Abstract
Michael E. Staub’s The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence between Brown and The Bell Curve is a much-needed exposé of the production of race science in the late twentieth century. Though much has been written about the production of racial knowledge at this time, and about scientific discourses in particular, there is still so much scholars have overlooked for one very important reason. Those who study scientific racism normally begin with discourses of race themselves, bridging outward to related material that may or may not directly deal with race. Staub takes a different tack. He looks at the emerging science marshaled in public policy debates, mostly to do with education funding. This science often purports to prove the basis for innate differences in humans, often without addressing population differences of any kind. However, as Staub cogently demonstrates, these novel metrics (or “mismeasures,” as he shows) fuel racist ideas and serve as the foundation for racist policy.
The Mismeasure of Minds cleverly asks: what happened between, and more specifically how did we get from, the momentous Brown v. Board of Education decision to the publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life? This is a question many sociologists of all backgrounds have asked themselves, and it is one we are currently asking ourselves as we experience the backlash against what seemed like substantial and permanent political progress around race. With in-depth analysis of scientific and public policy disputes, Staub instructs us that progress is a pipe dream. What’s more, coherent positions are an illusion. Discourses are mobilized in complex and contradictory ways by so many people acting in equally complex and contradictory ways. They entwine with meaning around race in unexpected ways that perpetuate the overwhelming status quo of racist social structuration. If scholars and policy-makers once believed that Word War II marked a great awakening in racial consciousness for Americans, buoyed by the common belief that Nazi science was dead wrong and America would eradicate apartheid in its midst, this book sounds a wake-up call. A single court decision is no match for four hundred years of white supremacy. Racism is the foundation of American society, no less than when legislators first attempted desegregation.
The Mismeasure of Minds is titled as such because, like Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, it critically examines emerging brain science from a time when equality and progress narratives abounded. Staub reveals that, as early as the very first court appeals to Brown v. Board of Education, litigants hung their cases on IQ research. Those appealing Brown proclaimed the very notion argued in The Bell Curve that colorblind IQ research proved that public policy could not solve the innate inequities found in the brains of different racial groups. According to the argument, no amount of social engineering would ever change the pervasive need for separate educational, work, and living facilities. Those arguing to uphold Brown also called on IQ research, and later brain science, as proof positive of the need for integration. Of course, there was a great deal of outright racist psychology that was not only read in scholarly circles but was also popularly consumed during this time. But it didn’t take racist science to continue the practice of using science of the mind to decide on policy. Those on all sides believed that it had the final say.
Staub’s fundamental argument, one that has been important to assessing emerging racial science in the twenty-first century as well, is that we should not ask science of the mind to adjudicate. The brain science he covers in The Mismeasure of Minds has been overturned by contemporary approaches and findings. So just on the basis of that, it is a poor measure for innate similarities or differences. But even if the science had held up through the years, it would still be a poor measure, given that it does not tell us anything about social factors of inequality. It says nothing about institutionalized racism, prejudice, discrimination, ghettoization, incarceration, and the many social processes at the base of our racist social order. These are what must be measured when determining public policy, and they are best measured by sociological research methodologies.
Sadly, Brown itself rested on this very mismeasure, holding that the trouble with segregation was psychological in nature. Brown’s proponents argued that blacks suffered undue emotional stress from segregation. Though this was not an argument of innate differences, it fed easily into the belief that the stakes of inequality were found in our minds, not in our surroundings. It paved the way for debates squarely located in the realm of brain science.
The Mismeasure of Minds takes us from Nixon’s attempt to dismantle Head Start programs to attention deficit disorder disputes and on to left brain/right brain science and emotional intelligence or “EQ” debates. It shows two important patterns. First, no matter where we look in time, in the span of policy struggles, there is an enduring tension between the notions of neuroplasticity and innate immutability. This tension is found within individual scientific discourses or political arguments just as much as it is found on varying sides of debate. Second, though race, as Staub puts it, comes in and out of focus, it is always already a part of each advance in both science and policy. So when some speak of the middle-class child or suburban youth, they are coding race. The measurement of intelligence and its deployment in argumentation, as an explanans, is racialized plain and simple.
The gift of this volume is the rich coverage of debates and debating forces, and of the many different interests and interpretations of those who fueled the ongoing struggle to determine education policy. At times it was dizzying how recursive the debates were. I would have liked the story to have been more chronological everywhere. But alas that would not be true to the complexity of it all.