By Hannah Bachman
As a person who processes differently, I have often considered the question: who gets to decide what intelligence is? For most of modern history, the answer has been people with power, and the definitions they built have rewarded the ways they already think, speak, and learn. Once that narrow standard becomes universal, everyone else is judged by a measure never designed to recognize them. The myth of race and intelligence depends on that imbalance. This essay traces how the myth formed, how it persists, and what it hides about the range of human ability.
The Myth of Race and Intelligence
If you begin with that “who decides?” question, the history looks different. The story is not only that some scientists were wrong. Rather, it is that intelligence was turned into a political tool. Capacities were defined narrowly, measured through biased systems, then used to explain inequality as natural. Race based intelligence theories did not emerge in a vacuum. They emerged in empires, slave societies, and segregated nations that needed a way to justify what they were doing.
Starting from the present makes the stakes clearer. Human intelligence is not one thing. It is not a single ladder, and it is not owned by any group. It shows up in creativity, caretaking, problem solving, social navigation, improvisation, artistry, and resilience. It shows up in classrooms and far outside them. Yet most institutions still treat intelligence as if it has one correct shape; they still reward the people whose lives match that shape. This is why myths about race and capability keep resurfacing, even after the science behind it has collapsed.
Many Ways of Being Smart
Standardized test scores and IQ scales measure a very specific kind of performance. They focus on certain types of language, logic, memory, and speed that tend to align with formal schooling and middle class cultural norms. That is a narrow slice of what intelligence looks like in real life.
There are forms of intelligence that do not fit into a timed exam. Emotional precision, the ability to read risk, the skill of mediating conflict, bilingual thinking, creative invention under pressure, community leadership, and practical problem solving all matter. Many marginalized communities cultivate these capacities because survival often demands them. Yet these skills are rarely recognized as evidence of intelligence in schools, hiring systems, or policy debates.
This gap has consequences. When intelligence is defined and measured through one cultural lens, people outside that lens are treated as deficient. The label becomes a verdict instead of a description. The result is a system that confuses access with ability and then calls that confusion merit.
What Contemporary Science Actually Shows
Modern genetics and neuroscience make race-based intelligence claims hard to defend. Human genetic variation does not divide neatly into the categories we call race. The Human Genome Project showed that humans are about 99.9 percent genetically identical and that race is a social category rather than a biological border. (Duello et al. 232–34)
Research on cognition also points to complexity. Intelligence reflects many genes with small effects interacting with environment across a lifetime. The influence of genes depends on context. Nutrition, exposure to toxins, early childhood stress, school funding, neighborhood safety, and access to healthcare shape how well people learn and perform. These conditions vary across societies because of policy and history, not because of biology. (Nisbett)
Neuroscience reinforces this view. The brain is plastic. Its pathways develop through experience. Cognitive abilities can strengthen or weaken depending on opportunity and stress. (Nisbett) This does not mean genes do nothing. It means genes do not create destiny in isolation, and they do not map onto race.
Work by Richard Nisbett and others shows that cognitive outcomes improve with high quality early childhood education, stable housing, strong schools, and family support. These effects are especially visible for children growing up in poverty or under racialized disadvantage. Claude Steele’s research on stereotype threat adds another layer. When people are reminded of a negative stereotype about their group before a test, their performance can drop. The same person, with the same ability, can score differently depending on psychological climate. That is not a minor detail. It is evidence that scores are social products as much as individual traits.
Claude Steele’s research on stereotype threat adds another layer. When Black students are placed in situations where race is made salient or a test is framed as diagnostic of ability, performance can drop even when underlying skill is held constant. (Steele and Aronson)
Why Biological Determinism Keeps Returning
Given this evidence, why do race and intelligence narratives still show up? Part of the answer is political convenience. Biological determinism shifts responsibility away from institutions. If racial gaps in achievement are genetic, then unequal school funding, hostile tracking systems, segregated housing, environmental racism, and biased discipline can be treated as background noise. Inequality looks natural instead of engineered.
This logic is harmful in practice. It reduces support for policies that expand opportunity because it frames those policies as pointless. It turns structural failure into personal blame. It also makes it easier to tolerate injustice. If some groups are seen as naturally less capable, their exclusion can be described as unfortunate rather than unacceptable.
The Late Twentieth Century Revival: The Bell Curve
The most visible modern revival of race based intelligence claims came with The Bell Curve in 1994. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued that intelligence is largely hereditary, that racial groups differ in average IQ, and that these differences help explain patterns in poverty, crime, and schooling. (Herrnstein and Murray) They suggested that social programs cannot do much to change outcomes because they cannot overcome what they called cognitive stratification.
The book was framed as neutral data analysis. It was not. Scholars including Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Nisbett criticized its methods, its selective citation, and its near silence on structural racism and environmental inequality. (Gould; Nisbett) Many of the gaps it treated as genetic emerge from uneven schooling, economic exclusion, neighborhood violence, health disparities, and long histories of segregation.
Still, The Bell Curve mattered because it supplied a modern sounding cover for an old idea. It presented inequality as biological and therefore inevitable. Its arguments were used to attack affirmative action, desegregation, and social welfare programs. (Gould) If intelligence is fixed and racialized, then supporting marginalized communities becomes charity instead of justice. The book’s influence shows how easily pseudoscientific narratives can travel when they align with existing power.
IQ Testing and the Sorting of People
To understand how a book like The Bell Curve could feel plausible to so many readers, you have to look at how intelligence testing developed. Alfred Binet designed the first IQ tests in early twentieth century France to identify children who needed extra support. He insisted that intelligence was not fixed and warned against using tests as permanent labels. (Carr)
When Binet’s work reached the United States, it was repurposed. Lewis Terman standardized the test into the Stanford Binet scale and treated IQ as a stable trait useful for ranking students. IQ tests were given to soldiers in World War I and to immigrants at Ellis Island, often in English and under conditions that guaranteed cultural and language bias. The results produced score gaps across ethnic groups, which were quickly read as evidence of inherent inferiority rather than unequal opportunity. (Gould; “Birth of American Intelligence Testing”)
These tests then shaped schooling. Black children and many immigrant students were disproportionately placed into low academic tracks or special education. Once placed there, they had fewer resources, weaker curricula, and lower expectations, which further depressed outcomes. (Gould) The tests did not simply measure difference. They helped create it.
Arthur Jensen’s late 1960s claim that racial IQ gaps were mostly genetic poured fuel on this system (Jensen). Even after strong scientific critique, his work helped normalize the idea that unequal scores meant unequal worth. This logic survives today in how some people talk about “achievement gaps” without naming the structures producing them. (Jensen)
The Deep Roots: Colonial Race Science
The test culture of the twentieth century was built on older foundations. The idea of sorting intelligence by race took shape during European colonial expansion and the slave trade, when ruling powers needed moral cover.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach classified humans into five races and placed Caucasians at the top. Samuel Morton collected skulls, measured cranial capacity, then claimed that larger skulls meant higher intelligence. (Morton 1–14) His conclusions put white Europeans above Black and Indigenous peoples. Later critics showed that Morton manipulated data to match his expectations. (Gould) Yet his work gained prestige and helped cement scientific racism as common sense.
These early theories also fed other pseudosciences such as phrenology, which claimed that moral character could be read from skull shape. The details were different. The goal was the same. Turn hierarchy into nature. Once that move was made, colonization and slavery could be described as the inevitable outcome of human biology.
Eugenics as Policy
Francis Galton transformed these ideas into a social program. He coined “eugenics” and argued that intelligence and worth were inherited. Society, he thought, should encourage “fit” people to reproduce and discourage “unfit” people from doing so. In practice, “fit” usually meant white, wealthy, and educated, while “unfit” covered the poor, disabled, nonwhite populations, and many immigrants. (Gould)
In the United States, eugenics became law. States passed sterilization statutes and forcibly sterilized people labeled mentally inferior. More than 60,000 people were sterilized, overwhelmingly from marginalized groups. (Kaelber; Stern) Eugenic logic also shaped immigration restriction in the 1920s. The Immigration Act of 1924 reflected claims that certain national and racial groups were genetically inferior and threatened the national future. (Kaelber)
In Europe, eugenic beliefs helped drive Nazi policies that culminated in genocide. (Kaelber) The Holocaust was not a break from eugenics. It was eugenics taken to its extreme. This history makes clear that race and intelligence theories were never harmless abstractions. They were built to govern bodies and control futures.
What a Wider Definition Makes Possible
Seen together, this history reveals a pattern. Intelligence is defined narrowly by dominant institutions. That narrow standard is treated as universal. The groups who match it succeed, while those excluded by it are described as lacking. Science then arrives to measure the gap, and power uses the measurement to claim the gap is natural.
Breaking this cycle requires two shifts. First, we have to recognize intelligence as multiple, contextual, and shaped by conditions. Second, we have to treat unequal outcomes as evidence of unequal structures, not unequal humanity.
When people grow up with safe housing, nourishing food, stable healthcare, and well funded schools, their cognitive capacities develop in ways tests are designed to reward. When people grow up in stressed neighborhoods, under resourced schools, and environments saturated with discrimination, their performance reflects those burdens. The difference points to policy, not race.
Conclusion
The myth of race and intelligence survives because it has always served an unequal socio-political purpose. It has justified conquest, slavery, segregation, and unequal schools. It has offered an excuse not to fix broken systems. Even when explicit race science collapses, the logic lingers in new language.
Modern research rejects the biological basis of race and shows how deeply cognitive outcomes depend on environment and experience. Critical and liberation oriented theories explain why those environments differ, and why the myth keeps returning.
If intelligence is not one narrow trait owned by any group, then our obligations shift. We are responsible for building institutions that recognize many forms of intelligence and nurture them. The real question is not which race is smarter. It is whether we are willing to create a world where every kind of human ability has room to grow.
Works Cited
Carr, Sarah. “Even the ‘Father of IQ Tests’ Thought the Results Weren’t Written in Stone.” The Hechinger Report, 18 Apr. 2024, https://hechingerreport.org/reporters-notebook-even-the-father-of-iq-tests-thought-the-results-werent-written-in-stone/. University of Vermont
Cohen, Miriam. “This Jigsaw Puzzle Was Given to Ellis Island Immigrants to Test Their Intelligence.” Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Mar. 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/puzzle-given-ellis-island-immigrants-test-intelligence-180962779/.
Duello, Theresa M., et al. “Race and Genetics versus ‘Race’ in Genetics: A Systematic Review of the Use of African Ancestry in Genetic Studies.” Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, vol. 9, no. 1, 2021, pp. 232–245. Oxford Academic, https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoab018. OUP Academic+1
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Rev. ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. W. W. Norton & Company, https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Mismeasure-of-Man/.
Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Free Press, 1994. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=JBA3MQEACAAJ.
Jensen, Arthur R. “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 1969, pp. 1–123. Harvard Educational Review, https://www.harvardeducationalreview.org/content/39/1/1. Semantic Scholar
Kaelber, Lutz. “Eugenics: Compulsory Sterilization in 50 American States.” University of Vermont, 2012, https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/. University of Vermont
Morton, Samuel George. Crania Americana: Or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America. J. Dobson, 1839. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections, https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-60411930R-bk. Reason.com
Nisbett, Richard E. Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. W. W. Norton & Company, https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393065053.
“The Birth of American Intelligence Testing.” Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association, Jan. 2009, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment. American Psychological Association
Steele, Claude M., and Joshua Aronson. “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 69, no. 5, 1995, pp. 797–811. Stanford SPARQ, https://sparq.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj19021/files/media/file/steele_aronson_1995_-_stereotype_threat_the_intellectual_test_performance_of_african_americans.pdf. SCIRP
Stern, Alexandra Minna. “Eugenics and Sterilization in the United States: Patterns, Experiences, and Legacies.” National Human Genome Research Institute Symposium, 2021, https://www.genome.gov/sites/default/files/media/files/2021-12/NHGRI_History_of_Eugenics_Symposium-Stern.pdf. Semantic Scholar
Shapiro, Ester R., Edil Torres Rivera, and Lillian Comas-Díaz, editors. Liberation Psychology: Theory, Method, Practice, and Social Justice. American Psychological Association, 2020. APA, https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/liberation-psychology-sample-chapter.pdf.
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