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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.
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
Chapter 9
Top IQ-tester
Henry E. Garrett, WWII, and the effort to preserve segregation
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http://www.hirhome.com/rr/rrchap9.htm
This is what happened to American society as a result of Yerkes’ WWI army ‘intelligence testing’ program:
“Intelligence testing had been practiced on the widest scale ever... Afterward, civilian organizations such as schools and businesses began to seek intelligence tests for their own purposes. . .the return of hostilities in World War II found the entire United States military ready to make extensive use of intelligence and aptitude testing, on a much more organized scale than in 1917 and 1918. Thus, the army testing program firmly established the place of [so-called ‘intelligence’] testing in American society.”[1]
One of the men responsible for elaborating the tests used by the US Army in World War II was Henry Edward Garrett. In one of the original five school-desegregation cases that were joined in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the landmark Supreme Court case that destroyed the legal infrastructure of American apartheid known as ‘Jim Crow,’ Garrett was called to testify.
This particular Virginia case is called “Dorothy Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, VA, et al.”[2] The case grew out of a boycott by African American students who attended the segregated Moton High School to protest the poor and inferior conditions of their school facilities, which included the use of tarpaper shacks as classrooms (see the introduction for details).
At trial, Henry Garrett was called to testify for the defense—that is, to make arguments in favor of segregation. Given that one purpose of ‘intelligence testing,’ as we have seen, was to advance a racist strategy that would disenfranchise blacks, it is no surprise that American segregationists recruited Henry Garrett and his “statistical shenanigans,” as he himself called them (see below), to make their case.
Henry Garrett wasn't just anybody: he sat at the pinnacle of the American Establishment. With friendly prompting by Attorney Moore, whose job was to defend segregation, Henry Garrett listed his credentials:
[Attorney] MOORE: “Doctor, I know, having gotten acquainted with you as I have these last few days, you are sort of modest about yourself. But I think for the Court and this record, I need to ask you about some of the positions of responsibility, outside of your teaching work at Columbia, that you have had throughout the years.”
GARRETT: “I am past President of the American Psychological Association, a national organization; past President of the Eastern Psychological Association; New York State Association; Psychometric Society; I was Vice Chairman of the National Research Council of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology, National Research Council; during World War II, I was a member of the Advisory Committee on Military Personnel, advisor to what was an Advisory Committee to the Adjutant General’s Office; and for five years, I was an expert consultant to the Secretary of War. Any more than that, Mr. Moore?”
Garrett was then questioned as to whether psychology could establish an impact of segregation on personality—that is, whether psychology could determine an adverse effect of segregation on the black people who were the victims of this policy.
MOORE: This is the real question I was leading up to, Doctor. In your opinion, have we reached the point in the progress of psychology and its study where true measurement can be made by objective tests, or any other tests, as to the impact on personality on [of?] such a factor as segregation itself, whether on a voluntary basis or on a statutory basis?
GARRETT: I think that is very doubtful.
For the record: other psychologists had famously demonstrated the obvious: that racial discrimination had adverse psychological effects on black people, and it was these studies that Garrrett found “very doubtful.”[2a] By contrast, Garrett felt the army IQ tests, in which blacks scored relatively lower, and which Garrett had helped design himself, were quite good and accurate.
MOORE: One of the witnesses [for the plaintiffs], Dr. Smith, testified as to certain experience that he said he had had in connection with World War II in regard to certain personality tests among soldiers. Did you have anything to do with the matter of developing soldier tests in World War I or World War II?
GARRETT: I was one of the originators of the AGCT, the Army General Classification Test, which was given to some 12 million soldiers. I do not think that young Dr. Smith referred to personality tests, Mr. Moore, I think he was talking of the Army General Classification Test as a measure of learning.
MOORE: As ability to learn?
GARRET: Yes, as ability to learn. You can only measure ability to learn by finding what a person has already learned, at least that is the theory we have proceeded on. What a person has learned is some guarantee of what he will be able to learn.
What Garrett’s explanation reveals is that the logic of ‘intelligence testing’ was still that of the eugenicists: taking Binet-Simon tests—designed to measure ‘stuff learned’—and treating them fraudulently as a measure of ability to learn. In Garrett’s words, “What a person has learned is some guarantee of what he will be able to learn, at least that is the theory we have proceeded on.” But of course, people who up to the time of the test had not had many opportunities to learn the stuff in the tests would score low, despite the fact that their ability to learn might be just as high as that of people with good opportunities to learn that material. The point of Garrett’s activities was therefore quite obviously to make the socioeconomic advantages of upper-class whites appear as a supposedly natural advantage: an ‘innate mental superiority.’
MOORE: What was found in connection with the tests, this ability-to-learn test, as we will call it for short, in World War I in comparing the average Negro soldier with the average white soldier?
GARRETT: Well, in World War I, intelligence tests were administered to almost two million soldiers, of whom some 500,000 were Negroes, as I remember it; it might have been a few more. As is well known, the Negro troops scored more [mistakes] than the white troops.
I interrupt to point out that while attorney Moore actually tries to stick to what Garrett said, calling this sort of thing an “ability-to-learn test,” Garrett effortlessly switches to calling them “intelligence tests.” To psychologists such as Henry Edward Garrett, remember, ‘intelligence’ was something supposedly innate and unalterable.
Attorney Moore continues,
MOORE: By what proportion, roughly?
GARRET: A proportion of overlap of roughly 25 per cent. That means that 25 per cent of the Negro soldiers did better than the average white soldier [as opposed to the 50 per cent of white soldiers who did better than the average white soldier; see below]. This is a fact which, incidentally, is disputed by no one. The difference between the fact itself and the interpretation of that fact, that is to say, whether it is largely or entirely a matter of environmental opportunity, or whether it is partly a matter of difference in ancestry or native capacity, that is where the crux comes.
Garrett here makes it seem as though there was a debate about whether the differences in IQ test scores were environmental or hereditary, but this is a lie in two different ways. The first is that, outside of the courtroom, Garrett was flatly stating that blacks were naturally stupid. As reported in US News and World Report in 1963, Garrett said:
“[The Negro] has less of what I call ‘abstract intelligence’ than the white man. He functions at a lower level… he is not so able to think in terms of symbols—words, numbers, formulas, diagrams.”[3]
The second sense in which Garrett lied in the courtroom was that, even if there had been a debate on the question of heredity versus environment, the debate itself would have been a lie, because the entire enterprise of ‘intelligence testing’ was a fraud, constructed on cooked data, phony statistics, fabricated authors, and a complete misuse of the Binet-Simon tests.
Indeed, from Garrett’s testimony it appears that, not content with riddling the army tests with all sorts of ridiculous biases to favor upper class whites (remember the examples we saw in the previous chapter), there may have been data fabrication here as well. Notice below the interestingly awkward exchanges Garrett had with the two lawyers, on the stand, when he tried to explain his army tests a bit further.
First, with Defense Counsel Mr. Moore:
GARRETT: Let me say it just another way. Taking the white group as your standard, 50 per cent of them would be above your median score. [But only] 25 per cent of the Negro group, Negro soldiers, made scores in the upper 50 per cent of the white group. Is that clear?
MOORE: Yes that is right. Let us come to the results of World War II tests.
GARRETT: In World War II, the material has never been published. I have had access to a good deal of it and I can say, from my own knowledge, that the percentage of overlap is just about the same.
Then, Plaintiff’s Counsel Mr. Carter cross-examined Garrett as follows:
CARTER: …Mr. Garrett…you referred to some material, the results of some material, that was used in World War II, with regard to intelligence tests.
GARRETT: Yes, sir, I did.
CARTER: And I think you said that this material was unpublished. By ‘unpublished,’ do you mean that the material has merely not been published, or whether it is available generally to the profession?
GARRETT: The material on which I based my statement has been published. I am afraid I messed things up a bit there, because I have had access to a good deal of this material in the Adjutant General’s Office, which has not been published. The material upon which I based my statement involved some 5000 recruits, Negro and white, who had been classified as regards to score and as regards to their schooling, and I was able, by certain statistical shenanigans, to determine the percentage overlap in that group of five—it was half a million, 500,000 soldiers, Negro and white.
CARTER: This is the World War II study that you were talking about?
GARRETT: May I change that? There were 500,000 Negro soldiers.
CARTER: And this will refer to the test made in World War II?
GARRETT: That was the Army General Classification Test, called AGCT.
CARTER: Are you referring to World War I or II?
GARRETT: This was II.
Was Garrett a bit nervous?
First he claimed that the results of the World War II tests had “never been published.” Then he reversed himself under cross-examination and claimed that, in fact, he didn't really mean to say “never,” as such, because in fact the results had been published. “I am afraid I messed things up a bit there,” he explained. He did? A bit? How could Garret confuse the simple question of publication for its precise opposite, particularly when he himself had designed the AGCT and helped the army administer it to the soldiers?
To make matters worse Garrett answered in such a way that it was not clear whether he was basing his testimony on the published results or on “a good deal of this material in the Adjutant General’s Office, which has not been published.” It all appears to betray a certain discomfort.
Notice also that Garrett was not quite sure if the sample that he was relying on to make his claims was made up of 5000 recruits, black and white, or else 500,000, black and white, or else 500,000 exclusively black soldiers. The latter is his final answer, which he offers as a correction to all the preceding ones. The problem, however, is that Garrett couldn’t possibly say how the black soldiers compared to their white compatriots if he was only looking at data from black soldiers. So his answer here, taken together, is at least very confusing, and this is again consistent with the hypothesis of a certain nervousness in Garrett.
Finally, notice that Garrett explains how it was “by certain statistical shenanigans” that he got the result that blacks had scored lower in the army tests. But no fancy statistical footwork was necessary here; all Garrett had to do was look at the proportion of black soldiers who scored above the white mean. So when he says “statistical shenanigans” Garrett cannot be referring to complicated statistics, which would be a misuse of the word ‘shenanigan’ anyway. The only remaining hypothesis, therefore, is that Garrett used the word ‘shenanigan’ properly, and that what came out of his mouth was precisely what was in his head.
That looks quite plausible. Here is the meaning of the word ‘shenanigan,’ according to Merriam Webster Online:
1 : a devious
trick used especially for an underhand purpose
2 a : tricky or questionable practices or conduct—usually used in
plural b : high-spirited or mischievous activity—usually used in
plural.
So a shenanigan is either “a devious trick,” “a questionable practice or conduct,” or else a “mischievous activity.” Never something honest. Since a ‘slip of the tongue’ is precisely the kind of thing that will happen to nervous people with a guilty conscience when placed under cross-examination, my guess is that Garrett inadvertently confessed the very thing he was trying to hide: that, in order to allege that ‘science’ had supposedly shown black people to be less intelligent, he had lied.
But did Garrett have a motive to make up his data?
Certainly. It suffices only to examine Garrett’s position on segregation to see what these reasons might be. Here is another exchange between Carter (the attorney for the plaintiffs) and Henry Edward Garrett:
CARTER: What I would like to ask you is, do you know of any situation involving racial segregation of Negroes in the schools, like that practiced in the United States, and in Virginia, where this stigmatism has not been put on the separation?
[Translated into modern, plain-spoken English, this would read: “…do you know of any situation involving racial segregation…where the separation does not cause a stigma?”—FGW]
GARRETT: I think, in the high schools of Virginia, if the Negro child had equal facilities, his own teachers, his own friends, and a good feeling, he would be more likely to develop pride in himself as a Negro, which I think we would all like to see him do—to develop his own potentialities, his sense of duty, his sense of art, his sense of histrionics; and my prediction would be that if you conducted separate schools at the high school level for Negroes and whites, one of two things might happen: that the Negroes might develop their schools up to the levels where they would not mix, themselves; and I would like to see it happen. I think it would be poetic justice. They would develop their sense of dramatic art, and music, which they seem to have a talent for—politics—and they would say, “We prefer to remain as a Negro group.” The other would be in a mixed school where, as I said, a great many animosities, disturbances, resentments, and hostilities and inferiorities would develop…
Garrett asserted confidently that segregation was a good thing, and that black people should have their own schools where they could develop the things that black people, in his opinion, were good at: “sense of art,” “sense of histrionics,” “dramatic art, and music,” and “politics.” There is a thread running through these: Garrett was ‘praising’ black people as being good at things that were not considered serious intellectual work. Why? Well, consider that in Garrett’s opinion a black person was in the world to serve him, Henry Edward Garrett, something that is obvious from the fact that he would like a black person “to develop pride in himself as a Negro,” which to Garrett is the same as “to develop his own potentialities, his sense of duty…”
If Garret was saying that blacks were not good at thinking but were good for “duty,” he obviously had the mindset of a classical American racist, and viewed black people as his beasts of burden. A beast of burden will be dull, and consequently, as we saw above, Garrett maintained that “[The Negro] has less of what I call ‘abstract intelligence’ than the white man.” But a beast of burden will not merely be dull; it will be strong. And consequently Garrett also expressed that “Those black Africans are fine muscular animals when they’re not diseased.”[3a] By a simple connection we are thus brought to Jon Entine, who with one hand ‘praises’ blacks for their supposedly biologically superior physique, and with the other hand defends IQ-testing frauds who allege that blacks are biologically inferior intellects. Is it a coincidence that there should be such a direct affinity between the arguments of Entine and Garrett?
Jon Entine concludes his chapter on IQ with the following sentence: “Differences on the track or basketball court do not necessarily mean differences between the ears.” As a disclaimer, this is just pro forma. But it is not a disclaimer. The “not necessarily,” of course, telegraphs that there may be a connection, something that Entine has been virtually screaming between the lines. In order to do that, Entine pretends that there are human races; that they correspond to the boundaries imagined in the lay intuitions of Americans; that differences in athletic abilities correspond to those same boundaries; that the concept of intelligence as defended by modern psychologists is what the IQ tests were designed to measure; and that IQ-testers are honest. Not one of these claims, as we have seen, is true. So Entine, like Garrett, is dishonest.
What then does the affinity between their arguments suggest? That if Entine and Garrett are both dishonest, it is likely because they are both racists.
We now have enough context with which to consider Entine's defense of modern intelligence testing. I turn to this next.
»» Continue to
Chapter 10:
http://www.hirhome.com/rr/rrchap10.htm
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Footnotes
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[2] National Archives-Mid Atlantic Region (Center City Philadelphia) Records of the U.S. District and Other Courts in Virginia, 1793-1956. Records of the United States District Court for the Eastern District, Richmond Division. Case File: CV-1333 (1952) - Dorothy Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, VA, et al. (103 F. Supp. 337).
The case was appealed twice to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the title of the case was changed in the late 1950s to Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (337 U.S. 218), when it again was heard by the United States Supreme Court in 1964.
[2a]
"In a well-known footnote in Brown [v. Board of Education],
the Supreme Court declared that it was persuaded by social
science that segregated schooling has a profoundly harmful
impact on African American children. This was based on a
statement which was endorsed by 32 social scientists led by
Dr. Kenneth Clark, who had pioneered psychological tests
using Black and White dolls to identify segregation's injury
to African American children. This kind of evidence
ultimately had a substantial impact on the nation's
understanding of the psychological costs of racism.
In addition to Clark's famed doll studies, the Brown
litigation team compiled research covering the environmental
(as opposed to genetic) basis of learning; polling data of
social scientists indicating 90 percent viewed segregation
as harmful; the psychological, social, and economic impact
of segregation; and - for good measure during the height of
the Cold War - Gunnar Myrdal's research on the chasm between
the concept of democracy and Blacks' unequal status in
America."
SOURCE: "Brown at Fifty: Fulfilling the Promise"; The Recorder (Equal Justice Society); May 14, 2004; by Eva Paterson
http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/press_recorder_
2004_may_14.html
To read about the famous "doll studies" that showed black kids preferring white dolls to black dolls because they had absorbed that black was not as good, consult: Clark, K. B. 1955. Prejudice and your child. Boston: Beacon Press.
[3] U.S. News & World Report, Nov 18, 1963, pp 92-93.
[3a]
Newsweek,
‘Lesson in bias.