Praise for IQ tests in column masks racist bias

Dan Cassino's March 25 commentary on IQ tests is inaccurate and contains racist assumptions. In 1912, psychologist Henry Goddard used the Binet test (cited as "accurate" by Cassino) to "prove" Jewish and Italian immigrants were intellectually inferior.

Carl Bingham, a Princeton psychologist who helped develop educational testing, used data from World War I Army intelligence tests on East and Southern European draftees to provide the intellectual justification for the 1924 Immigration Act that halted new immigration from these groups. He argued, incorrectly, that these groups' entry into the U.S. had lowered the general intelligence level here. In fact, the tests measured acquired skills, not intelligence. Naturally, as non-native speakers, they could not compete with native speakers on a test that measured language competence. The tests showed absolutely nothing about the immigrants' ability to learn. (See: Feagin, J and C.B. Feagin. 1993. Race and Ethnic Relations fourth ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993, pp. 119-120).

These early IQ tests rely on late 19th century physical anthropologists' assumptions about genetic superiority and inferiority. They believed that by measuring skull sizes, they could determine which "races" had superior intelligence. These experiments ("anthropometric tests") sought to "prove" Northern Europeans' racial superiority by showing they had larger skulls than Africans.

In the late 1970s, Stephen Jay Gould re-analyzed their data and found that these so-called racial differences were non-existent - brain sizes overlapped between different "races." Later, Franz Boas demonstrated that genetic traits, like skull size, can go through sharp changes from one generation to the next: They are not necessarily retained across generations (See Gregory, S. and R. Sanjek, Race. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994: pp.5-6). In sum, there is absolutely no scientific basis to the idea that intelligence is genetically transmitted.

It should be clear by now that Mr. Cassino's allegiance to intelligence tests reflects his own racist bias rather than "the facts," as he claims. Moreover, his contention that intelligence is genetically determined is extremely dangerous.

It has been used historically to justify slavery in this country and the Holocaust during World War II. Is his argument an attempt to rationalize the harsh new legislation against immigrants and welfare recipients?

I'll let the reader decide.

Professor Joel Stillerman
Assistant research social scientist
Latin American Area Center