The Politics of Cerebral Asymmetry and Racial Difference

Split-brain theorizing became the lingua franca of the 1970s and 1980s, with the left hemisphere considered the seat of rationality and language while the right hemisphere housed intuition and creativity. Expert and popular writing on cerebral asymmetry came to be directed to society’s privileged, who were encouraged to expand their right-brain potential with yoga, transcendental meditation, and biofeedback. At the same time, a substantial part of debates among neuropsychologists and related medical, social-scientific, and educational professionals revolved around the implications of such a revaluing of right-hemispheric skills specifically for African American, Latino, and Native American children. A remarkable array of experts began to affirm the existence of racial differences in intelligence while taking up a critique that “right-brained” (and often poor and minority) children were trapped in “left-brained” schools. Declaring IQ to be an inaccurate measure, psychologist Alan S. Kaufman in 1979 developed an influential alternative assessment scale specifically to expand what counted as intelligence and to include a range of creative, nonverbal, spatial, and emotional capacities—only to find that gaps in test scores between white and nonwhite children narrowed accordingly.

Minimal Brain Dysfunction, Ritalin, and Racial Politics

This chapter examines psychologists’ involvement in the 1960s and 1970s in inventing a diagnosis known as “minimal brain dysfunction” (MBD) – a precursor to attention deficit attention disorder (ADHD). Although asserted to be a physiological matter, one best treated with stimulant drugs like methylphenidate (Ritalin), MBD was not based on a clear medical symptom. Quite soon, the modal individual for whom Ritalin became considered the most appropriate treatment was a white and middle-class child. As desegregation was often followed by the new phenomenon of tracking within schools, and as more African American children were labeled as suffering from “mild mental retardation,” the contrasting diagnosis of MBD represented a new disease entity to address the cognitive challenges sometimes faced by privileged children of the predominantly white suburbs. Simultaneously, a growing number of commentators, both African American and anti-racist white, came fiercely to protest what they perceived to be a disturbing tendency to overprescribe stimulant medications to poor children of color.

Neuroscience, Race, and Intelligence after The Bell Curve

After the appearance of The Bell Curve and its (however qualified) reintroduction of the science of biological inheritance – including statistical evidence of a persistent gap in IQ and achievement between African Americans and whites, and an overt critique of federal investments in compensatory programs – efforts to neutralize the book’s impact focused on findings from neuroscience. From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (2000) was an important and pathbreaking document that clarified how nature and nurture were in fact inseparable and that marshaled neuroscientific evidence that the brain of a young child was plastic and amenable to the influences of environment; it argued that the stresses of poverty itself could harm a young brain. From Neurons to Neighborhoods sought strategically to foreground the view that the neurosciences were now critical to any policy discussions of early childhood. The damages done by poverty were certainly real, and these sociological problems could be documented at the somatic level. Meanwhile, right-wing theorists argued for redirecting public funding to “gifted” education.

Plasticity of Intelligence, Education Reform, and the Disadvantaged Child

This chapter takes up the pressure under which preschool enrichment programs like Project Head Start—promoted by President Johnson as signature components of his War on Poverty—found themselves, in needing to demonstrate that they were worthy of investment, rather soon after they had been launched. A most significant turning point came in 1966 with the Equality of Educational Opportunity report (better known as the Coleman Report). Expected to demonstrate that students in segregated schools lagged in IQ scores, the Coleman Report instead had the effect of calling into question the conviction, so essential for advocates of desegregation and early enrichment alike, that children’s brains were malleable and that changing their environments improved their IQs. At the same time, a host of seemingly unrelated psychological theories – e.g. “locus of control”, learned helplessness, the interpersonal expectancy effect (better known as the Pygmalion effect) – got swept into controversies over the potential effectiveness of compensatory education.

Introduction

The Mismeasure of Minds is situated at the intersection of: the history of scientific and social scientific attitudes toward minorities and the poor in the twentieth century, including the history of educational reform; the histories of psychology and the neurosciences; and the history of the transfer and adaptation of theories and the interplay of the behavioral sciences and medicine with culture and politics—with a particular focus on the 1950s through the 1990s. The book explores how psychological theories migrate into popular culture and public policy and attends to the ways in which theories and concepts, both when they have merit and when they are manifestly incoherent, can nonetheless be profoundly consequential – especially for African American children. It argues further that to study race and intelligence between Brown and The Bell Curve tells us a great deal about the vicissitudes of white identity in postwar America, as it documents the extent to which whites of the middle and upper classes were also addressed and engaged in worries over learning difficulties, beliefs about creativity and intuition, and ideas about the benefits of self-discipline and postponement of gratification.

Afterword

In 1905 French physiological psychologist Alfred Binet pioneered a “metrical scale of intelligence,” a practical and easily administered system for establishing a child’s capacity to perform complex mental processes. Binet did not intend his intelligence test—or the score that the test yielded—to be anything more than a method to identify, and thus to assist, children who experienced difficulties with learning. When the concept of IQ arrived on American shores, it rapidly became racialized. That the racialization of mental testing came so powerfully to thrive in the United States was due in no small part, as Stephen Jay Gould has shown, to the growing prestige and influence of the discipline of psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century, the consequences of which live on – however inadvertently – into the twenty-first century

A Racial History of Emotional Intelligence

This chapter examines the idea that self-control and ability to tolerate gratification delay was an essential skill infinitely more important than IQ. By the 1960s, personality psychologist Walter Mischel was testing preschoolers on their ability to resist the temptation of one marshmallow available immediately in the expectation that if they waited they could have two marshmallows subsequently. Mischel saw his marshmallow experiment as having a powerful predictive value, even as others racialized Mischel’s findings in a way that pathologized black youth. By the 1970s, psychologists (like Richard Herrnstein, future coauthor of The Bell Curve) announced that there were correlations between low impulse control, low IQ, and criminal behavior. By the mid-1990s, after the publication of The Bell Curve, Harvard-educated psychologist Daniel Goleman, in his bestseller Emotional Intelligence, argued that self-control—not IQ—was most likely to predict future success. Emotional intelligence was to become a critically important alternative both to the metric of IQ and to the policy recommendations (and biological determinism) advanced in The Bell Curve.