'Intelligence' and Race (was Re: Invention of the white race // Rakesh on eugenics)

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Mon Jun 1 08:58:21 PDT 1998


At 06:05 PM 5/31/98 -0500, Yoshie wrote:
>Charles replies to Justin:
><<I agree that if you are doing studies, there is a need to operationalize
>the measures. But "intelligence" has too important a meaning in valuing
>people to allow the limits of ability to measure to limit the application
>of the word to people's abilities.>>
>
>In my view, there is no need to test 'intelligence' or even to posit such a
>category. What's the point of inventing and measuring it, except that
>administrators might want it for the purposes of educational sorting and
>hierarchizing with an appearace of scientific objectivity and that
>'intelligence' business helps to shore up the ideology of meritocracy?

Ditto. Once we accept the fact that there are diffrent cognitive skills that are not directly comparable to one another (which I think is an implication of Levi-Strauss's idea of "practical intelligence") - the hierarchy goes down the drain. The unspoken agenda of the IQ testing was the institutionalization of one type of cognitive skill -- the manipulation of certain types of abstract symbols produced by academic authorities, while delegitimizing all other cognitive skills that may be put under the rubric 'practical intellgence."

BTW, multiple choice testing that proliferates in the US, is another way of institutionalizing a 'desirable' cognitive skill, picking up the right choice from a narrow range of options handed down by an authority figure - over, say, creative problem solving.

In all those cases, the trick lies in the arbitrary selection of a single cognitive skill whose performance forms the backbone of a hierarchical ranking system. Multiple and incomparable cognitive skills, e.g. psychomotor coordination required to play basketball and abstract symbol manipulation, considered as the basis of different types of 'intelligence" would be a death knell to meritocratic ideologies so dear to the Harvard/Yale/Princeton & Co. - processed minds.

Regards,

Wojtek Sokolowski



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