“Racial Differences in Intelligence”: Japanese Americans and Intelligence Testing in the Early 20th Century

Hisakichi Misaki, a student of psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman, wrote in his 1927 thesis that “between various racial groups in the United States distinct mental differences exist” (“The Effect of Language Handicap on Intelligence Tests of Japanese Children,” 1). The development of Terman’s 1916 Stanford-Binet intelligence test came at a time when people of color were increasingly viewed as problems that must be addressed—including the question of education and its ties to psychology, criminality, and immigration. Much of the literature on racial intelligence testing has come from psychology, education, and anthropology with little to no analysis about the history of relational racial formations of Asian Americans and other people of color. This talk is on Hisakichi Misaki, a Japanese American who participated in Terman’s study in the early twentieth century and helped develop eugenic technology about students of color using intelligence testing for socioeconomic mobility.

The paper is on the relational racial construction of Japanese American and Mexican American students at the height of eugenics and intelligence testing in the early twentieth century in order to better understand the interrelationship between education, scientific racism, and citizenship. Some Asian Americans used racial intelligence testing as way to position themselves as superior to their Black and Latino counterparts. In other words, some Asian Americans used racial science not to challenge white supremacy in the early twentieth century but to reify racial hierarchies in an attempt to raise their status within American society. These Asian American researchers used the results of eugenic tests to construct model minority intelligence—an intelligence that could only exist with the essentialism of the unintelligence of other people of color. No matter how progressive these researchers may have thought of themselves, in the end they played key roles in shaping exclusionary policies in education, immigration legislation, and citizenship.