Kamala Harris and the Unseriousness of the Intelligence Debate in America

As this general election comes to an end, one of the Trump campaign’s closing arguments to voters is that sitting Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris managed to miraculously ascend to the highest heights of American government while being a “very low IQ person” who is incapable of intelligible articulation. To paint Kamala Harris as a lucky simpleton who does not deserve to be near political leadership, people have laughably changed the definition of a word salad to include perfectly intelligible, albeit evasive, political rhetoric. (See my tweets on how people are bastardizing the definition of ‘word salad’.) What is important to note, however, is that discussions of intelligence in the American context have always been unserious and designed for the purpose of making the eugenicist case that nonwhites are unfit to meaningfully contribute to the American project. Only by understanding this history will the current nonsensical attacks on Kamala Harris’ intellect make sense.

The first intelligence tests were created by Alfred Binet in France in the early 20^th century. His purpose for testing intelligence was a laudable one: identifying cognitively challenged children who were underperforming and providing them the help that they needed to succeed. Identifying children who were in need of help made sense because the underlying premise of Binet’s work was that not having the highest intelligence was not a reality that made someone irredeemably destined to fail at life. With more attention, he reasoned, such people could be productive members of society.

Unsurprisingly, the corruption of intelligence testing happened with its importation to the United States. One of the biggest culprits responsible for the corruption of intelligence testing was a eugenicist named H. H. Goddard. Rather than intelligence testing being used to help individuals, as was Binet’s original objective, Goddard thought it would make more sense to use it to identify and exclude inferior groups. As one can expect of a tawdry eugenicist, he predictably came to the finding that whites—which at the time excluded groups such as the Jews, Hungarians, and Italians—were the most intelligent and others were not as bright, and he argued that American immigration should be reflective of this, restricting “feebleminded” people from entering the country via Ellis Island. His work was also significant in criminology because he maintained that low intelligence and criminality were linked. Integral to the work of Goddard was that feeblemindedness was not an ailment that could be improved. This is a position he later reversed, as the scientific dubiousness of his work became undeniably and embarrassingly clear.

As scholar Leila Zenderland writes in her excellent 1998 book, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing:

In using intelligence tests to redefine “feeblemindedness,” Goddard helped make Binet’s name world-renowned and his scale the most widely disseminated psychological product yet invented. During the same decade, Goddard himself also became world famous as a disseminator of the biological ideas of Gregor Mendel, especially as explained by leaders of the eugenics movement. By fusing together Binet’s psychology, Mendel’s biology, and his own sociology, he redefined “intelligence” as a biologically inherited, socially unchangeable, and easily measured entity with profound political implications. In the process, he also helped spark what would become one of the most explosive scientific controversies of the century.

If Binet died too soon to experience fully either the fame or the controversy generated by his invention, Goddard lived long enough to see his own popularity gradually transformed into notoriety, and his science greeted with ridicule instead of respect. In the decades following World War I, numerous American testers found even more uses for Binet’s invention, especially in offering scientific confirmation for nativist, racist, and antisocialist political programs. As eugenic science became more suspect, so too did Goddard’s writings. By the 1920s, the concept of the ‘moron’ had begun to lose its scientific legitimacy, although popular use increased. By 1936, this word had been included in H. L. Mencken’s study The American Language. By the 1940s, ‘little moron’ jokes had become a familiar part of American folk humor. (pp. 348-349)

When one understands that intelligence testing in the United States has always been a fundamentally unserious enterprise that was solely used as a cheap getaway car for white supremacy and eugenics, modern discussions of IQ make more sense because they simply continue this pitiable tradition. There is no other way to understand people in modern political discourse describing prominent black politicians who are observably intelligent as being “low IQ” without reckoning with this history of IQ and eugenics. When a pro-Trump commentator at a rally in New York, for example, referred to Kamala Harris as “a Samoan, Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor,” he was basically trying to point out that not being white essentially means that someone is not intelligent, even if everything about the person’s life points to the direct opposite. It is right out of the American eugenicist playbook.

If shame were still commonplace, unlettered people with no discernible accomplishments would demonstrate some shyness about looking at the highest ranking woman in American political history and publicly claiming that she has a low IQ. Nothing about her background would suggest that she is anything other than very intelligent, and it is clear she comes from a deeply impressive family of staggering intellectuals. She is the daughter of two PhD-holding parents. Her late mother was an endocrinologist. Her father was the first black tenured professor in the history of Stanford University’s Economics department. One just needs to look and count the number of law degrees, PhDs, and professorships held by various members of her family (on both sides). Given the role of genetics in intelligence, Kamala Harris’ success makes perfect sense. The idea that Kamala Harris has a low IQ is just white supremacist phantasmagoria that quite literally has no basis in reality.

When Trump and his supporters refer to Kamala Harris as having a low IQ, what they are trying to say is that people who are not white are inherently stupid. They do not care about evidence to the contrary. It does not matter that Kamala Harris intellectually vivisected Donald Trump for all to see in their one and only debate. It does not matter that Kamala Harris comes from a family with glittering academic and legal credentials. The only thing that matters is the fact that Kamala Harris is not white, and so people who are not intellectually fit to shine her shoes can confidently stand in public and dismissively malign her as a dunce. These are deeply unserious people, just like the eugenicists who came before them.