!@#%$%#^$#^%$#^% IQ testing

I was reading something fascinating on the LJ community debunking white :

about the validity of IQ tests.  (read article here)
So what kind of intelligence is it that the tests actually measure?  IMO it is the ability to take IQ tests which are a particular kind of problem/puzzle solving.  I have had so many unhappy discussions about the stupidity of IQ tests…….it makes my blood boil!  SO WHAT if you get a huge score on an IQ test?  It hardly means anything at all.

Case in point:  My father.
(Mom, if you’re reading this, please know that this is not to air out the family laundry, but I am using it as an example I personally know very well. To everyone else, I LOVE my dad ab-so-lute-ly and I am grateful to be his daughter. He’s a fabulous guy.  I promise I’ll write more about his fabulosity next time)

My dad (as he was very fond of telling me and my sibs during the “drinking years”) tested very high on the USAF IQ tests – he used to tell us he was off the charts – I’m not so sure that was true, but….let’s just say that it was true.   After the Air Force, he went to college and became a history teacher. When that couldn’t really pay the bills in rural NH, he went to work at the local oil-seal factory – first on the white collar side and then on the blue collar side…for like 18 years.  He bitched about his job all the freakin’ time.

Then when my folks moved to Virginia about 20 years ago, he went to work for Wal-Mart, which he retired from about a year ago.  He bitched about that job all the freakin’ time too.

HOWEVER,  Dad acquired a drinking problem at some point in his early twenties to go along with some other personal demons, and when he stopped drinking, chose not to go to AA or get any help. There were times during those approx. 40 working/career years when he could have chosen to do other things….gone back to school, gone back to teaching, etc, etc; my mother chose to become an RN 20+ years ago and makes a nice living at it, so he had some options. But Dad, for whatever reason, chose not to do anything.

What good did that high IQ test score do for him?   Did it put a dime in his pocket? Did it assist him to make better choices in life?  Did it make him a better person in any way? Did it measure his tremendous sense of humor? Did it say what a great cook he is?   I say it mainly helped him prop up his undersized/severely damaged ego in a unhealthy way; he felt superior to other people in general (and at his jobs in particular) because he KNEW he was a genius.  But if , as according to the IQ test, his intelligence is/was so great, why wasn’t he the next Einstein?  OK his field wasn’t physics, it was history – so why wasn’t he the next John Hope Franklin?

If/when you read the article (link above),  it would seem that Dutch teenagers are getting “smarter”, and so are teens in the U.S.  Maybe the kids are better educated?  But if you’ve ever read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books – you know that kids back in the 1840’s even in the pioneer areas got a far more rigorous education than kids do now.

And what about my second cousin, Whip?  Yes, Whip dropped out of school at 16 but he’s so amazing with his hands – he’s an electrician (or he was the last time I checked).  An IQ test measures none of that.

I think that these tests are CRAP. Some folks think that everything is somehow quantifiable, and if something isn’t quantifiable, it ain’t worth anything. Intelligence, and especially certain kinds of intelligence, is prized by  us, so some (white) guys thought up a way to measure it and show that they had more of it! A kind of mental masturbation, don’t you think?  I wonder if these tests were designed by black folks in the US how well us white folks would do.  Most of us are not bicultural – heck we’re not even aware that there is a white culture; most black folks are bicultural – because they have to be.

It’s as I was telling a friend of mine who has a 5 month old baby: white men don’t like breastfeeding because they cannot measure it out and see how much the baby is getting and therefore control it.  They just LOVE formula, because then they can measure, see and control the feeding of the baby.  It doesn’t matter to a lot of guys that breastfeeding is the best thing for the child……and they are unaware that that is the main reason they don’t like it.

Don’t get me wrong – I *love* white people.  Married to one white man, mother of three white kids, my beloved parents and brothers are white and I’m related to lots of others.  But I know my people and how we do.

What does our Creator say?  He says that we were created in His image.  He says that His Son was the color of “burnt brass” and had hair like “lamb’s wool”, which to me reads like He ain’t no “white guy”.  He says that we are all His children.  How can it be that He created some folks who look  a little different than me but are essentially SCIENTIFICALLY the same, but somehow made them less intelligent as a group?  Nope, I don’t buy it for a second.  The flaw MUST be in the tests created by man.