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Robert L Hayman, Jr.

What exactly is intelligence? Is it social achievement? Professional success? Is it common sense? Or the number on an IQ test?
 Interweaving engaging narratives with dramatic case studies, Robert L. Hayman, Jr., has written a history of intelligence that will forever change the way we think about who is smart and who is not. To give weight to his assertion that intelligence is not simply an inherent characteristic but rather one which reflects the interests and predispositions of those doing the measuring, Hayman traces numerous campaigns to classify human intelligence. His tour takes us through the early craniometric movement, eugenics, the development of the IQ, Spearman's "general" intelligence, and more recent works claiming a genetic basis for intelligence differences.
 What Hayman uncovers is the maddening irony of intelligence: that "scientific" efforts to reduce intelligence to a single, ordinal quantity have persisted--and at times captured our cultural imagination--not because of their scientific legitimacy, but because of their longstanding political appeal. The belief in a natural intellectual order was pervasive in "scientific" and "political" thought both at the founding of the Republic and throughout its nineteenth-century Reconstruction. And while we are today formally committed to the notion of equality under the law, our culture retains its central belief in the natural inequality of its members. Consequently, Hayman argues, the promise of a genuine equality can be realized only when the mythology of "intelligence" is debunked--only, that is, when we recognize the decisive role of culture in defining intelligence and creating intelligence differences. Only culture can give meaning to the statement that one person-- or one group--is smarter than another. And only culture can provide our motivation for saying it.
 With a keen wit and a sharp eye, Hayman highlights the inescapable contradictions that arise in a society committed both to liberty and to equality and traces how the resulting tensions manifest themselves in the ways we conceive of identity, community, and merit.

NYU Press

Critical America

The Smart Culture: Society, Intelligence, and Law

Bryan K Fair

The Constitution of the United States, writes Bryan Fair, was a series of compromises between white male propertyholders: Southern planters and Northern merchants. At the heart of their deals was a clear race-conscious intent to place the interests of whites above those of blacks.
 In this provocative and important book, Fair, the eighth of ten children born to a single mother on public assistance in an Ohio ghetto, combines two histories--America's and his own- -to offer a compelling defense of affirmative action. How can it be, Fair asks, that, after hundreds of years of racial apartheid during which whites were granted 100% quotas to almost all professions, we have now convinced ourselves that, after a few decades of remedial affirmative action, the playing field is now level? Centuries of racial caste, he argues, cannot be swept aside in a few short years.
 Fair ambitiously surveys the most common arguments for and against affirmative action. He argues that we must distinguish between America in the pre-Civil Rights Movement era--when the law of the land was explicitly anti-black--and today's affirmative action policies--which are decidedly not anti- white. He concludes that the only just and effective way in which to account for America's racial past and to negotiate current racial quagmires is to embrace a remedial affirmative action that relies neither on quotas nor fiery rhetoric, but one which takes race into account alongside other pertinent factors.
 Championing the model of diversity on which the United States was purportedly founded, Fair serves up a personal and persuasive account of why race-conscious policies are the most effective way to end de facto segregation and eliminate racial caste.
 Table of Contents
 A Note to the Reader 
 Acknowledgments 
 Preface: Telling Stories 
 Recasting Remedies as Diseases 
 Color-Blind Justice 
 The Design of This Book 
 Pt. 1. A Personal Narrative 
 Not White Enough 
 Dee 
 Black Columbus 
 Racial Poverty 
 Man-Child 
 Colored Matters 
 Coded Schools 
 Busing 
 Going Home 
 Equal Opportunity 
 The Character of Color 
 Diversity as One Factor 
 The Deception of Color Blindness 
 Pt. 2. White Privilege and Black Despair: The Origins of Racial Caste in America 
 The Declaration of Inferiority 
 Marginal Americans 
 Inventing American Slavery 
 The Road to Constitutional Caste 
 Losing Second-Class Citizenship 
 Reconstruction and Sacrifice 
 Separate and Unequal 
 The Color Line 
 Critiquing Color Blindness 
 Pt. 3. The Constitutionality of Remedial Affirmative Action 
 The Origins of Remedial Affirmative Action 
 The Court of Last Resort 
 The Invention of Reverse Discrimination 
 The Politics of Affirmative Action: Myth or Reality? 
 Racial Realism 
 Eliminating Caste
 Afterword 
 Notes 
 Index

Notes of a Racial Caste Baby: Color Blindness and the End of Affirmative Action