Racial Measures and Developmental Measurements: Raising Blackness from the Children’s Bureau to the Brownies Books, 1910–30

This paper departs from a historiography of intellectual/developmental disability (IDD) in the early twentieth-century U.S., which tends to focus on those medically classified as “feebleminded.” Instead, this paper examines the racial parameters of “normal” development and the tacit alignment between Black children and developmental delay, even if they evaded formal diagnostic capture. The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed an efflorescence of organizations, conferences, and publications devoted to measuring and managing the “normal” child and developmental processes that were regarded as susceptible to corruption without expert intervention. This paper turns to the first generation of rudimentary evaluative metrics, including pediatric growth charts and developmental schedules, that were generated and promoted by the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station and the Children’s Bureau. Although these metrics claimed universality, they were modeled after observational studies that were restricted to white, non-immigrant, and mostly middle-class research participants. This paper attends to the slippage between whiteness as a developmental norm (as in average) and whiteness as a developmental ideal by following the routes through which popular developmental metrics circulated in Black communities. I study several developmental tributaries, including parent education classes, popular parenting magazines, literature for Black children like W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Brownies’ Books (an offshoot of The Crisis), and Black-led public health initiatives like Negro Health Week. This paper asks: How did developmental metrics serve simultaneously as vehicles for Black racial uplift, wielded by white reformers and Black community leaders alike, “objective” measures of innate Black underdevelopment, and condemnations of Black mothers as poor conduits for healthy development? How did these metrics acquire dynamic and unpredictable meanings in the hands of different stakeholders? This paper extends existing scholarship on the historical relationship between anti/Blackness and disability in its exploration of the persistent material and conceptual entanglements between Blackness and developmental aberrancy.