of performance from changing the opinions about African Americans that ordinary whites grew up hearing, Robert Yerkes gave the US army a different standard of worth: phony ‘intelligence science.’ But Yerkes’ tests, which were responsible for assigning African Americans mostly to the role of servants to the white soldiers, did not merely transform the careful methods of administration that Alfred Binet had cautioned researchers to employ; they also transformed the Binet-Simon tests themselves. Precisely because they were measuring ‘stuff learned in a Paris school,’ Binet and Simon had chosen different tasks for the different years of schooling; Yerkes instead standardized the items for all ages so that people at any stage could be tested on the same things, and described this move as “turning a relatively unscientific procedure... [into one that] is striving to fulfill the essential requirements of scientific method.”[11] That called for some nerve. And these army-inspired ‘reforms’ to the Binet-Simon tests are precisely what Yerkes’ recruit Lewis Terman became famous for. He produced what came to be known as the Stanford-Binet test.[12] Terman was also responsible for promoting the widespread adoption of William Stern’s meaningless IQ ‘statistic’ (see previous chapter). It was for reasons such as these, naturally, that Yerkes had recruited Terman. The Yerkes-Goddard-Terman ‘research’ in the army also had an impact on immigration laws. A clear majority of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe scored below Yerkes’ standard for ‘moronity.’ On the basis of such purported results, Carl Brigham, another eugenic psychologist, would build a whole ‘theory.’ “Yerkes’ colleague Carl Brigham made much of these findings…, and explained them on a genetic-racial basis. Borrowing from a then-fashionable (but scientifically unfounded) anthropological theory, Brigham asserted that…northern Europeans...[had] superior ‘Nordic’ blood, as opposed to that of the inferior ‘Alpine’ and ‘Mediterranean’ racial types. . .”[13] At the time there was much immigration of the so-called “Mediterranean racial types” into the US, so the machinery of the US government, which was itself promoting eugenics, took Brigham’s argument that immigration was lowering American intelligence as the excuse to pass laws restricting immigration from southern Europe in 1924. This was not an honest reaction to a real scientific finding: Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, a major eugenicist, had called for precisely such restrictions on immigration in a New York Times editorial that moreover made reference to IQ test results, and which made clear that Davis was very worried that immigrants might have socialist ideas.[13a] So the US government made use of a scientific fraud in order to justify a racist social policy, the better to further the aims of the aristocratic side in a class war. The dishonesty of this immigration policy is obvious from the aftermath. Even Brigham ended up confessing that his ‘theory’ was groundless, though this hardly led to the repeal of the immigration laws his ideas inspired. As psychologist Peter Shoneman explains: “These laws were not revoked when Brigham later, to his credit, recanted his earlier prophesies (Brigham 1930).” Here is Brigham recanting: “This review has summarized some of the more recent test findings which show that comparative studies of various national and racial groups may not be made with existing tests, and which show, in particular, that one of the most pretentious of these comparative racial studies—the writer’s own—was without foundation.”[14]
All of the foregoing is awkward, to say the least, for anybody trying to defend ‘intelligence testing.’ For you see, it is Yerkes, Goddard, and Terman who, in their attempt to further the agenda of eugenics, turned such testing into a widespread mainstream phenomenon in American society, and bequeathed to us the tests that are now widely used to determine opportunities in the US. So those who defend intelligence testing must somehow find a way to apologize for this troika, and this finally brings us back to Jon Entine. On page 165 of Taboo, after talking for a bit about Yerkes, Goddard, and Terman, Jon Entine says this: “Although some of the assumptions of intelligence quotient (IQ) testers have proven fallacious, these early-century theorists are far from unindicted co-conspirators of racism and genocide as they have been portrayed in some quarters.” First, notice how weak Entine’s defense is. He begins by virtually conceding that these people were frauds: yes, he admits, Yerkes, Goddard, and Terman made assumptions that “have proven fallacious.” Well, in that case the assumptions of current IQ tests that are modeled on the work of Yerkes, Goddard, and Terman must be fallacious as well. Why then does Entine come out so strongly in favor of modern intelligence testing? To answer that, consider that Entine’s defense of the above troika is reduced to asserting that the accusations against these three psychologists as promoting racism and genocide are false. But Henry Goddard became famous as the country’s foremost advocate of extermination by means of forced incarceration and sterilization of minorities, as we saw in the previous chapter. So Entine does not merely show remarkable contempt for his readers, he appears to be defending eugenics. And once again Jon Entine is shockingly bold, daring his audience not to notice. On the very same page, and immediately preceding the above quoted protest that Yerkes, Goddard, and Terman shouldn’t be accused of being racist and genocidal, Entine quotes Lewis Terman—the creator of the widely used Stanford-Binet test—saying this: “A low level of intelligence is very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among Negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come... The writer predicts that...there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture...From a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.”[15] The passage above presents an extreme racist view, from one of the most important prophets of IQ testing, and a member of the most radical eugenic organization, stating what the author himself calls a “eugenic point of view”—that is to say, a genocidal advocacy. The author, Lewis Terman, is the man about whom Entine claims, on the same page, that he was neither racist nor genocidal. Jon Entine takes my breath away. But you can almost feel sympathy for Jon Entine when you realize that his position requires him to plunge into these absurdities. Why? Because the tests that Americans are required to take in order to apply for college and graduate school are direct descendants of the army tests that the Yerkes-Goddard-Terman troika created, so it is quite necessary that this troika somehow be apologized for if the modern use of ‘intelligence tests’ is to be defended. Ah yes, I am talking not merely about Terman's brainchild, the widely used Stanfort-Binet, but about the also widely used SAT and GRE.
Taking the WWI army Alpha, which had been designed by Yerkes, Goddard, and Terman, as his model, “[Carl] Brigham went on to develop the first standardized college admissions test [the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)], which in essence was an IQ test… Just as [Charles] Spearman would have wished, the SAT soon became virtually mandatory for access to higher education in the United States.”[16] The Educational Testing Service (ETS) is the organization in charge of the SAT. You will not be surprised to learn that
Once again, Carnegie money was promoting eugenic policy and making it official. And how did Henry Chauncey come to create ETS? BusinessWeek explains:
What Chauncey did for the army was help it implement a eugenic program, but BusinessWeek is not criticizing Chauncey. It calls the man a "great innovator," taking his claim that he was supposedly trying to make the educational system more meritocratic at face value. It is relatively obvious to those who have been forced to take the SAT that the test is absurd. Now they know why: these tests were designed by eugenicist frauds. Consider my experience. Like a lot of people, I stopped doing any arithmetic the minute I was allowed to use calculators. But when I began to study for the GRE (in the US, a requirement to apply for graduate school in many disciplines), I had to go back and re-train for speed in arithmetic (because the GRE tests speed, not knowledge, so it rewards the ability to learn mindless rote shortcuts, not analysis). By contrast, my knowledge of advanced algebra and calculus were not tested. What happened in graduate school, naturally, is that I used my advanced algebra and calculus, whereas the arithmetic tricks I re-trained myself in so that I could answer GRE math questions quickly—these I never used again. As hard as I tried to improve my arithmetic chops, I did quite poorly in the math section of the GRE. As you might have guessed, however, this was a bad predictor of how I would do in graduate school, where I studied under a mathematician and got an A+ in the main mathematical course he taught. In addition, I got my PhD in record time and was hired at the University of Pennsylvania before I even finished my degree. Psychologist Peter Shoneman explains why this should surprise nobody: “...the SAT—a descendent of conventional ‘verbal’ IQ tests such as the [Yerkes-Goddard-Terman] Army Alpha—consistently performs worse than easily available previous grades as a predictor of subsequent grades. This was known, though not advertised, since the 20s. For long-range criteria (such as graduation or GPA at graduation), the SAT usually accounts for less than 5% of the criterion variance (Humphreys, 1968, Donlon, 1984). As one might expect, the picture dims further for the GRE: In two recent, large scale, validity studies, Horn and Hofer (undated) and Sternberg (1998) found that the validities of the GRE for predicting successful completion of graduate training were effectively zero.”[17] But if these IQ tests do not predict in the least who is going to do well in higher education, then why are they being used as a criterion for admission? What are these tests good for? Well, so long as the public is told that the use of these tests is meritocratic, they will be good for maintaining the pretense that systematically keeping minorities out of higher education is not unfair. For you see, Yerkes, Terman, and Goddard were careful to preserve the cultural bias in these tests, so that white middle- and upper-class people would easily score higher. Raymond Fancher explains, “Yerkes claimed that the items had been designed to minimize cultural or educational issues, yet some of the questions clearly required familiarity with American culture and history. Subjects had to know that the Overland car was manufactured in Toledo, (not Buffalo, Detroit, or Flint), for example, and that Crisco was a food product and not a disinfectant, toothpaste, or medicine. One sentence-completion item read ‘Washington is to Adams as first is to ____?’ The Beta tests supposedly provided roughly equivalent tasks, but did not require the subjects to read...[and yet] they were not entirely culture-free by any means. Several picture-completion items required familiarity with middle-class culture, for example, such as a tennis court without a net, or an Edison phonograph lacking the sound-horn. Moreover, while Beta did not require subjects to read, it did demand the circling, drawing, or filling in of correct answers with a pencil. For totally uneducated people who had seldom or never held pencils in hand before, this presented a marked disadvantage...”[18] Edwin Black puts it this way, [Quote from War Against the Weak starts here] The Alpha test’s multiple choice questions could certainly be answered by sophisticated urbanites familiar with the country’s latest consumer products, popular art and entertainment. Yet most of America’s draftees hailed from an unsophisticated, rural society. Large numbers of them had ‘never been off the farm.’ Many came from insular religious families, which disdained theater, slick magazines and smoking. No matter, the mental capacity of everyone who could read and write was measured by the same pop culture yardstick. Question: “Five hundred is played with…” Possible answers: rackets, pins, cards, dice. Correct response: cards. Question: “Becky Sharp appears in…” Possible answers: Vanity Fair, Romola, The Christmas Carol, Henry IV. Correct response: Vanity Fair. Question: “The Pierce Arrow car is made in…” Possible answers: Buffalo, Detroit, Toledo, Flint. Correct response: Buffalo. Question: “Marguerite Clark is known as a…” Possible answers: suffragist, singer, movie actress, writer. Correct response: movie actress. Question: “Velvet Joe appears in advertisements for…” Possible answers: tooth powder, dry goods, tobacco, soap. Correct response: tobacco. Question: “‘Hasn’t scratched yet’ is used in advertising a…” Possible answers: drink, revolver, flour, cleanser. Correct response: cleanser.[19] [Quote from War Against the Weak starts here] If you didn’t know the answers to the questions above, then by Robert Yerkes’, Henry Goddard’s, and Lewis Terman’s standards you are a moron. Of course, you could object that, as they say, “the past is a foreign country.” And indeed it is. The US in the first half of the twentieth century had a very different culture, and therefore the stuff that upper-class people were expected to know was not the same as today. So, naturally, you don’t know the answers to the questions above, and it would be unfair for anybody to determine your innate intelligence by your inability to answer. But it is equally true that members of the lower classes of the time were not exposed to the upper-class pop culture that these tests were measuring, and so it was entirely unfair for Yerkes, Goddard, and Terman to categorize people from the lower classes as ‘morons.’ That said, there is no question that these tests can indeed identify morons, because anybody who really thinks that the stuff above measures ‘innate intelligence’ has to be one. Concerning Jon Entine the point is this: Since he goes out of his way to apologize for the Yerkes-Goddard-Terman troika that bequeathed us the nonsense quoted above, and since these tests then became the SAT and the GRE, it appears that Entine is trying to prevent his readers from figuring out that an entire scandal has been institutionalized in the United States in order to keep disadvantaged minorities—and, in general, the working classes—out of higher education, while giving the impression of a ‘meritocracy.’ »» Continue to
Chapter 9:
Footnotes http://www.yerkes.emory.edu/about_history.html [2] Fancher, R. 1985. The intelligence men: Makers of the IQ controversy. New York: Norton (p.121) [3] The intelligence men (pp.117-118) [4] The intelligence men (pp.133-135)
[4a]
"A Brief Biographical Sketch of G.
Stanley Hall" [5] The intelligence men (pp.118-119) [6] Binet, Alfred, Les idées modernes sur les enfants, (original edition: pp.135-138; 1973 edition: pp.97-99). Also reproduced in Alfred Binet: Ecrits psychologiques et pédagogiques, choisis et présentés par G. Avanzini. Toulouse: Privat (1974, pp.125-135). My translation.
[7]
"Black Americans, or African Americans." Britannica Student
Encyclopedia from Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
[8]
The Father Ryan Catholic high school has put together some
useful materials on African American participation during
WWI that are considerably more informative than what the
Encyclopedia Britannica has on the subject. The quote in the
text is taken from: [9] http://www.fatherryan.org/blackmilitary/ww1.htm [10] http://www.fatherryan.org/blackmilitary/hell.htm
[10a]
"Harlem Hellfighters"; Wikipedia [11] The intelligence men (p.123) [12] The intelligence men (pp.139-140) [13] The intelligence men (p.128) [13a] ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF IMMIGRATION; By JAMES J. DAVIS. Secretary of Labor; New York Times (1857-Current file); Feb 17, 1924; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2001); pg. XX1 [14] Shonemann, P. H. 2005. "Psychometrics of intelligence," in Encyclopedia of social measurement, vol. 3, pp. 193-201: Elsevier. (p.196) Shoneman is quoting: Brigham, C. C. 1930. Intelligence test of immigrant groups. Psychological review 37:158-165. (p.165) [15] Entine gets this quote from: Lewontin, R. C., S. Rose, and L. J. Kamin. 1984. Not in our genes: Biology, ideology, and human nature. New York: Pantheon. (p.86) [16] Shonemann, P. H. 2005. "Psychometrics of intelligence," in Encyclopedia of social measurement, vol. 3, pp. 193-201: Elsevier. (p.196)
[16a]
Educational Testing Service. "Our
Heritage"
[16b]
"Henry Chauncey: The Aptitude Tester:
The SAT's inventor and founder of Educational Testing
Service had a dream of a more meritocratic America, and he
pursued it faithfully"; THE GREAT INNOVATORS; BusinessWeek;
JULY 7, 2004; by Mike Brewster. [17] This is from psychologist Peter Shoneman’s website: http://www.psych.purdue.edu/~phs/research.htm The same argument, with something very close to the text which appears on his website, can also be found in the following published paper: Shonemann, P. H. 2005. "Psychometrics of intelligence," in Encyclopedia of social measurement, vol. 3, pp. 193-201: Elsevier. The references Shoneman cites are the following: Donlon, T.F (1984) The College Board Technical Handbook for the Scholastic Aptitude Test and Achievement Tests. New York: College Entrance Examination Board. Humphreys, L.G. (1968) The fleeting nature of the prediction of college academic success. Journal of Educational Psychology, 59, 375-380. Sternberg, R.J. and Williams, W.M (1997) Does the Graduate Record Examination predict meaningful success in graduate training of psychologists? A case study. The American Psychologist, 52, 630-641. [18] The intelligence men (pp.124-125)
[19]
Black, E. 2003. War against the weak: Eugenics and
America's campaign to create a master race. New York:
Four Walls Eight Windows. (pp.80-81). |