Modern society shows acceptance for a much broader cultural diversity in the mainstream media. It seems cliché these days to claim that no one is really normal. Unfortunately, the standards for inclusion which would allow more people to have the basics of food, clothing, shelter, and health care are not increasing nearly as much as the media portrayal of our acceptance of cultural diversity encourages people to believe.
The standards for normal in terms of mental health and intelligence continue to exclude and demean a large part of the population. In the United States, the standards for who is mentally ill is lowering and the standards for who is intelligent is rising.
The best examples of this is the increasing number of diagnoses in the DSM, the failure of standardized testing with the No Child Left Behind Act, and the social dynamics described as the school to prison pipeline.
The myth which is encouraged by people claiming to be bettering the human race with eugenic ideals (or ones that have traditionally led to eugenics) is that their standards are actually attainable. The people who were held in high regard as examples of what everyone should aspire to are too often not closely examined or questioned at all.
In the same way that those who are held as shining examples of what we should all strive to become are not nearly as much better (if at all)than the rest of us as eugenics promoters encourage us to believe, those who are described as unworthy of education, training, and other opportunities are not nearly as bad.
Defining developmental disabilities such as autism in such demeaning ways is the result of age-appropriate standards and the myth of the intelligence quotient.
In order to promote eugenics the names Juke and Kallikak were used to describe two families that were unfit in character, lacked intelligence, and had anti-social behavior. As uncomfortable as it is for people to think about how these things are combined by the decision-makers defining fit versus unfit, everyone who is labeled in one of these is seen by many people as having the other attributes as well.
As Wikipedia describes in Family studies and eugenics about the Jukes and the Kallikaks:
"The Jukes and the Kallikaks were pseudonyms for two families used as examples during the latter 19th century and early 20th century to argue that there was a genetic disposition toward anti-social behavior or low intelligence. The arguments were used to bolster advocacy of eugenics, or the pseudo-scientific breeding of human beings, by demonstrating that traits deemed socially inferior could be passed down from generation to generation.
As a general concept the Jukes Family represented inherited criminality and the Kallikak Family inherited mental retardation."
It also says:
"In the early 1950s these studies were presented in sociology and psychology textbooks in such a manner as to leave the student or reader with the distinct impression that families with these names actually existed.[citation needed] That impression was fortified by the oft used reference to many descendants of "the original six Juke sisters". These same text books also characterized homosexuality as a mental illness."
In this article THE EUGENIC ORIGINS OF IQ TESTING:IMPLICATIONS FOR POST-ATKINS LITIGATION it says:
(Note: I removed the reference numbers from these quotes for easier reading)
"Throughout the early 1900s, eugenicists labored to devise objective
methods of measuring and quantifying valued traits, including intelligence,
in order to substantiate their hypothesis of Nordic genetic advantage.
Some of their more preposterous experiments involved measuring the crania of school children,analyzing the facial asymmetry of criminals, and sketching the toes of prostitutes. Eugenicists struggled for years to produce compelling results, until the advent of Alfred Binet’s intelligence scale in 1909 gave rise to standardized intelligence testing, colloquially known as IQ testing.
Armed with this so-called objective methodology,American
eugenicists advanced a straw-man rationale for large-scale testing.
They reasoned that society needed to identify, segregate, and sterilize
the “feeble-minded,” initially defined as those with mental disabilities
but later extended to include any “unfit” person of low intelligence,
character, or ethnicity. In both Germany and the United
States, persecution of the “feebleminded” hastened a broader eugenic
campaign against immigration, miscegenation, and other professed
threats to Nordic ascendancy."
It also says:
As suggested above, the IQ test played a central role in the eugenics movement as a shibboleth designed to reaffirm Nordic supremacy and stratify the populace along ethnic, racial, and class lines.
AND
"Alfred Binet’s intelligence scale, a prototype for the Stanford-Binet IQ test,was developed with the sole purpose of identifying French children with developmental disabilities so that they could receive extra help in school.Binet’s scale assigned children a mental age based on a comparison of their skills with those of “normally functioning” children.Binet explicitly warned against dangerous and unsupportable extrapolation of his work, such as using his tests to peg normal children and adults on a single, linear scale of immutable intelligence. Notable American eugenicist, Henry H. Goddard, eager to catalog Americans along just such a scale, promptly ignored Binet’s warnings, translated the tests into English, and pushed for their widespread use.
Known as the father of intelligence testing in the United States, Goddard used a perversion of Binet’s intelligence scale to rank those he considered feebleminded into varying degrees of mental incompetence: idiots (pre-verbal), imbeciles (illiterate), and morons (highfunctioning). For Goddard, morons, or those with mental ages of eight through twelve,posed the gravest eugenic threat because of the ease with which they could pass for normal and reproduce. Goddard found morons wherever he looked: criminals, alcoholics, prostitutes, and anyone “incapable of adapting themselves to their environment and living up to the conventions of society or acting sensibly.” Most immigrants also fit this classification."
And this is important:
Moreover, the U.S. Army’s use of the test during World War I sanctioned intelligence testing in other areas,spawning a battery of standardized tests still used today, including the Scholastic Aptitude Test and related aptitude tests.
And this is also very important to show how education is used as an exclusionary tool:
These tests were used to justify the denial of admission of non-elites into institutions, mainly of higher education, despite these institutions’ purported commitment to economic mobility.
and that last part of the sentence again: "despite these institutions’ purported commitment to economic mobility."
AND
But, in our fake meritocracy, intelligence tests serve only as predictive
measures of achievement (aptitude for success within the status quo) or as measures of oppression and social disadvantage. By exploiting persons with mental retardation, American eugenicists effectively turned a simple test designed to help French school children into a macabre sorting experiment meant to wipe out whole classes of human beings. Their fellow eugenicists in Germany devoured every morsel of bogus data gathered from the Army’s intelligence testing and took the eugenics movement to its terrifying, if
logical, next step.
HERE'S THE INFUENCE OF THESE TEST:
"Moreover, Yerkes’s team of eugenicists laid the groundwork for certain assumptions that are made today about intelligence and intelligence tests: (1) intelligence is static; (2) it can be precisely measured; (3) it is possible to design a testing instrument capable of peeling back layers of political and socioeconomic shrouding to reveal a true essence of intelligence; (4) this essential intelligence can be expressed with a single number or with several numbers; and (5) the purpose of unmasking this essential intelligence is to allow society to identify and promote the best and brightest among us."
It can't be done and that's not what the test do!
I would hope that having a better understanding of how history has shaped our unreasonable view of the ridiculously broad diversity of human worth with these oppressive standardized tests would help us learn how we can encourage more people by accepting them. Neither our uniqueness nor our similarities can be measured in such strict terms. The emotions we attach to what we see as valuable in other people are too often decided by typical social standards that were designed to divide us from each other and create hostility between us.
We as the human species can't afford these judgments. This encourages dramatic misunderstandings from the chaotic emotions within us based on unrealistic expectations. These expectations include the ways people relate to us and how well they relate to us. The ways we encourage falsely constructed hierarchies of human worth is part of how we as individuals separate ourselves from the quality of our own uniqueness and creativity.
Comments