ABSTRACT
Almost from its inception, intelligence testing has had a long history of use as a pseudoscientific tool to promote cultural racism. The overlap between prominent psychologists in the development of intelligence testing and the membership of influential political organizations that supported social policies limiting immigration, sterilizing the “feebleminded,” and other repressive practices in the 1900s was described in Chapter 3. In the 1960s, Jensen (1969) cited the lower average IQ scores
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of Negroes compared to Whites as evidence that IQ is innate and cannot be altered by environmental enrichment and therefore that compensatory education programs are doomed to failure. In 1979, the Larry P. v. Riles class-action suit in the state of California banned the use of standardized intelligence tests as a primary selection criterion for placing children into classes for the mentally retarded because it erroneously overselected African American children (Lambert, 1981; White, 1984). The political forces behind the use of testing for discriminatory purposes were so potent that the suit took seven years to litigate, and to the present day it continues to be challenged in the judicial appeals process. Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) book, The Bell Curve, which describes correlations between IQ, as a measure of intelligence, and many social problems, has again brought attention to the use of science to promote political agendas.
