Two pretty good articles surrounding the history, and current use of, IQ tests.
[Despite my quotes both articles do also highlight the potential good of IQ tests as well - I'm just bringing out some of the stuff relevant to the
current "debate".]
The IQ test wars: why screening for intelligence is still so controversial
Quote:
But in their darkest moments, IQ tests became a powerful way to exclude and control marginalised communities using empirical and scientific language. Supporters of eugenic ideologies in the 1900s used IQ tests to identify “idiots”, “imbeciles”, and the “feebleminded”. These were people, eugenicists argued, who threatened to dilute the White Anglo-Saxon genetic stock of America.
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As a result of such eugenic arguments, many American citizens were later sterilised. In 1927, an infamous ruling by the US Supreme Court legalised forced sterilisation of citizens with developmental disabilities and the “feebleminded,” who were frequently identified by their low IQ scores.
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Those in the US who were forcibly sterilised in the aftermath of Buck v Bell were disproportionately poor or of colour.
Compulsory sterilisation in the US on the basis of IQ, criminality, or sexual deviance continued formally until the mid 1970s...
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Intelligence: A History
Quote:
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Sometimes, this sort of ranking is sensible: we want doctors, engineers and rulers who are not stupid. But it has a dark side. As well as determining what a person can do, their intelligence – or putative lack of it – has been used to decide what others can do to them. Throughout Western history, those deemed less intelligent have, as a consequence of that judgment, been colonised, enslaved, sterilised and murdered (and indeed eaten, if we include non-human animals in our reckoning).
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