"YOU went to Oxford?"
Who gets to be deemed as 'intelligent'
There are a few questions I dread; my dad asking what the plan is for my future, my mum asking if I’m dating my new female friend and most importantly - the question of where I attended university.
The reason why I dread the university question is because it elicits two unfavourable responses:
1) “YOU went to Oxford?”
Emphasis on the subject, suggesting one’s disbelief that I could have gotten into such an institution.
2) “You went to OXFORD?”
More emphasis on the institution and their admiration of it.
Either way, it’s a choice between disbelief or veneration, and I am uncomfortable with both.
Who gets to be intelligent?
The first response begs the question, what does intelligence look like?
In this post, I hope to explore what intelligence ‘looks like’, in terms of how it is visually perceived and why that is the case.
The question of who gets to be classed as intelligent sounds innocuous. Before it’s written off as another thread in the endless barrage of wokeness, I really want you to think.
When I think of intelligence or rationality, the alarm bells of the Enlightenment sound. If it wasn’t the Enlightenment, it probably would have been one of the polymaths of Antiquity.
The unifying theme is white and Western. We are taught that intelligence and by extension, rationality, begins and ends with the white Western world. Regardless of attempts to decolonise the curriculum and introduce diversity to university degrees, the standard of intelligence, the fore-bearers of the very subjects we study diligently are typically white Western men.
This is not a new discovery, it has been a source of ire for many since at least the late 20th century. What I am getting at is how this framework informs daily, lived experiences. This notion that intelligence is bound up with whiteness explains why when I was walking down Holywell Street (a renowned street in Oxford with strong ties to the university) a man asking for directions refused to believe I went to the university despite me repeating it three times.
I don’t look like someone that would attend that university. Unlike being mistaken for a boy, this misappropriation did not bother me. Even during the application process, I was hesitant. Since birth, I had known that universities like Oxbridge were not for ‘people like me’ both racially and socio-economically. The image of the ideal Oxford student does not align with a young black girl who has an affinity for streetwear, trainers and natural hair.
A significant reason for this is the presentation of intelligence. Intelligence is packaged to us as an exclusive trait, that only the chosen are gifted with. And the chosen tend to be white, wealthy men. White supremacy, specifically the positioning of whiteness, means that anything outside of that is othered because it is alien. Ergo, of course people are taken aback seeing black Oxbridge students, they are the antithesis of the standard.
Me and my friends at university often joked about the strange encounters we experienced due to our blackness. When I was once followed closely late at night in my accommodation because the porter thought I didn’t look like I attended the College (it was 10pm at night and I had a laundry basket in my hand). Or when peers would suddenly change their vernacular to seem more ‘urban’. Perhaps it an effort to be more relatable to us, although, I’m still not entirely sure what all of that was about. Or when people thought some of my male friends sold drugs and had been involved in knife crime prior to attending university.
When you look like me, you don’t get afforded the perception of intelligence. I’ve made my peace with it, but I think it is important to investigate why we believe these things. I enjoy picking things apart, tracing the specifics to understand how we got here. I hope to take you from intelligence as a concept to how its conception informs lived experiences and how the racialisation of it has become systematic.
Whiteness as the benchmark of intelligence
Across history, if whiteness has been the benchmark for intelligence, what is blackness?
Like many things, blackness is the opposite.
The establishment of blackness as the delinquent, the uneducated, the regressive was not just achieved by promoting whiteness, it was a multi-faceted effort. The promotion of whiteness coupled with the denigration of blackness.
My dissertation was on the criminalisation of male same-sex relations in Jamaica across the 19th century. The reading for that was paramount in me arriving at this perspective. When I read primary sources of white British missionaries and colonial administrators dispersed throughout the Caribbean, I often found the condemnation of the black population paired with the exaltation of the white plantocracy.
A pertinent example of this, was the journal of Charles William Day, a British traveller. Entitled Five Years Residence in the West Indies (1852), Day expressed his belief that black people were of low intelligence, he stated “negroes” were “people of weak intellect” and a “race of utterly mindless people”. In a similar vein, he went on to celebrate the superiority of his race, stating that white workers within the Governor's residence “felt their vast superiority, and unnaturally asserted it [over the negroes].” The subordination of black populations via white supremacy was a two-part process. As Day demonstrated, it was not just depicting black people as inferior. It was painting them as less than because they were like that naturally and because they were less than in comparison to white people who were naturally better, including intellectually.
Thus it is not surprising, that at first sight, black people are exempt from the trait of intelligence. For at least a century, intelligence and blackness were treated as antagonistic forces and we still feel the legacy of this today.
The veneration of intelligence, to our detriment?
Scientific racism shows how worshipping the iteration of intelligence which lacks feeling and emotion produces pernicious outcomes.
Emerging in the 17th century, scientific racism reached its apex in the subsequent two centuries. One of the most famous names associated with scientific racism is Charles Darwin. Whilst he argued there was a sense of unity amongst the human races in The Descent of Man (1871), he still drew clear distinctions between racial groups and their levels of civilisation. It was the usual; non-white populations being ‘savages’ and white populations existing at the height of civilisation. Darwin propagated scientific racism, but it didn’t end there.
A new branch of scientific racism was born in the 18th century, phrenology. Phrenology was an ‘analytical science’, the examination of the shape and dimensions of the human skull. These markers would then be used to determine the mental capacities of an individual. Considering the context of this period, the skulls of black people were used as indisputable evidence to justify beliefs that lower levels of intelligence were innate within them.
Obviously, scientific racism lacked consideration for its subjects. The latter is so important; its absence ensured that scientific racism could be used to not only promulgate these harmful ideas but to maintain systems of exploitation towards black people. Most notably, slavery.
The existence of racist ideology that was treated as an indisputable fact, illustrates why Charles William Day was able to boast with ease and credibility that there was a “natural intellectual inferiority of the African races” on the Caribbean islands he helped to colonise.
Intelligence had been co-opted by white supremacy. It was monopolised by white academics and researchers in science. They used their status to create ‘scientific’ theories to protect and justify the undue influence they exercised both home and abroad.
In Summary
As I post more, you will come to realise that I love the intangibles.
Yes! We should be examining things we can’t operationalise, placing emphasis on things that we feel but can’t yet express.
Solely thinking in a ‘rational’ mind, with no regard for the emotions of others is maniacal and will only engender harm. Scientific racism and the enslavement of black populations are at the extreme end of when feeling does not provide checks and balances on ‘intelligence’.
Of course, there will be times when you have to decide between the two. But, this idea that emotion and logic will always exist in a dichotomous binary is frustrating, we often use both to navigate life without realising. If all you think about is results and numbers, you are not in touch with the intangibles.
Unwavering, dogmatic ‘intelligence’ proves that you can only engage in an intellectual and emotional space from a limited angle. Intelligence and emotion are not parallel lines in a quadrilateral. I like to think of them as coexisting around the curves of a circle.
Helpful Readings:
https://evolutionnews.org/2022/02/the-racism-of-darwin-and-darwinism/
I read 2 posts on here regarding intelligence which were great, Ayan Artan - in defense of pretension and Helena Aeberli - the oxford effect