page_title: Race and intelligence
section_title: History of the controversy
hierarchical_section_title: Race and intelligence / History of the controversy
caption_attribution_description: Alfredo Benet Junior (July 11, 1857 – October 18, 1911)
context_page_description: Discussions of race and intelligence, as well as claims of genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines, have appeared in both popular science and academic research since the inception of IQ testing in the early 20th century. The concept of "race" is a social construct, and "intelligence" has no agreed-upon definition; the validity of IQ tests as a metric for general intelligence is itself disputed. In particular, there is no scientific evidence that the average IQ scores of different racial or ethnic population groups can be attributed to any claimed genetic differences between those groups.
  The first tests showing differences in IQ scores between different population groups in the United States were the tests of United States Army recruits in World War I. In the 1920s, groups of eugenics lobbyists argued that these results demonstrated that African-Americans and certain immigrant groups were of inferior intellect to Anglo-Saxon white people, and that this was due to innate biological differences; and they used such beliefs to justify policies of racial segregation.
context_section_description: Claims of differences in intelligence between races have been used to justify colonialism, slavery, racism, social Darwinism, and racial eugenics. Racial thinkers such as Arthur de Gobineau relied crucially on the assumption that black people were innately inferior to white people in developing their ideologies of white supremacy. Even Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, believed black people to be innately inferior to white people in physique and intellect. At the same time, prominent examples of African-American genius such the autodidact and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the pioneering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, and the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar stood as high-profile counterexamples to widespread stereotypes of black intellectual inferiority.
caption: Alfred Binet (1857–1911), inventor of the first intelligence test
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