Racializing smartness

When teaching about smartness on a predominantly white campus, I ask my students to tell me what a ‘smart’ person looks, talks, and acts like. I encourage them to use stereotypes. I want them to see how we assign ‘smartness’ to people through behaviors and artifacts such as clothing, books, or eye glasses, which are all a part of performing smartness. Overwhelmingly, the students typically describe the person as wearing glasses, dressing in a suit, reading the Wall Street Journal, and listening to classical music such as Bach or Mozart. Additionally, the person almost always speaks using so-called ‘proper’ English and ‘big’ words. We then discuss how race/ethnicity, gender, and class play into these descriptions and the schema they hold in their minds. Slowly, they begin to see how smartness is overwhelmingly framed in the image of a white, wealthy man. They begin to see smartness as a cultural trope in the US that is embedded in whiteness and patriarchy – that notions of smartness and ability cannot be separated from identity politics.

Within this special issue, our purpose is make explicit the ways smartness is constituted within cultural identities and, in doing so, counter the taken for granted connections between whiteness and smartness. In 1995, a similar special issue was conducted in The Journal of Negro Education titled, ‘Myths and Realities: African Americans and the Measurement of Human Abilities’ by John Stanfield and Rutledge Dennis. They state in their introduction to the special issue,

The reluctance, if not outright refusal, of American publics to believe that it is possible for blacks to be the intellectual equals or superiors of whites is very much the reason behind the creation and reproduction of the low status of blacks in the United States

(Stanfield and Dennis 1995, 215). Vera, Feagin, and Gordon (1995) discuss the role of sincere fictions in white identity development as a way to remain oblivious to white privilege and patterns of racism in society. They name ‘the superior intellect of whites’ as one of the key ‘sincere fictions’ operating in society to reinscribe white superiority. These sincere fictions become a part of white identity and work to maintain the invisibility of whiteness. Gillborn (2005) states, ‘One of the key points about whiteness as a performatively constituted identity is that those who are implicated in whiteness rarely even realize its existence – let alone their own role in its repeated iteration and re-signification’ (9). In the spirit of critical race theory, this special issue seeks to build upon the work of Stanfield and Dennis by providing counter stories to the ways smartness and white supremacy have been interwoven and, in doing so, aim to disrupt these sincere fictions.

The authors in this special issue do so by racializing smartness, which means using race, culture, and identity as lenses to challenge the terms ‘smart’ and ‘educated’ along with their power laden meanings embedded in white superiority. The ultimate goal is to create a new body of scholarship that challenges dominant definitions of smartness and, instead, centers definitions and understandings that are typically marginalized within school settings. The rest of the introduction will provide a brief overview of the ways smartness came to be a key aspect of white superiority and institutionalized through schooling processes followed by a brief description of the articles and their key tenets.

Historicizing race and smartness

Historically, whiteness and smartness have been closely linked in the US (Leonardo and Broderick 2011; Skiba 2012). According to Skiba (2012), the brutality of the slave trade created dissonance for colonists who upheld Christian principals such as ‘love thy neighbor.’ Skiba (2012) states, ‘Such levels of oppression could be justified in a Christian society only to the extent that those who were enslaved were seen as less than fully human’ (4). Furthermore, this justification necessarily had to be framed as ‘natural’ and ‘unchangeable.’ The framing of blacks as ‘less than human’ has included two main discourses historically: religious and scientific. Religious claims were the most common until the eighteenth century when the Enlightenment period began to emphasize logic and science. During the nineteenth century, ‘anthropometric measurements were made of virtually all parts of the human anatomy in an attempt to ground a racial hierarchy in physiological difference,’ (Skiba 2012, 9). In particular, these physiological differences were used to make claims about the supposed intellectual superiority of whites and to justify the dehumanization of people of color.

The idea of smartness or intellectual ability as something that could be measured and used to compare people originated during the period of reconstruction and white backlash against gains made by freed slaves in the late nineteenth century (Gould 1996). Claims of the ‘natural’ intellectual superiority of whites were used in Plessy v. Ferguson to justify racial segregation and the withdrawal of previously won rights (Skiba 2012). Early intelligence tests included measuring head circumference and were used to ‘prove’ the intellectual superiority of white males (Gould 1996). Terms such as ‘half-witted,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘mentally slow,’ and ‘feeble minded’ were regularly used to refer to blacks and other groups of color such as Mexicans, American Indians, and immigrants from Southern and Southeastern Europe (Skiba 2012). Lewis Terman, one of the early pioneers in intelligence testing stated:

The intelligence of the American Indian has also been over-rated, for mental tests indicate that it is not greatly superior to the average negro. Our Mexican population, which is greatly of Indian extraction, makes little if any better showing. The immigrants who have recently come to us in such large numbers from Southern and Southeastern Europe are distinctly inferior mentally. (Terman 1922, 658 as cited in Skiba 2012)

These claims were used to justify laws against interracial marriages, racial segregation, and the denial of citizenship and other basic rights, which were all related to the eugenics movement. ‘Feeblemindedness was viewed as the chief threat to the welfare of the state and the race’ and used as a key logic to justify eugenics based laws and policy (Skiba 2012, 19–20). Additionally, the eugenics movement was very strong in the US during this time and the first immigration quotas were instituted in the Immigration Reform Act of 1924 to avoid the ‘dumbing’ down of America (Skiba 2012). The group most heavily affected by the legislation was Jews attempting to flee Europe, estimated in the hundreds of thousands (Wyman 1996). These immigration polices remained in place for nearly 50 years. Gould (1996) states regarding the powerful influence of intelligence testing and racist beliefs:

What argument against social change could be more chillingly effective than the claim that established orders, with some groups on top and others at the bottom, exist as an accurate reflection of the innate and unchangeable intellectual capacities of people so ranked? (27–28)

In sum, the linking of white superiority, genetics, and intelligence testing provided room for those in power to essentially claim enslavement, colonization, and apartheid are justifiable because the slave owners, colonizers, and separationists are simply smarter and that’s how they came to be the ones in power. Furthermore, the physical violence and marginalization of people of color were justified by denying humanity as a result of supposed lower intelligence.

What followed in the early 1900’s was the institutionalization of smartness as white superiority through schooling and the explanation of school failure vs. success and denial of access to schooling. Alfred Binet constructed a test in the early 1900’s to identify children who might need special services in school, which resulted in the first intelligence scale and began the long history of achievement and intelligence testing in schools (Gould 1996). ‘Educators believed that their new “science,” especially the new technology of testing, provided the key to assigning students systematically to different classes and curricula,’ which resulted in the beginning of tracking pupils based upon supposed ability (Deschenes, Tyack, and Cuban 2001, 531). As a result, the notion that school failure was a result of students not being ‘smart’ enough became a part of the ideology and nomenclature of schools (Deschenes, Tyack, and Cuban 2001). Schools as cultural institutions became shaped and centered upon the cultural tropes of whiteness and smartness in the US.

During this same time period, American Indian boarding schools were founded as well to ‘educate’ and ‘civilize’ or ‘make smarter’ American Indian children, which involved the forced removal of Indian children from their families and communities (Lomawaima 2014). Many immigrant children were also forced out of school for their low achievement (Deschenes, Tyack, and Cuban 2001). Furthermore, African Americans advocated for the rights of their children to have access to public schooling, which was being denied (Anderson 1988). In sum, student failure and denial to education was largely predicated either on student social class or race, which still holds true for schools today (Deschenes, Tyack, and Cuban 2001).

In the 1950s and 1960s, again a time of great social upheaval similar to the period of reconstruction and the early 1900s, smartness and neoherediterianism resurfaced to oppose school desegregation based upon the idea that learning abilities differed between whites and blacks, which supposedly required separate curricula, pacing, and schools as a result (Valencia 2012). Although these claims did not successfully lead to the continued legal segregation of schools based upon race, these ideas have continued to be perpetuated in more recent history by works such as The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) where they claimed that, ‘there are ethnic difference in intelligence that may be to some extent genetically based’ (Skiba 2012, 33). The same premise was also argued in 1998 in The g Factor by Jensen. Arguably, these books were used to justify the rollback of civil rights during the Nixon era and the overhaul of the Welfare system in the mid-1990s (Tucker 1996; Vidal 1996). Despite a lack of veracity to the claims that race and intelligence are linked, these ideas and the associated educational practices have largely remained untouched for the past century.

Smartness and race today

The legacy of the social construction of race being closely tied to the social construction of smartness in the US is still apparent in schools today. Our current educational system is set up to sort students so that not everyone will succeed in school through the system’s preoccupation with labeling the mental capacities of students (Bennett and LeCompte 1990; Oakes et al. 2015; McDermott, Goldman, and Varenne 2006; Nieto and Bode 2007). Artifacts such as grades, test scores, and college preparatory curriculum associated with smartness represent some of the gatekeeping mechanisms (Hatt 2007, 2012). The students who succeed in getting past the gatekeeping points are told that they have succeeded due to working hard and being smart. The students who fail to pass the gatekeeping points are told that they are lazy and/or not smart enough. In reality, who succeeds past these gatekeeping points is largely connected to race with white students receiving the easiest passes through gatekeeping mechanisms. As a consequence, whiteness and smartness get reproduced.

(Dis)ability

In his work on the ‘racialization of disability,’ Artiles (2011) discusses the substantial historical connections between the social construction of disability and of race, which date back to the early nineteenth century ‘ugly laws.’ These laws were geared towards maintaining racial segregation and the marginalization of people with disabilities. The growth of ‘ugly laws’ corresponded with the use of science to justify slavery and other forms of oppression as discussed previously. It is also important to note that the growth of labeling kids as having intellectual disabilities increased by 400% during 1948–1966, a key time period for school desegregation (Cross and Donovan 2002; Skiba et al. 2008). Special education classes became a mechanism for the continued racial segregation of schools, especially with classification of intellectual deficits (Ferri and Connor 2005)

According to Cross and Donovan (2002) black students are twice as likely than white students to be labeled as having an intellectual disability and Native American students 24% more likely to be labeled as learning disabled. Although national averages do not show Latino students as being overrepresented in these categories, data vary largely by state with some states having extremely high overrepresentation for Latinos (Cross and Donovan 2002). These labels lead students to being perceived as ‘deficit’ or ‘lacking’ and the overrepresentation of students of color leads to a reification of beliefs about whole communities supposedly being ‘at risk’ or ‘lacking’ (Harry and Klingner 2014).

African-American children as early as preschool begin to be over-represented in what are perceived as ‘low ability’ classes and/or classes for the ‘educable mentally retarded’ (McBay 1992; Wright-Edelman 1988). As mentioned above, assignment to these classes can be devastating to the students’ self-concepts and they may even begin to perceive themselves as not smart. Consequently, this can lead these African-American students to have low achievement, a lack of motivation, and a desire to drop out of school. As Jones states, ‘[T]he failure of many of these students is often attributed to their ability rather than the school’s ability to provide quality education’ (Jones 1996, 344).

The overrepresentation of black, Native American, and Latino students is especially high in the categories relying upon clinical judgment rather than verifiable biological data (Harry and Klingner 2014). Furthermore, research has shown that these clinical judgments are likely biased against black, Latino, and Native American children (Harry and Klingner 2014). The ideology of smartness and the assumed inferiority of students of color are used to justify racial inequities related to perceptions of smartness and connect to the low expectations or deficit thinking placed upon students of color and the devaluing of the funds of knowledge within communities of color (Valencia 2012; Weinstein, Gregory, and Strambler 2004; Yosso 2005).

Whiteness as giftedness

On the flip side of the inequities in special education is the underrepresentation of students of color in gifted programs with white students being over-represented (Ford and King 2014; Staiger 2004). In addition to being underrepresented in gifted courses, students of color are typically underrepresented in college preparatory courses as well (Delpit 2012; Solorzano and Ornelas 2002). The lack of access to these courses reduces the opportunities students of color will have to attend college (Delpit 2012; Solorzano and Ornelas 2002). Identification of students as ‘gifted’ is another category that relies heavily on clinical judgment through teacher referral. Therefore, it is not surprising that research has clearly established for the past 20 years the ways that tracking of students has largely operated to maintain race and class privilege (Oakes 2005). This form of within-school segregation increases as the percentage of black students increase, with schools that are 30–60% black showing the highest rate of segregation (Clotfelter, Vigdor, and Ladd 2006; Ford and King 2014)

Students may, ‘begin to believe that their placement in these groups is natural and a true reflection of whether they are “smart,” “average,” or “dumb”’ (Nieto and Bode 2007, 111). For example, in her book, Multiplication is for White People, Delpit (2012) describes a black female student stating, ‘Why you trying to teach me to multiply, Ms. L? Black people don’t multiply; black people just add and subtract. White people multiply’ (14).

Students’ academic identities are shaped through these placements and their perceptions of their own competence or they realize that they will never be perceived as ‘smart’ within school walls regardless of actual performance (Delpit 2012; Hatt 2007, 2012). Karolyn Tyson’s (2011) work demonstrates the ways:

[E]arly sorting of students helps steer them toward particular programs of study, which also help shape their friendship networks. Students, in turn, base their course decisions on a combination of subjective criteria: their interpretation of the meaning of their prior placement and achievement experiences, and their understanding of where they fit within both the intellectual pecking order and the social networks of their school (16).

In addition to hurting their academic identities and trajectories, students in the lower tracks are more likely to receive teachers poorly prepared in their subject matter and new to teaching (McLaughlin and Talbert 2001). Furthermore, students in the lower tracks are also more likely to experience pedagogy based upon rote memorization and an emphasis on learning the ‘basics’ (Nieto and Bode 2007; Oakes 2005).

In schools where white students are overrepresented in gifted programs, whiteness becomes more closely aligned with high achievement (Tyson 2011). Interestingly, Tyson (2011) discusses the cultural shift of ‘acting white’ prior to the 1980s meaning ‘more inhibited’ or ‘lacking soul’ to being associated with taking honors and AP classes, getting good grades, and doing schoolwork since the 1980s. Tyson traces this cultural shift to school desegregation and, in particular, attempts to bypass it through tracking, gifted, and magnet programs that essentially resegregated and continue to resegregate schools. Tyson (2011) states:

Students in these schools were exposed to daily images of ‘whiteness as giftedness.’ Especially in classrooms in which ‘gifted’ children were ‘pulled out’ for special instruction, students regularly witnessed a starkly racialized image of ability each time the gifted students stood and left the room … as some children put it, signal[ing] to all present that only white children are intelligent. (37–38)

What is even more telling in Tyson’s work is that students in predominantly black schools, unlike high achieving black students in racially diverse and predominantly white schools, ‘did not report any problems with students casting achievement as acting white or other racialized ridicule and ostracism,’ (67). This reinforces the claim that the use of gifted programs to resegregate schools further links whiteness and smartness.

Where do we go from here?

Leonardo and Broderick (2011) suggest the next step is, ‘the abolition of both whiteness and intelligence’ (2226). But before we can even get to that point, we have to understand and name how smartness and whiteness operate as an intertwined system of oppression as ‘invisible’ cultural tropes within US society. Where Leonardo and Broderick (2011) frame smartness as ‘property’ and a noun, Hatt (2012) argues smartness can also operate as a verb, as something that is ‘done to others as social positioning’ (14) and used to frame identity. It is a complex, power-laden concept that has been so deeply embedded in the US psyche that it can even be difficult to imagine schooling that does not operate with student ability or smartness at its core.

Scholars have begun to challenge smartness and whiteness and the consequences of this linkage. For example, Carrillo (2013) has created a Mestiz@ Theory of Intelligence that,

emphasizes the talents, improvisations, and intelligences used by some working-class Mexican-origin students in an effort to excel academically, spiritually, and culturally (71).

Based upon critical mesitizaje (Pérez-Torres 2006) and mestizo consciousness (Anzaldúa 1987), his work offers an alternative understanding of intelligence that is nurtured and developed from ‘living on the margins’ (71). Additionally, Hatt (2007, 2012) has explored the cultural production of smartness, its connections to identity, and the implications for schools. The articles in this special issue continue to build upon these key works and challenge oppressive definitions of smartness.

At its core, smartness operates as a tool of dehumanization and symbolic violence against people of color. How do we recreate cultural tropes that are based upon humanizing action, love, trust, faith in people, cultural empowerment, complexity rather than conformity, and community rather than individualism? This special issue continues to challenge dominant ideologies that intertwine whiteness and smartness. Each article provides a specific counter narrative that challenges the dominant cultural tropes about what it means to be smart, who is smart, and what does schooling have to do with smartness? The articles in this special issue offer hope and possibilities for new directions.

The special issue

Each of the following pieces counter the deficit thinking imposed upon children of color and address the problematic ways hegemonic definitions of smartness create obstacles for students of color in schools. Alternatively, the articles provide racialized definitions of smartness that can only be acquired through living and experiencing life as a marginalized person of color. Furthermore, in racializing smartness, the articles challenge smartness as an individual characteristic and, instead, offer smartness as a characteristic that is collective and connected to families and identities embedded in community.

Cultural constructions of smartness

The first four articles challenge deficit perceptions of immigrant families and Native American communities by emphasizing cultural wealth and socio-cultural constructions of smartness in various forms. Each article provides a counterstory that negates deficit claims and offers alternative understandings of smartness framed within Vietnamese, Mexican, and Central American immigrant families and a Native American tribe working together for federal recognition.

The first article, Smartness as Cultural Wealth: An AsianCrit Counterstory, the author, Dr Lan Kolano, shares the story of her family’s escape from Vietnam and the forms of cultural wealth demonstrated by her parents that allowed her family to survive and succeed in the US. She racializes smartness through equating the cultural wealth demonstrated by her parents as forms of smartness that are too often framed as deficits within school walls towards immigrant families. The second article, Undocumented Intelligence, is an autoethnography where the author, Dr Aurora Chang, describes the forms of smartness she acquired through being undocumented in the US along with her struggles of maneuvering within hegemonic definitions of smartness and citizenship within school walls. In the third article, Seeing Smartness in a Poarch Creek Way, Dr Karla Martin provides a counterstory of smartness on two fronts. First, she writes the article in a style so that it will be accessible to members of her tribal community and, in doing so, problematizes notions of what is ‘good’ academic writing and the typical inaccessibility of academic writing to many research participants and their communities. Secondly, she counters the ways smartness is taught as something individualistic and valuable within school buildings and how these notions contradict her tribe’s cultural grounding in community and placing a higher value on attributes of hard work and supporting the tribe. The final article in this section, Diasporic Community Smartness: Saberes (Knowings) Beyond Schooling and Borders, follows Mexican families in the US back to Mexico for a village celebration. Dr Luis Urrieta highlights what the children learn on the visits despite such trips being framed as problematic in the US due to school absences.

Smartness as resistance and struggle

The second section includes articles that challenge the differences between education and schooling and the ways the two do not coincide; Whereas schooling can be oppressive, education can offer empowerment. Dr Pamela Hoff explores smartness as transformative resistance in the first article of this section, ‘Fool Me Once, Shame On You; Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me’: African-American Students’ Reclamation of Smartness as Resistance. Specifically, she addresses the ways resistance as smartness by African-American students can work to protect students from hegemonic definitions of smartness in schools that are intertwined with whiteness and white superiority. The second article, Mujeras Truchas: Urban Girls Redefining Smartness in a Dystopic Global South, is based upon young women in their final year of high school in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Dr Claudia Cervantes-Soon introduces the concept of mujeras truchas, a form of smartness the young women develop as a part of strategic survival and maneuvering within oppressive structures. The third article, Freedom Lessons: Black Mothers Asserting the Smartness of their Children, by Dr Billye Sankofa Waters explores what she refers to as freedom lessons taught to black children by their mothers. She describes these freedom lessons and the ways these lessons generate a form of smartness within black children that teachers should incorporate and build upon in their classrooms. The final article, She Doesn’t Even Act Mexican: Smartness Trespassing in the New South, involves Dr Juan Carrillo and Esmeralda Rodriguez sharing the struggles of Maria, a high achieving undocumented student in the southeastern US. Maria is in unchartered territory as the sole Latina in the gifted program and the article explores her ‘smartness trespassing’ as an act of agency and resistance against smartness as whiteness.

Rather than being rooted in our brains and objectively assessed outside of personal judgment and bias, smartness as a concept was created to maintain notions of white superiority. Schooling and these oppressive definitions of smartness operate together to reproduce school failure by children of color. However, education within community and familial settings, as opposed to schooling, offer alternative understandings of smartness and ability (Shujaa 1994). What it means to be ‘smart’ shifts across cultural settings and is intimately connected to cultural identities. Definitions of smartness within these cultural settings redefine smartness to mean how to maneuver and survive within oppressive institutional structures and operate to affirm students’ cultural identities. Through this reframing, students of color learn to resist, to challenge, and to be resilient within school settings that too often frame them and their communities solely within deficit frameworks. It is here in this disruption that there is hope and possibility. The articles in this special issue are birthed from that disruption and offer a new discourse regarding who is smart and what is valuable knowledge outside of whiteness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Beth Hatt
EAF Department, Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA
[email protected]