University researcher: ‘Intelligence is a White man’s mythology’

A University of Cincinnati graduate assistant wrote that “intelligence is a White man’s mythology.”

“Stop calling your female colleagues ‘smart,’ or ‘clever,’ or ‘brilliant,’” wrote Mel Andrews, who studies cognition and evolution. “It’s sexist and infantilising… it shouldn’t be surprising to you in 2021 that women are capable of thought.”

“You’re doing the same thing when you describe your Black and Latino students as ‘very bright,’” added Andrews. 

“Intelligence is a White man’s mythology. A phantasmal concept. A non-referring term. Syncategorematic,” she wrote.

Indicating that her post was entirely serious, Andrews posted an excerpt from a chapter that she wrote for a book entitled Handbook of Parenting. She cited works claiming that “more than a century of wanton reductionism and definitional vagueness in the study of intelligence and human potential has perpetuated a stratified social order and obscured the true dynamic complexity and diversity of human cognitive development.”

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