Lecture Notes
Video Lecture by
Asa G. Hilliard, III
Notes by
Halford H. Fairchild
January 24, 2008
[A
note to myself:
the powerpoint slide show stopped at the first
page of critique of The Bell Curve.]
[Other
notes of the note taker, are in brackets.]
The
talk was entitled, “Either a Paradigm Shift or No Mental Measurement,” and was
an invited paper presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of The American
Psychological Association in
Dr.
Hilliard apologized for reading the text of his paper, but he did so because of
strict time constraints. (At meetings of
the Association of Black Psychologists, time constraints are more flexible, and
I have a tape of Dr. Hilliard that covered two fast-paced hours!)
His
focus was on The Bell Curve: Intelligence
and Class Structure in American Life, the 1994 book authored by Richard J. Herrnstein
and Charles Murray (NY: The Free Press,
a Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.).
He
began with an anecdote of a meeting he attended at the Educational Research
Association, where he sat on a panel that asked the question, “What ever
happened to the measure of intelligence?” He noted that the panel was convened because of
the observation that few sessions at the ERA or APA had focused on IQ testing. Did this indicate a declining interest in
intelligence measurement?
Dr.
Hilliard wished to challenge the view of a declining interest, and suggested
that IQ thinking and testing was “alive and well.”
[A side note by Fairchild: The SAT, GRE, LSAT, etc. are all in the same
vein as so-called IQ tests, and they are very much alive and well, and
multi-billion dollar industries. Yes, billions.]
His
focus in the current talk was on the Herrnstein & Murray book, and he noted
its tremendous popularity, rising to the NY Best Seller list for 10 weeks. The surviving author (Herrnstein died prior to
the book’s publication – I guess God don’t
like ugly), Charles Murray, hit many of the talk shows, including Phil
Donohue and other news magazine shows.
Hilliard
spoke in many venues in critique of The Bell Curve, and found that most
psychologists and/or students in psychology had not actually read the
book. So its popularity stemmed from
non-specialists. Why is this?
Hilliard
noted that the critique of The Bell Curve (The BC) as been on moral and social
justice bases. But these critiques are “uninspired”
and missed the main point. And that is,
the book is not scientifically valid.
It
is not that The BC is morally or politically incorrect, it is not
scientifically correct.
Hilliard
admits that the primary focus of the book is not on race [only one of several
chapters raises these issues of race; but it was the race issue that brought
most of the attention, and controversy]. [According to Fairchild, the book sought to
disguise its racist thrusts with a focus on class issues.]
Hilliard
noted that human problems do not divide themselves in the neat disciplines that
we are used to in higher education (psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.). Human problems present themselves in
wholes. Thus, The
BC’s focus on psychometrics (measurement), particularizes the issue in a way
that does violence to its holistic nature.
Understanding
the phenomenon of human thinking and learning must be approached from more than
the narrow confine of psychometrics or assessment. Psychometrics and assessment are insufficient
to understand the issue of human potential.
[Human
potential is unlimited! Therefore a
sampling of its range—in a test for example—is all but impossible; as a
sampling of infinity is itself infinite.]
Instead,
we must have a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding human potential. We have a need for a ‘paradigm shift.’
But
mental measurement specialists actually restrict the involvement of other
disciplines (e.g., linguistics, anthropology, etc.), claiming intelligence to
be the exclusive purview of psychometricians.
Hilliard
asserts that The BC is not science at all.
It is worse than being non-science; it is non-sense [this latter point I
heard Hilliard mention on other occasions.]
Hilliard
mentions some of the other critiques of mental testing, Leon Kamin, Thomas O. Sillen, Stephen
J. Gould, and others.
The
basic problem with the field of mental measurement is that it is decontextualized. It
ignores culture and politics.
The
scientific validity of The BC can be challenged on the following grounds:
·
Can IQ be validly measured?
·
IQ tests are not universally applicable
·
You cannot infer causation from correlation
·
The BC makes the leap to make political inferences and recommendations
related to crime and delinquency
·
The BC assumes that IQ is stable
·
Presumption that everyone has an equal opportunity to learn the content
of the tests.
Hilliard
promises to expose the eight (8) ‘cracks’ in The Bell Curve.
Before
getting into the specific critiques, he noted that the book was a work of
propaganda, and this is evident by who provided the financial backing for the
project (The Bradley Foundation, a conservative, right-wing think tank that
listed Murray as a Bradley Fellow; the Pioneer Fund, an Aryan group that
supported the highly disputed Minnesota Twin Studies and supported the work of
J. P. Rushton); and the Heritage Foundation (another
conservative ‘think tank’).
[there is a lot of money in
promoting the racist ideology. Note, for example the money that Larry Elder makes – L.E. is the
African American talk show personality who degrades Blacks and promotes
conservative ideologies.]
Hilliard
noted that much of the last part of the book focused on public policy,
demonstrating its propagandistic mission. He noted that IQ does not equal intelligence.
Hilliard
does not doubt the validity of the correlation coefficients presented, and even
if they were 1.0 (explaining 100% of the variance), he would raise the same
critiques.
The
BC makes overly grandiose conclusions based on the very faulty IQ test scores.
The Eight Cracks in The
1. The BC is bad psychology.
It does
not reflect the state-of-the-art in mental measurement. At a
IQ
testing ignores context. And current
research shows that cognitive processes are sensitive to context. Meaning is always context
specific. Tests should take context into
account. As Gabriel Solomon (outgoing
editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology) noted, the decontextualized
nature of IQ testing is invalid.
[SAT
tests, and similar tests, also ignore context.]
There
is, therefore, a greater need for the ecological validity of mental
testing. Learning is social and involves
both intra-individual and inter-individual factors. Learning occurs in, and should be tested in,
its situational context.
Human
potential is a composite of many factors (components). IQ tests are just one such component. (Imagine if NASA tried to fly to the moon just
on mathematics.)
The
BC says nothing at all about contexts. [Therefore,
it violates the canon of controlled observation.]
Once
we admit that context is meaningful, mental measurement will be revolutionized.
There
is no relationship between IQ and problem solving. Give a person a complex, novel problem, and
IQ does not predict performance.
[Similarly,
SAT is a very weak predictor of college grades, and a non-predictor of overall
college success.]
The
BC quotes authors who contribute to the Mankind
Quarterly, a publication that promotes the ideology of White Supremacy. These citations are uncritical. It was the Mankind Quarterly that had Hitlerian representatives, and was bankrolled by
organizations sympathetic to the Nazis and who sought the repatriation of
Blacks to
2. The BC is bad biology and bad anthropology
“Race”
is not scientifically used. The BC
treats race and ethnicity as if they were the same, but ethnicity is clearly a
cultural construct whereas race is clearly a biological one. But there is no construct validity for “ethnicity,”
and no scientific procedure for obtaining an “ethnic” or “racial” sample. There is no operational definition of ‘race.’ No valid criteria for racial definition.
Hilliard
mentions the work of Albert Yee. [Yee
and Fairchild have collaborated on two articles.]
[Racial
comparison studies are invalid, because of the critique that Hilliard raises.]
3. BC is bad pedagogy
The
power of schools to change students is clear.
Hilliard cites the work of Barbara Sizemore in
4. BC ignores inequities in educational
opportunity
It
is clear that schools differ in quality. According to Hilliard, this is the major
determinant of group differences in achievement (and IQ). The entirety of the literature on school
effects was ignored by The BC.
5. The BC is bad cultural linguistics and
cultural anthropology
It
is clear that culture effects language and learning. Culture is the context that must be considered—systematically
and scientifically. Yet, these aspects
of the study of human potential were ignored by The BC.
6. History of Racism in Psychology
Belief
in the ideology of White supremacy is widespread, and is equally widespread in
the field of psychology.
7. IQ testing is bad measurement
Because
of the flaws in IQ testing (its decontextualized
unidimensionality), the reliance on IQ tests makes
for bad science.
[According
to Fairchild, the BC didn’t use IQ tests at all, which makes the situation even
worse.]
8. The BC is bad genetics
True
geneticists laugh at the ‘genetics’ in The BC. The way that The BC uses genetic concepts, and
the concept of heritability, is laughable.
Their use of genetics does not reflect ‘state-of-the-art.’ Instead, The BC
cites people like J. Phillippe Rushton,
a scientific charlatan (whose ideas of racial differences is repugnant, and
whose methods includes asking men in shopping malls the distance of their
ejaculation.)
[Rushton ties his scientific racism to very questionable
notions of reproductive strategies. See
my article linked on this date.]
Rushton suggests that IQ and size of genitalia are inversely related.
Conclusion
The
BC is not bad science, it is not science at all. At best, it is political opportunism. It is superstition. It is part of a worldwide propaganda campaign
to promote the ideology of White supremacy (the flip side of which is the
ideology of Black inferiority).