IQ Tests

Being skilled at chess does not make one skilled at babysitting. Being an excellent bedroom lover does not imply advanced skill in a chemistry lab. Piano virtuosity does not mean street smarts.

IQ Tests measure only how skilled one is at taking an IQ test – most often in the form of sit down exams and multiple choice questions, a format largely used in the education systems by those who developed the tests themselves. They are inherently flawed and biased.

For example: one has to be stupid to not recognize Mensa IQ tests measure not IQ but how one connects dots and squiggly lines on a multiple choice page. That this has anything to do with “general intelligence” is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

Tupac Shakur once said of his Mother, in the song “Dear Momma”, that she “made miracles every thanksgiving.”

A Black Mother in a Ghetto in 1907ce with no classroom education who had never heard of a multiple choice exam let alone taken one would likely not fare as well on a squiggly line and dot timed test as a white student in Virginia on a plantation attempting to go to Princeton with the help of a tutor and a private academy with a lifetime of practice on such exams and exam formats.

That white student would, no doubt, be less capable of performing miracles at the dinner table for their family than that woman.

IQ tests were designed largely and with the racist intent of showing that white student is smarter than that Black Mother – and with the intent to support a racist argument that the Black Mother in the Ghetto is not there because of racist whites but because she is stupider than them.

They were developed for racists and by racists. To this day they remain a tool of racists who refuse to acknowledge that these tests were designed for Black People in Somalia to score lower that White People in New England not due to general intelligence but due to the manner in which people receive education – and what skills are valued.

In short: IQ tests are bullshit.

That there are people with educational barriers and obstacles is a reality.

There is and needs to be a Special Olympics.

But this has nothing to do with squiggly dots on a timed multiple choice exam, nor is being skilled on squiggly dot exams any indication a parent enduring poverty can perform miracles for their children, which is of course a much more important skill to have.