Jeannie Shinozuka is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and American Studies & Culture at Washington State University and a 2024-2025 Consortium Research Fellow.
The 2023 United States Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, serves as a reminder of how Asian Americans, as model minorities, have played a central role in shaping affirmative action policies, standardized testing, and eugenic racism. The development of psychologist Lewis Terman’s 1916 Stanford-Binet intelligence test came at a time when people of color were increasingly viewed as problems that must be addressed—including the question of education and its ties to psychology, criminality, and immigration. Much of the literature on intelligence testing has come from psychology, education, and anthropology with little to no analysis about the history of relational racial formations of Asian Americans to other people of color. Rather than compare and contrast the experiences of students of color, Model Minority Intelligence intervenes in the literature in its focus on the role that intelligence testing played in elevating Asian Americans as model minorities while simultaneously positioning other people of color as indolent and criminal. The research project alters previous narratives by arguing that the elevation of Asian American intelligence rest on notions of the putative criminality of other communities of color. The work-in-progress shall answer the following: How did leading psychologists and eugenicists view students of Asian descent in relationship to other students of color? How did they view Filipino Americans, as well as other non-East Asians, such as South Asian students in the United Kingdom? How did intelligence testing as eugenic technology denigrate communities of color in the US and the UK and how did they influence each other? How did Asian Americans and other communities of color respond to intelligence testing, especially in light of eugenic debates about fitness for citizenship? What role did the Stanford-Binet and other early intelligence tests play in the formation of later standardized tests, such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)? Generous funding from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine enabled the completion of necessary archival research at the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, the Wellcome Collection, and Yale University.
First, Model Minority Intelligence shall be the first book-length project on the role intelligence testing played in elevating Asian Americans as models for intelligence. Second, intelligence testing formed the centerpiece of eugenic technology—without it, the military, immigration officials, educators, school administrators, and psychologists struggled to grade and classify examinees. In developing and disseminating intelligence tests, leading psychologists ushered in the age of testing regimes that would shape all major facets of American life beginning in the early twentieth century. The psychologists who devised these intelligence tests, including Terman (Stanford University), Carl Brigham (Princeton University), and Robert Yerkes (Yale University) evidence how those who facilitated its widespread use moved throughout the highest echelons of educational institutions. Third, the intelligence tests engineered and popularized by Terman and other leading psychologists shaped intelligence testing around the world. Rejecting the misleading term pseudoscience, testing regimes centers eugenic ideologies and technologies, where it touched even the most intimate aspects of daily American life and where the most prominent psychologists of their day sat on the board of directors of the American Eugenics Society (AES). Well into the twentieth century, the AES continued to present itself as a socially acceptable organization—unlike the American Eugenics Party, from which it sought to distance itself as an overtly racist and extremist organization.
As indicated earlier, archival materials housed at the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, the Wellcome Collection, and Yale University have fundamentally shaped the project. In the first chapter, Yerkes, a psychologist at Yale University, devised intelligence tests to be used on well over a million army recruits. Yale University houses the papers of Yerkes and his work on testing in the military and immigration, as well as his critic, journalist Walter Lippmann and materials on Irving Fisher, one of the founders of the AES. The papers of Edward Anthony Spitzka at the Huntington Library illustrated how studies of the brain formed the organ that determines one’s intelligence and personality. In Spitzka’s examination of the brains of Native Alaskans, he positioned them as descendants of Mongolians—placing them closer to Asians, including the Chinese who were oftentimes lumped into the legal category “Mongolian.” The rise of intelligence tests on a mass scale transformed Asian Americans from “feebleminded Mongolians” (as evidenced by pamphlets housed at Yale University’s Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library and the papers of Spitzka at the Huntington Library) in the late nineteenth century to “thinking Orientals” within the first half of the twentieth century. Additional archival materials at the Yale Medical Library revealed how in the second half of the nineteenth century a racial narrative about “Negro brains” as ape-like and of lower intelligence emerged—all through visual examination of these brains. They likewise analyzed Chinese or “Mongolian” brains in the same manner, expressing ambivalence about Asian intelligence. Chapter two focuses on California as formative for eugenic psychometric testing, where Terman engineered his 1916 Stanford-Binet intelligence test. The Japanese Association of America, along with at least a few students, including Kwok Tsuen Yeung and Hisakichi Misaki, supported Terman’s efforts to administer intelligence testing to Asian Americans—all in order to end educational segregation and ultimately raise the status of Asian Americans. Chapter three returns to Yerkes with his work on primatology, where he tested apes, chimpanzees, and gorillas in establishing comparative psychology. Yerkes experiments that enabled him to racialize animals just as he animalized African Americans occurred within a larger context of the establishment of the AES in 1920s New Haven, Connecticut. Prominent AES board members, including Terman and Yerkes, sought to normalize eugenics at all societal strata, where Asian Americans consistently occupied a status either just below or equal to white Americans and above Black Americans due to their higher intelligence quotient or IQ (as shown by AES materials at the American Philosophical Society and Yerkes’ papers at Yale University). Yerkes, along with other Yale University professors, Fisher and Ellsworth Huntington, capitalized on their Ivy League connections in their efforts to violently suppress, segregate, and exclude racial minorities. Chapter four rewrites the history of education through the transpacific and transnational impacts of intelligence testing, including Hawai‘i and Great Britain, where eugenics flourished. For example, Stanley Porteus, a psychology professor at the University of Hawai‘i, developed his Porteus-Maze test to be administered on Native Hawaiians, Filipinos, and other non-white residents of Hawai‘i. The conclusion details the lasting impacts of intelligence testing, including Brigham’s intelligence test that formed the precursor to the SATs and the long-term implications of testing. Archival materials from the American Philosophical Society and the Wellcome Collection attest to how the language and concepts about “Negro” and “Mongolian” brains persisted well into the twentieth century even as testing became the sine qua non for measuring one’s IQ and predicting success. An undated AES pamphlet at the APS cited that “[e]ven though some of the negroes have a percentage of Caucasian genes, they still manifest a mental deficiency which is dangerous in society,” echoing the earlier ideologies about anatomic studies of the brain well into the 1960s. The pamphlet argued that the “brain of the negro is 10% smaller” than white Americans, pointing to the presumably smaller frontal lobes and a “less wrinkled” cerebral cortex (meaning that Black brains have “less gray matter”). According to this pamphlet, all of these claims could be supported with the “average negro I.Q.” fifteen to twenty points lower than the average white person. Indeed, lighter-skinned African Americans allegedly fared better on intelligence tests but still scored far lower than white Americans. At the Wellcome Collection, materials from the Leslie Spencer Hearnshaw papers demonstrated the larger international reach of intelligence testing, including “Personnel Selection Tests for Africans” in the mid-twentieth century.
These aforementioned archival materials shall enable the timely completion of the proposed project, and the submission of the book manuscript to a university press. In the coming years, this research will contribute to studies of education, intelligence, and eugenic racism in the US and the UK in a transnational perspective, as well as the centrality of standardized tests in shaping dialogue about immigration, education, socioeconomic mobility, and citizenship.