How Standardized Tests Were Designed by Racists and Eugenicists

Democracy Now!: Ibram X. Kendi, professor and author of two books confronting racism in the United States, joins us to discuss his new book, "How to Be an Antiracist." He talks about the racist underpinnings of standardized tests and their development as tools for prominent eugenicists to prove the intellectual inferiority of the poor, women and particularly descendents of Africans. The tests, he argues, blatantly discriminate against people of color under a veneer of scientific objectivity. He says, "These tests became the evidence they have been looking for, really, for hundreds of years to prove that people of color and poor people and women were intellectually inferior."