times the rate of their white counterparts could not alone offend the Constitution: validated or not, Test 21 was “race-neutral” because the Court could not afford to believe otherwise.3
Before the Civil War, every southern state except Tennessee prohibited the instruction of slaves. After a brief period of promise during Reconstruction, black education was effectively suppressed by the violent reactions of Redemption and the gradual entrenchment of the Jim Crow system. Some of the tools of racial hierarchy were legal, some extralegal. As to the former, racial segregation, combined with grotesque disparities in the allocation of educational resources and radical differences in the focus and depth of the curricula, was both pervasive and effective. As to the latter, a relentless scheme of orchestrated violence, directed principally at educated black Americans, achieved for white supremacy what laws alone could not.
Today, America’s white citizens are more likely than its black citizens to receive undergraduate and graduate education, more likely to attend primary and secondary schools in districts with superior resources, and more likely to be enrolled in “advanced” or “college preparatory” courses; its black citizens are more likely to be suspended, expelled, or failed from high school, are more likely to attend overcrowded and underfunded primary and secondary schools, and are more likely to be assigned to remedial education classes, or labeled “mentally retarded.” America’s black citizens are offered fewer math and science courses as primary and secondary school students, are forced to learn with smaller supplies of texts and equipment, materials that are, in any event, more apt to be hopelessly outdated, and are more likely to be led in their educational efforts by underpaid and underqualified “substitute” teachers.4
And white people, for some reason, keep doing better on “race-neutral” tests.
The stories of Carrie Buck and of George Harley and John Sellers are the stories the law usually tells about “smart.” They are not stories of unbridled egalitarianism: no wealth is redistributed, no incompetence rewarded, no unqualified applicant gets the prize, no loser suddenly wins. The stories told by the law are the stories told by the culture at large: the smart people get ahead, the not-so-smart people don’t. The law, truth be told, ensures this result.
This book is about being “smart”—about its meaning and its consequences. It is about attempts to expand its meaning and make it more inclusive, and it is about attempts to preserve its conventional meaning, to maintain its exclusivity. It is a book about the relationship between “intelligence” and “race,” and the way the two phenomena have been created together. It is about the relentless interplay between science and politics in shaping the conventional meaning of both constructs, and the vital role played by law in shielding those conventional meanings from critical scrutiny.
This book, then, is about the deeply rooted cultural myths that surround the concept of smartness: the myths of biology, the myths of merit, and the myths of equality under law. It is about the myths that persuade us, over our better moral judgment, that not all people—and maybe only very few—are smart. It is about, then, the “smart” culture.
The mythology of “smartness” is old: it is an original part of our national fabric. It found full expression during the very founding of the Republic, as a vital part of the effort to reconcile the lofty rhetoric of universal liberty and equality with the undeniable realities of social caste, political exclusion, and chattel slavery. Not all people were in fact created equal, endowed with inalienable rights, and meant to share in the blessings of liberty. What distinguished the included from the excluded were the natural differences in “the faculties of men”: Indians, Africans, women, and the poor all were differentiated by “nature,” and relegated to the lower rungs of the “natural” order.
That was in the beginning. Four score and a few years later, a reconstructed nation abolished slavery and promised all persons the “equal protection of the law.” But the architects of Reconstruction—as a collective whole—were intensely ambivalent, and the promise they offered—of legal equality—was maddeningly ambiguous. Even that promise withered in the face of assertions of natural superiority: separate but equal was in truth only separate, and the inequality was entirely in keeping with the natural order. By the end of the nineteenth century, a new evolutionary science seemed to confirm the inevitability of the American hierarchy: even in a land of unrestrained liberty—and perhaps especially in such a land—only the fittest will thrive. Over a century into the American experiment, social caste and political exclusion remained the general rule, and while chattel slavery yielded to sharecropping and debt peonage and wage labor, the economic order was essentially the same. And whenever it was called upon, the Supreme Court would be there to confirm that it was all perfectly natural.
Another century later, and much finally has changed. Suffrage is now genuinely universal. Public or private discrimination based on race, gender, or disability now violates federal law. The promise of legal equality, at least, is now a reality.
Yet by every social, political, and economic measure, the hierarchies of race, gender, and disability endure. And to explain the reality of inequality in the face of professed equality, we make recourse still to the same old myths:
• The myth of identity: that the salient differences among groups of people—race, gender, disability—are biological.
• The myth of merit: that our social, political, and economic markets are free and neutral, and only occasionally corrupted by the bias of individual discrimination.
• The myth of intelligence: that the unequal outcomes of social, political, and economic competition reflect the inborn inequities of nature.
• The myth of equality under law: that equality can never transcend the empty realm of form, for the law is limited by tradition and powerless in the face of the natural order.
Thus the mythology of smartness endures. And it is all untrue. And the real tragedy is this: by now, we should know better.
We should know that the biological differences among groups of people are trivial, and that the salient differences are generated through the processes of social interaction.
We should know that our markets reflect the preferences of the people who have structured and maintained them, and that these biases—structural and unconscious—constitute the real discrimination.
We should know that unequal outcomes—in education, in employment, and yes, on tests of smartness—reflect the cumulative advantages and disadvantages of centuries of discrimination, and the same biases that pervade all of our culture.
We should know that our laws and traditions are only what we choose to make them, and that equality can be as real as we dare.
All of this we should now know, yet somehow refuse to believe. And in rejecting the liberation offered by contemporary understanding, we have rejected as well the very best of our national heritage. We abandon the egalitarian vision of the people who founded and reconstructed our nation; we embrace instead their tragically flawed mythology.
Smart people do get ahead. They stay ahead. But it is not only natural.
One question haunts this book: for all the talk about “socially constructed this” and “culturally determined that,” for all the critiques of the “natural order” and all the appeals to equality, isn’t it undeniably true that some people—and perhaps some groups of people—are just plain smarter than others?
The answer is simple and obvious: yes, some people—and perhaps some groups of people—are smarter than others.
It’s the explanation that’s complicated. Because the fact is that both the question and the answer are meaningless unless we are clear about what we mean by “smart.” The problem is that we often are not very clear, and we often are not in agreement, and so our assertions about the relative smartness of some people as compared to others are too easily misunderstood, and it becomes far too easy to assume that their profound smartness—and other people’s lack of it—is more natural, more inevitable, and more inherently meaningful than it really is.
So let me try to be clear about what I mean when I say that