The SAT: Black People’s Kryptonite
Each year scores of high school students around the world spend copious hours preparing to take an examination that largely determines their fitness to attend a university of their choosing. This rigorous examination, created to filter out “unqualified” applicants, was the brainchild of a singular, maniacal bigoted man. Carl Brigham, the man credited with creating the scholastic aptitude test (SAT), was a noted eugenicist, meaning he believed in maintaining racial “purity” through social engineering and weeding out undesirable characteristics, such as mental retardation and other challenges. In fact, so trenchant was his belief, Brigham was a member of the Advisory Council of the American Eugenics Society (AES), an organization with the stated mission of “improving the genetic composition of humans through controlled reproduction of different races and classes of people.” As author of the SAT, Brigham generally sought to proscribe non-whites from membership in higher education, various academies, etc. He also endeavored to maintain the purity of the white race using aptitude tests as an exclusionary tactic to reduce proximity between the races.
Granted, aptitude tests, have served as a gatekeeper for colleges, military, and employment agencies for over a century. In fact, the U.S. military used IQ tests to gauge fitness for military duty during World War I, testing nearly 2 million candidates. Regrettably, IQ tests also directly led to the forced sterilizations of more than 65,000 U.S. citizens who were considered “unintelligent” or “feebleminded.” The vast preponderance of those sterilized were poor and non-white. Under the Buck v. Bell ruling, sexual sterilization was permitted so long as subjects were afflicted with a hereditary form of insanity or imbecility as partly determined by IQ assessment.
Moreover, Brigham was an ardent believer that Negroes were among the intellectually inferior races on Earth. In fact, Brigham wrote “The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups owing to the presence here of the Negro.” Further, Brigham believed that American intellect was declining and scientifically “proved” that this cognitive diminution was attributable to racial miscegenation and integration.
Brigham’s racial animus was not only reserved for Black people, however. He also derisively wrote about the intellect of certain European groups. Brigham wrote the following: The Nordics are … rulers, organizers, and aristocrats … individualistic, self-reliant, and jealous of their personal freedom. … [A]s a result they are usually Protestants. … The Alpine race is always and everywhere a race of peasants. The Alpine is the perfect slave, the ideal serf. …” Brigham’s racial invectives did not stop there. In the following excerpt, he further derides Blacks and also disparages the intellect of Italians and Jewish people.
The army mental tests had proven beyond any scientific doubt that, like the American Negroes, the Italians and the Jews were genetically ineducable. It would be a waste of good money even to attempt to try to give these born morons and imbeciles a good Anglo-Saxon education, let alone admit them into our fine medical, law, and engineering graduate schools.
Carl Brigham, the father of the SAT, the man largely responsible for incalculable hours of toil spent by untold numbers of teens around the world was a patent, unmitigated racist, even by the standards his time. With his fiendish notions and nefarious machinations, this man of influence directly shaped the lives of scores of young people, particularly during the early years of the SAT. Undoubtedly, Brigham’s views on race relations were somehow imbued into the fabric of the test, making parity between whites and Blacks (and poor people of all races) nearly impossible to achieve. Views such as those listed above unquestionably permeated not only the assessment itself, but also the institutions which promote the tests, creating a veritable glass ceiling for non-white people, particularly Blacks, whom Brigham regarded with especial disgust. As it happens, a good deal of Brigham’s seminal research, A Study of American Intelligence, centers on the incapacity of Black people (as was customary at that time, he called Black people Negroes; and, of course, he wrote it with a lowercase “n”). The findings of his study suggest that Blacks besmirch the intellectual landscape and that Europeans, in particular, should be thankful not to face Negro scourge. Brigham wrote the following to that effect:
We must face a possibility of racial admixture here that is infinitely worse than that faced by any European country to-day, for we are incorporating the negro into our racial stock, while all of Europe is comparatively free from this taint.
Supplementally, Brigham said, “… we have the most sinister development in the history of this continent, the importation of the negro.”
Ironically, Brigham took his chauvinist views with him to his post as secretary of the American Psychological Association (APA), the same association that governs style rules of writing for the social sciences. By this time Brigham reportedly changed his racist ideas and understood the supremacist nature of his earlier stances on race relations, but the damage was already done. Brigham, along with his like-minded supporters, thenceforth, adversely affected generations of Americans and created an infrastructure that further widens the social divide between the races.
While the deeply entrenched social challenges that continually plague people of color can be traced back as far as this country’s origins, more recent and equally harmful social phenomenons can be directly attributed to Carl Brigham and his ilk. For instance, it is said that Brigham’s research strongly impacted immigration laws, strengthening restrictions against “undesirables.” With that said, the SAT, with all its fanfare and interest, could rightly stand for Sick And Tired, as in sick and tired of all the systemically embedded racism that haunts US citizens, namely Black people. I do not hate you, Carl Brigham. I pity you.
