SOURCE: "Testing, The Bell Curve, and the Social Construction of Intelligence," in Tikkun, Vol. 10, No. 1, January-February, 1995, pp. 22-7.

[Hanson, an American educator and critic, is the author of Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life (1993). In the following essay, he faults The Bell Curve for arguing that intelligence testing is an accurate and valid measurement of human intelligence.]

At some gut level, many middle- and upper-class white Americans apparently harbor the conviction that they are more intelligent than people of the lower class and ethnic minorities (especially of African descent). While its obviously racist and anti-democratic connotations are sufficient to keep this attitude under wraps most of the time, periodically works grounded in psychometrics (the branch of psychology devoted to measuring differences among people) encourage this sentiment to re-emerge with an apparent mantle of scientific respectability. The most notorious of several recent eruptions has been sparked by...