That’s three down: Last week Brown University reinstated standardized testing as a part of its admissions requirements, following Yale and Dartmouth, which did the same earlier this year. For all that we have heard about how standardized tests propagate injustice, the decisions at these Ivy League schools are antiracism in action, and should serve as models for similar decisions across academia. (M.I.T. was an even earlier re-adopter of testing requirements, in 2022.)
Of course, for years, the leading idea has been precisely the opposite: that the proper antiracist approach is to stop using standardized tests in admissions. Many schools first suspended using them a few years back because their administration was too difficult during the peak of the Covid pandemic. But then, in line with racial reckoning commitments in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, many decided not to bring the tests back.
This was in line with longstanding claims, touted as higher wisdom, that the SAT promotes, rather than undercuts, racial disparities in admissions. The idea is that the test simply reflects socioeconomic level, with more affluent, disproportionately white kids able to afford test preparation classes to raise their scores. All the way back in 2001, the University of California president Richard Atkinson was warmly and widely celebrated for his call to eliminate the SAT from the schools’ admissions process. Enlightened consensus was that the SAT predicts nothing important. Grapevine wisdom has been that some test questions are biased against lower-income people (although exactly how many questions about things like regattas the SAT has included has never been clear).
Given this perception, the wave of schools letting go of the SAT after 2020 seemed to many like an acceleration of social justice long overdue. But lately evidence has mounted, steadily, that the SAT is in fact useful in demonstrating students’ abilities regardless of their economic backgrounds or the quality of their high schools. Some studies show scores correlate with student performance in college more strongly than high-school grades, and that without the standardized test data it is harder to identify Black, Latino and lower-income white kids who would likely thrive in elite universities. It was precisely this evidence that led the Dartmouth president, Sian Beilock, to be first out of the gate this year in daring to go back to using the test in admissions. I nominate her as Antiracist of 2024 so far.
Many might find it an awkward fit to label requiring the SAT for college admissions as antiracist. But we must attend carefully to what racism and antiracism actually are, as the words have come to occupy such broad swatches of semantic ground. In this light, the tacit sense of the SAT and similar tests as somehow anti-Black is dangerous.
This is because ideas have a way of undergoing mission creep. What an unspoken idea implies, a resonance in the air, eventually manifests itself as an openly asserted new position. In that vein, there is a short step between acknowledging that disadvantage makes it harder to ace the test — which is self-evidently true — and a proposition that is related but vastly more questionable: that Blackness is culturally incompatible with the test.
This is the ultimate source of the idea getting around in the education school world and beyond that it is “white” to cherish hard work, objectivity, the written word and punctuality. This conviction reveals itself both among white people (as in the creator of a graphic to this effect that the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture put online for a spell during the pandemic) and among Black people (such as a Black parent recalling a Black co-worker openly saying that standardized tests are unfairly imposed on Black kids because they “can’t do math,” with the implication of this as a general assumption).
And in turn, this sense of which whitenesses Black people will supposedly struggle with — math, objectivity, etc. — is the seedbed of university departments’ current conviction that attracting more Black majors and graduate students means loosening requirements. Hence classics without Greek or Latin, musicology without playing an instrument and physics without “white empiricism.”
The people promulgating ideas like these are well intentioned. They think of themselves as clearing away outdated notions of merit, which sometimes do bear re-examination. But all of it together constitutes a general cultural mood that alarms me. The SAT as racist, objectivity as white privilege, making academic training easier to attract Black majors and graduate students — there is a family relationship between them. Namely, an assumption that it is graceless or unfair to require Black people to grapple with detail, solve puzzles and make sense of the unfamiliar. At least, we are not to be expected to engage in such things nearly as much as, say, white people.
But what is Blackness, then, if not these “white” things? It would seem that the idea is that we are a Dionysian people, given to intuition over deduction. (Perhaps this also includes a certain relationship to rhythm?) In any case, we apparently shine especially bright when we offer our “lived experiences,” most valuably when they concern our oppression.
I’m sorry, but I find this a diminished, not to mention depressing, and downright boring racial self-image. It just doesn’t correspond with so very much that Black people do, and are, and seek and always have.
The street mailbox, with its intricate door slot mechanism, was patented by a Black man, Philip Downing. The View-Master, fondly remembered today by those of a certain age, rose to popularity after being redesigned by a Black man, Charles Harrison. A recent splendid revival of the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam” at City Center Encores! has me thinking about how the person who fashioned the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton’s music into an evening of theater for that show was Luther Henderson, who also contributed his dense and precise arrangements and orchestrations to countless Broadway musicals, including “white” ones. (Listen to his dance music after the title song of “I Had a Ball” here.) Octavia Butler’s science fiction oeuvre was the quintessence of close reasoning and thinking outside the box, as is historian Barbara Fields’s work on race in such books as “Racecraft,” written with her sister Karen.
I just cannot square a conception of Blackness that includes those people while asserting that exactitude is white, or that submitting Black people to standardized tests is a racist microaggression. No coherent admissions assessment would use the SAT as the sole measure of an applicant’s potential. However, the elimination of such tests from the process is less a favor to than an insult leveled against Black intelligence. I am glad to see the fashion fade.
