"Eugenics" is the latest scare-word pseudoliberals are using to deny reality
The "problem" is that some kids are simply better at learning than others, not the tests that reveal this disparity
When I was a child, I read I lot, starting at an improbable age. I also liked to solve math puzzles in my spare time, and before I was in first grade, I was commissioning my mother to purchase arithmetic workbooks intended for sixth-graders. I had a library card that I used nonstop. My formal public education itself was a mostly pleasant thirteen-year-long distraction. When I took up a sport and became decent at it, I felt relieved to have a non-academic facet to my persona, even if the cross-country team was where all the nerds wound up anyway.
Why I took to wanting to learn things so early and eagerly, no one knows. Both of my parents were, and still are, almost always reading something. Neither had a college degree, but they had reasonable assurances that I one day would, and they fed my every sequential interest, however ephemeral some of these (like racquetball) were bound to me. Beyond that, I can trace niche aspects of my thinking and manner of expression to my parents, but not in as direct or as reliable a way as, say, Steph Curry can trace the lights-out accuracy of his own jump shot along multiple paths to being the son of a former NBA player.
I myself was born with a visual deficit that effectively ruled out being any good at basketball, not to mention baseball, driving a bus, and, on really inattentive days, shaving the right side of my face properly. We get what we get, and if I could roll the dice and try again from scratch, I would think of it as the worst bet of my life. On balance, no matter how and where I have spent the last half-century and how many times I landed hard on my own ass, I lucked out.
Because I was good at school things—including writing ribald stories about my teachers and peers while bored during AP Biology and passing these around for suggestions and additions at significant personal risk—I had opportunities made available to me that weren’t as readily available to students who performed less proficiently in the classroom. In particular, while my grades were excellent, I was not the kind of kid who would aim for a grade of 100 on a test the next day when I knew that “settling” for a 95 would free up three more hours, or twenty more minutes, to fuck around with BASIC on the family IBM PC Junior. I was ranked around sixth out in my graduating class of about 450, in marginal terms far behind the valedictorian.
Instead, the metric of academic proficiency at which I really excelled was the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT. (I grew up in New Hampshire. In other parts of the country, the ACT, or American College Test, is used.) With a 1987 score of 800 on the math section and 720 on the verbal component, I placed in some tiny fraction of the uppermost one percent of test-takers.
With the progressive “recentering” of the scaled test scores, my combined 1520 would apparently be a 1590 today. All else being equal, that’s good enough to go to any university in the United States.
(I’m not bragging about any of this. There are kids like this at every high school in the country, just like there are three or four who stand out as unusually tall, fast, hairy, or pale. I literally could not have lived a different life for my first 18 years on Earth unless I had been abused or actively suppressed from succeeding at the things at which I succeeded, and instead I was encouraged at every juncture.)
The SAT has come under attack ever since its inception, mainly because it does exactly what it is supposed to do: It reveals differences in academic prowess between students, and as such it is an excellent predictor of college success. When a college admits a student, it is in the college’s interest as well as the student's that the student succeeds academically. The SAT (along with the ACT) is an exceptionally accurate way to tell if that will happen in the case of a given student. It’s far from perfect, but probably the best single tool the U.S. has.
The reason is that the test is standardized. This means that if a kid graduates 25th in a very competitive class at a private institution like Saint Paul’s School or Phillips Exeter Academy, she won’t be penalized in relation to the salutatorian at Dead Pecker Ridge (Ark.) High School, enrollment forty-three, so long as her SAT scores are comparable or superior to those of young Cletus. And the same thing works in reverse: A white-trash kid who shines at a podunk school may be the subject of implicit bias from folks from the Northeastern U.S., particularly those who spent time at Ivy League institutions. Those elitists know that anyone who graduates from Saint Paul’s can graduate from Yale (about four fucking million such people have, most of them now old men operating in the murky shadows of the Department of State), but aren’t so confident in the curricula of redneck schools in tornado country. The SAT helps dissolve the well-inculcated effects of this ingrained dismissal of the hillbilly intellect, said bias representing a different cultural problem altogether.
No matter what you may have heard, the SAT is a fair test. Freddie DeBoer—a jaded leftist whose politics are a mishmash of aspirational communism and resigned socio-capitalism, and whose writing is both touching and absolutely essential—has covered this topic extensively. Much of what I have written here stems directly from his work.
Nevertheless, in accordance with the aims of Wokism—which is not about genuine equalization of opportunity, but about systematic replacement by fiat, intimidation, and grift—the University of California system last year disposed of its requirement that prospective students submit an SAT or ACT scores when they apply to one if its member schools. Harvard has done the same, and now the Cal State system is prepared to follow suit. Others are surely already awaiting their turn.
And in the signature aspect of Wokism, those who will benefit will not be poorer students of color. They will be the half-witted progeny of one-percenter parents—exemplars of cognitive prowess such as Hunter Biden and either public figure named Donald Trump. They will be underqualified thinkers whose parents can reliably pay the tuition bills and who will even more reliably contribute to the mega-bloated endowment funds of Ivy League schools, which have grown spectacularly since the onset of COVID-19 pandemic. Those schools have always found ways to admit and graduate dipshits, but now they will have even more cover to do so. And the Ivies can continue to fulfill their racial quotas by admitting not black kids from the South Bronx or Compton, but black kids who happen to be, say, the sons of South African extraction-company owners who educate their children in private schools across Europe.
Despite the imperfection of the SAT/ACT as a screening tool, it is still vitally important. It was the one thing that most strongly rewarded a kid like me back in the day—one who was outstanding at school, but who was going to need something other than his parents’ bank account to open all the right doors most widely. And largely on the strength of my SAT score, I went to my school of first choice, where I performed very well in a rigorous major and gained admission to a highly selective graduate school.
What happened after that is beyond the reach of what the SAT was ever meant to predict, and illustrates at various points that objective intelligence per standardized testing does not automatically prevent the commission of catastrophic and repeated mistakes. If you have any brains at all, you will not think for one second think that I think I am “smart.” Before I finish writing this, I will do at least two stupid things, at least one of them accidentally and hence unnoticed by me.
But forget all that—the SAT helped me, and has helped thousands of kids like me, in the very same way. I won’t say that any standardized test is sacred, but getting rid of the SAT and the ACT requirement has exactly one combined effect: It punishes certain kids of lesser monetary privilege who do exceptionally well on the test, especially if they happen to be Asian-American, and moves their share of the admissions rewards into the hands of dumb or average-performing rich kids.
Think of the number of parents around the country who have been shepherding their kids along through school for ten-plus years, aiming them for the SAT and sometimes paying for tutoring classes, only to suddenly find that the one major advantage their kid has over her peers—the ability to demonstrate objective academic skill—has been summarily eliminated. Since this is 2022, I am of course talking mainly about white and Asian parents.
People are born according to a deterministic blueprint that, while adapted to shift slightly in accordance with environmental factors (“epigenetics”), is not malleable to the extent most of us understandably wish to believe. People are not anything close to blank slates; no one denies that visible physical differences exist between subpopulations of humans, so they idea that those subpopulations should be exactly the same in granular, less immediately evident ways is a noble fantasy.
No one knows for sure why black students tend to perform more poorly on average than others on the SAT. No one knows for sure why Asian-American kids tend to blow away everyone else. No one knows if these gaps will close. In the case of black kids, if the echoes of past structural racism are resounding in black public schools today, then differences in test scores is, as DeBoer mentions in one of the pieces linked above, exactly the outcome everyone should expect.
I do know that as a white person, I could offer the statement, “I highly doubt the test-score gap between Asian-Americans and everyone else will ever close” without even giving a reason, and the idea would be mostly noncontroversial, even striking some as funny, in most settings. But I couldn’t make the logically equivalent statement “I highly doubt the test-score gap between black kids and everyone else will ever close” without being branded a racist in those same settings, and being inundated with demands to comply with whatever the Twitter mob is proposing to “explain” whatever differences between people—differences, not incidentally, that Wokish people are always masochistically looking for so they can complain of a new injustice. Fortunately, no matter my opinions here, I need not worry about this branding, since I am already congenitally infected with a quality that makes me not irrevocably racist but, perverse though it is, a suitable target of racism (just proposed to be a Bad Thing) myself. That ship rocketed away from port as soon as the Wokish gained control of the media and higher academia, and I stopped waving forlornly in its direction long before others did.
Anyway, the word “eugenics” has evidently become a new favorite among blue-check shitlibs on Twitter. As always, their bleating would be incorrect even if they knew what the word meant or how to use it in a coherent sentence. Here’s a prime example of how someone operating in an environment free of meaningful pushback can seamlessly tar the SAT using the latest demon-spell term:
The idea here is to show that the SAT, like Planned Parenthood, carries the stain of eugenics, which like racism everyone understands is bad. As such, it is unfair to black kids, because black people have, as a matter of historical fact, been subjected to all manner of ghastly proposed and real experiments in the area of genetic manipulation.
The history of medical and research abuse of African Americans goes well beyond Tuskegee. Harriet Washington eloquently describes the history of medical experimentation and abuse,40 demonstrating that mistrust of medical research and the health care infrastructure is extensive and persistent among African Americans and illustrating that more than four centuries of a biomedical enterprise designed to exploit African Americans is a principal contributor to current mistrust. As recently as the 1990s, unethical medical research involving African Americans has been conducted by highly esteemed academic institutions.
If that’s not as gross as slavery—and really, the English language lacks a word for how uniquely ugly and mortifying the practice of human slavery is; can you really think of one?—then it’s damned close. People have a right to be suspicious of the government—more suspicious than most of them are, frankly—and each other, right here in these fulsome United States. And people have good reasons to propose that practices like these happening under our noses, but sub rosa, an ethos of dehumanizing millions of our own citizens, have helped keep children of color from performing as well, on average, as others.
But wherever they happen to be, and again as DeBoer relates, the brightest black kids seem to do well on the SAT no matter where they attend school. The SAT does for these kids what it does for everyone else: It proves they have a good chance of mastering, or at least handling, the material at the text level. All of this is borne out by decades of high-N, longitudinal research. Leftists, many of them well-meaning, have just as long been seeking ways to evade this and related statistical realities and their implications, and they have failed. Their goal is basically the same as someone who wants to prove that the best Samoans can outrun the best East Africans in the marathon if only the right inputs can be altered just so.
Regarding the use of “eugenics” here, well, the tweet is one of millions made just this week by shitlibs that they would never cast out into a neutral, moderated, in-person conversational setting. “Eugenics” is not something people see on a stat sheet. It’s a practice, not a good one to organize a free society around, and if you really want to learn more about it, have at it. (Sorry, the link failed.)
But the take-home message, which anyone is free to convey to KD up there, is this: Tools that establish that some humans are more proficient than others at a given task are not the same thing as tools that create those differences. Repeat after me, pass it on, et cetera.
Any number of arcane examples trivially reveal the difference. Saying that the SAT creates differences between ethnic groups, the sexes, or other subpopulations of interest is like saying the timing equipment at the Olympics creates differences in running ability between entrants in the field. Looking at the all-time track and field and road-running performance lists, on the Wokish view, World Athletics is practicing a pro-West African and pro-Jamaican eugenics project in the sprints, and doing the same thing on behalf of East Africans in the longer distances. (One thing, though: Those Eastern Bloc women’s times that are never falling to a bona fide female are essentially the result of as close to post-natal eugenics as the scientists responsible could approach.)
The desire to mold our* bodies and minds into better-looking or better-functioning presentations is a natural consequence of possessing a conscious, memory-retrieving, forward-looking, goal-oriented brain. So, I contend, is believing in deities; the first time Caveman Og recognized that he would one day experience the same permanent stoppage of an unmoving comrade, the seeds for an “afterlife”—a means of cheating death—were psychologically, probably even neurologically sown. But for as long as we’re here, we can only do as well as the tools we’re given allow. This is not, and never will be, a reason to enact policies that undermine the success of the more gifted and capable.
The diminution of the SAT is an inexcusable scorning of America's most promising and deserving kids. It is part of the greater anti-intellectual, anti-achievement, anti-objective-standards movement I am referring to whenever I cite Wokism, a word I am even more sick of typing than you are of reading. Add it to the reasons China will eventually dominate the world economy.
But more importantly, were the collapse of reason, the dispensing of useful standards of performance, and the rewarding of visibly incapable and immoral actors or color somehow only happening in the running world, I would be able to mostly ignore it. The fact that Wokism really is everywhere, and still spreading, is why I probably appear so frantic and angry about it whenever I focus on yet another running-related example. And I barely read or hear any news anymore.