ABSTRACT
Chapter five of Unequal By Design examines the various ways that high-stakes, standardized testing helps produce and maintain white supremacy in the United States. This chapter begins with a look at how standardized testing and the concept of meritocracy uphold whiteness, and continues with an examination of the ways that early standardized testing intersected with the white supremacy of the eugenics movement. It then examines the modern-day impacts of high-stakes, standardized testing on students of color, particularly Black and Brown students, at the intersections of curriculum, race, disability, neoliberalism, and incarceration. This chapter concludes with a look at how the very paradigm of standardized testing, with its presumption of objectivity, comparison, and rank-ordering of Black and Brown bodies, is deeply rooted in paradigms that extend directly from Eurocentrism and capitalism.
