Are black people stupid?
In a room full of reading materials—notes, documents, books, newspapers—Barbara and her mother are empty-handed and never glance at a piece of paper. Neither Barbara nor her mother knows how to read.
Eventually the other children did find out, and they started calling Barbara “dummy” and “retardo,” and someone—apparently another child—explained to her that she was in the “dummy room.” Barbara came home crying one day and said to her mother, “Why did you do this to me?”
But if Barbara is stupid, so are a lot of other black people. All black people score 12 to 15 points lower on IQ tests than all white people do. Even middle-class black people. Not just IQ tests, either. Black people have trouble with all major tests. Personnel tests. College boards. Law school admission tests. Scholastic aptitude tests. You name it; they flunk it more than white people do.
Nobody here is willing to say it, he said. But I am. Maybe black people are stupid.
In the 1920s, the first IQ test in English, the Standford-Binet, was administered for the first time to large numbers of Americans, World War I draftees. Blacks scored lower than whites. Poor people scored lower than rich people. Rural people scored lower than urban people. Urban blacks scored higher than rural whites from some states. People from families that had only been in the United States for a few generations did less well on the test than people whose families had been in the U.S. many generations, and recent immigrants were found to be “feebleminded” at an alarming rate. But scientists of the day explained all of this by means of genetics.
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Even when told that it must desegregate, the school system has refused. Last September, HEW rejected Hannon’s “desegregation plan”—called, with the school system’s usual attention to euphemism, Access to Excellence. HEW said Hannon’s figures for the number of children who would be desegregated under the plan were “significantly inflated,” but the agency’s language was as understated as the school bureaucracy’s typically is excessive. Among other maneuvers, Hannon had labeled desegregated schools that are 80 to 90 percent white—in districts that are only 20 percent white. He claimed to be placing thousands of children in “desegregated settings.” But in thousands of cases, this meant sending a black child one afternoon a week to a museum or a zoo. The city’s pet newspapers reacted to the HEW letter to Hannon by attacking HEW.
