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In 1914, Howard Knox, an assistant surgeon with the U.S. Public Health Service, explained how intelligence testing was helping to prevent the "contamination of our racial stock by turning back feeble-minded immigrants." At Ellis Island, Knox classified migrants according to a scale that included terms like idiot, imbecile, feeble-minded, and moron, based on the examined person's "mental age" and calculated using tests made by the French psychologist Alfred Binet (precursors to IQ testing). Those who scored too low were deported. Knox reported that a seventeen-year-old girl was expelled for failing to say the date and recite the days of the week backwards. According to Knox, such cruel gatekeeping was necessary: the United States "is as it is simply because it has been improved by men from prosperous northern European countries, which countries were prosperous simply because of the type of men who inhabited them."1
The quest to pin down intelligence has always served imperial and capitalist institutions by producing such hierarchies of human worth. Appeals to "intelligence" have sanctioned the sterilization, murder, and incarceration of those society deems disposable, notably the poor and non-white.2 But disposability was also shaped by the need for labor. Knox, for example, included "performance" tasks in his testing-such as stacking cubes in specific arrangements-which he emphasized could indicate qualities like "motor finesse" and flag those who were "incapable of consistent efficient work."
These notions of intelligence rest on racialism: a way of seeing the world through difference, along axes such as religion, nation, race, and reproductive and physical abilities. Racialism, as Cedric Robinson has argued, "ran deep in the bowels of Western culture," and capitalism thus developed in an already racialized world.3 Capitalism exploits difference to generate profits and in the process violently produces more difference. "Intelligence" provides another axis of difference, another way to sustain the loop of racial capitalism.
Regimes of racial intelligence change over time. The overtly eugenic regime was superseded by a regime of standardized testing, which used a more sanitized language of aptitude or ability, and later, merit. Today's standardized testing regime is presented as a tool for reducing social bias and increasing the diversity of institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light a reconfigured regime of racial intelligence, appearing under the banner of...