"Powerful."
"--Mary Frances Berry, Journal of American History"

"A painstakingly researched, scientific, psychological, sociocultural, and constitutional history of race. The Smart Culture is one of our generation's most powerful indictments of insidious racism and meritocracies."
"--The Law and Politics Book Review"

"A passionate attack on pervasive American cultural assumptions of natural inequality. The book provides a fine history of antiblack discrimination and of the racist and nativist bases of the developers of standardized intelligence tests."
"--Choice"

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 naturalintellectual 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.

"Powerful."
"--Mary Frances Berry, Journal of American History"

"A painstakingly researched, scientific, psychological, sociocultural, and constitutional history of race. The Smart Culture is one of our generation's most powerful indictments of insidious racism and meritocracies."
"--The Law and Politics Book Review"

"A passionate attack on pervasive American cultural assumptions of natural inequality. The book provides a fine history of antiblack discrimination and of the racist and nativist bases of the developers of standardized intelligence tests."
"--Choice"

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 naturalintellectual 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.

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 has long been heralded as a landmark in the progress of civil rights in the United States. But as the forces opposing affirmative action and supporting resegregation have gained ground in recent years, its legacy has been questioned. Some wonder whether the decision did more harm than good, by fomenting a backlash, or whether the desegregation it brought about might not have been accomplished anyway through legislation. Others worry about the racial paternalism they see as inherent in the desegregation project and reflected in the Brown ruling.

Choosing Equality includes contributions that give voice to these concerns, yet it provides a strong challenge to this revisionist interpretation. It does so in a unique way, by positioning the issues in the overall national context but focusing on them in the experience of one state, Delaware, that stands as a microcosm of the larger conflict. The State's significance to Brown lies in its contributing two of the five cases that were consolidated in the Court's review of the litigation. But Delaware's own history registered the racial conflict at the heart of the American dilemma: a slave state that fought on the side of the North in the Civil War, it experienced black migration to its cities and the ghettoization that followed but also had black farmers working as sharecroppers next to whites in its southern section. Moreover, while it saw massive resistance to desegregation, it also was the site of one of the largest and most peaceful metropolitan desegregation efforts.

This volume offers not only academic analyses of Delaware's experience of Brown, set in the broader framework of the debate over its significance at the national level, but also the personal voices of many of the leading participants, from judges and lawyers down to community activists and the students who lived through this important era of the civil rights movement and saw how it changed their future by giving them hope.