Black History Month: Assaults on Black intelligence Part II

Get the Point!

“Dumb, lazy, shiftless..."

The year was 2002, and I was serving as defense counsel in an armed robbery with a firearm case in Leon County. The stakes were high; my client, a 24-year old Black man, had been released from state prison for only about eight months before he was accused of robbing a local convenience store at gunpoint and netting a grand total of...wait for it...$7.86! 

Despite the small amount of money he was accused of taking by deadly force, the fact that my client had been out of prison for fewer than three years meant that under Florida's notorious Prison Releasee Reoffender Act, if the jury found him guilty as charged, he would serve the remainder of his natural life in a state prison cell—without the possibility of parole!

After a two day trial, the stage was set for closing arguments and while the state's case was rather weak—and included a begrudging identification from a Black store clerk who wasn't exactly convincing that the man on trial was the man who pointed a firearm at his head and told him to "give it up," the 20 or so minutes that I spent dissecting that and other weaknesses allowed me to show off rhetorical skills that were first developed in Christmas and Easter speeches at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, and enhanced in English and debate classes (and oratorical contests) from middle school on through to Morehouse College and finally, during my trial advocacy class at the University of Florida College of Law.

The jury took about 30 minutes to deliberate before they returned their verdict: "Not Guilty!" After my client, still in custody, was removed by the bailiffs so that they could process his release from custody, as I packed my briefcase—the same one that my deceased father carried that brandishes our shared C.E.H initials—the presiding jurist, a retired judge on senior status who was retained because of the high number of trials that week in Leon County, graciously thanked me and the prosecutor for our advocacy. But the judge, who had to be pushing close to 75 or some odd years old at the time, took it one step further by saying in his thick country accent,"Mr. Hobbs, I really enjoyed listening to your clever closing arguments—you have to be the most articulate colored fellow I've ever heard..."

For once, Chuck Hobbs, the "incessant talker" from days gone by, was rendered dumbstruck as I feared that if I followed my first instinct, which was to launch a profane "what the f*ck did you just say" bomb, would have had me held in contempt and on the way to the jail shackled beside my client." So I paused, gathered myself, and gave the iciest and most insincere "thanks" that I could muster. 

A later closing argument, circa 2006, during the second trial of five of my Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Brothers who were accused of felony hazing…

In 2002, if that judge was in his mid to late 70’s, such meant that he was born in the late 1920's. That also meant that the judge, who lived near Marianna, Florida (between Tallahassee and Pensacola), had been a child back when Claude Neal, 19, was falsely accused and lynched for the alleged murder of Lola Cannidy, a young white woman. While I have no way of knowing whether the judge was among the reported 2,000 whites who watched that lynching at the Cannidy farm, I have no doubt that as he grew up during that era, he heard about it—and other acts of violence against "colored" people during the Jim Crow era—with emphasis on "colored" because at that time, that's what Black people were formally called throughout the United States.

Claude Neal, 19, was lynched near Marianna, Florida circa 1934, and his lifeless remains were hanged to rot and send a message to local “Colored” people. The last picture is a selfie that I took near that very hanging spot following a 2019 hearing in Marianna...

Once I reminded myself of those historical facts, I calmed down and remembered that the old judge was from an era in which Blacks were generally deemed to be "dumb, lazy, and shiftless,"Black men were deemed to be "dumb, lazy, shiftless brutes," and perhaps, in his own way, he deemed me the opposite of his life-long assumptions?

Yesterday, I traced my early journey in a post Jim Crow school system that was still judging little Black boys and girls by the "dumb, lazy, shiftless" standards,  even if such was forbidden on paper because of "equal justice under the law" and whatnot. But old habits, stereotypes, and assumptions die hard, especially when they are wrapped in pseudo-science masquerading as scholarship with regards to Black intellectual capacities. 

If you didn't already know, the roots of discriminatory assumptions about Black intelligence were formed in the 18th Century on forward, first with famous European philosophers like Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Carl Linnaeus suggesting, without any concrete objective indicia, that intellect varied among the different racial categories in the world. 

By the mid-1860's, British philosopher Francis Galton, a cousin of famous geneticist Charles Darwin, suggested that the lack of "eminent" or prominent men among sub-Saharan Africans and West Coast Africans (where most Black Americans derive), and dark skinned Aboriginal Australians, rendered them on the lower end of the intellectual spectrum. This distinction is important to note because both during and after the Renaissance, most European academics divided Africa into northern and Sub-Saharan variations and considered North Africa—specifically Egypt—to be more European because of racial mixing through the centuries with Greeks and Romans who conquered and occupied that region.

A second reason why Europeans claimed North Africa as their own is because while most of their academics believed that Ancient Greece was the most advanced early civilization and the foundation of Western thought, they actually "discovered" that the famous Greek philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians had spent considerable time copying the works of Egyptian philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians who were enlightened centuries earlier—back when Greek tribes were still beginning to emerge into formal societies. Thus, if white racial superiority was the assumed truth, then there's no way that the sum of white knowledge could have derived from "Black" ancient Egyptians, even if it was crystal clear that the intermingling and racial mixing in North Africa occurred thousands of years after the pyramids were erected and Black Egyptian schools were considering all manner of phenomena under the heavens!

Again, while Galton and his ilk had no "objective" measures by which to test their racist hypotheses about inherent white intellectual superiority, by the turn of the 20th Century, their words were deemed true across Europe and among the descendants of European colonizers in the Americas. 

During the early 1900's, Alfred Binet, a French lawyer by trade who read extensively about psychology and deemed himself an expert on the subject, developed a testing methodology to classify French students from an academic standpoint. Binet's tests included measures to determine the ability to draw shapes and figures from memory, and the ability to do certain simple physical tasks on command, with the same forming the foundations of the first "Intelligent Quotient" examinations. That the creator of such measures was not classically trained in any rigorous psychological analysis should be noted—as should the fact that language, or the ability to perform on command, was (and remains) crucial in testing results. 

At this same time, the Eugenics or "good genes" movement was taking the world by fire, with figures ranging from U.S. Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, to German Dictator Adolf Hitler, concluding that the white race was intellectually and physically superior to all others! Amid this backdrop, Alfred Binet's unscientific test was imported to America and became known as the "Stanford-Binet" test, one that supposedly was designed to curtail "the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency."

Alfred Binet

Separately, Frank Bruner, a graduate of the psychology department at Columbia, described the mental qualities of Negroes as, "lacking in filial affection, strong migratory instincts and tendencies; little sense of veneration, integrity or honor; shiftless, indolent, untidy, improvident, extravagant, lazy, lacking in persistence and initiative and unwilling to work continuously at details. Indeed, experience with the Negro in classrooms indicates that it is impossible to get the child to do anything with continued accuracy, and similarly in industrial pursuits, the Negro shows a woeful lack of power of sustained activity and constructive conduct."

Damn…

I guess Bruner wasn't going to allow the undisputed facts that enslaved Blacks had cleared most of the fields, planted and harvested most of the crops, cleared most of the forests and swamps, built the majority of the buildings in major cities, including Washington D.C., where a free Black man named Benjamin Banneker surveyed what would become the Nation's Capital—one in which his enslaved Black kinsmen literally broke their backs by cutting the rocks from quarries to erect the White House, the Capitol Complex, and all of the monuments that people from around the world flock to see as tourists each year?

Benjamin Banneker (above) was highly recommended by Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to design the Nation's Capital, one that was constructed by enslaved Black laborers…

Sadly, Bruner and Binet's theories later went from mere propaganda to formal policy, first with the Immigration Act of 1924, one that allowed full immigration from Northern Europe, limited immigration from Southern European nations that held darker whites who had intermingled with Africans through the centuries; maintained strict quotas on Asian immigrants, and held that NO immigration whatsoever was to occur from Sub-Saharan Africa! These policies remained in effect well into the late 1960's!

While some may suggest, "well, Hobbs, that was almost 100 years ago so why don't you just get over it," the fallacy in such a conclusion is that it fails to realize how the past, indeed, is prologue with respect to ideas about intellectual inferiority among the races.

Several years ago, I listened to NFL Hall of Fame defensive tackle Warren Sapp (above) discuss his struggles with the SAT prior to his enrollment at the University of Miami. Sapp argued that such tests were culturally biased and used as an example how when he was building his mansion in Tampa, that the architect kept talking about several “lanais” on the property. Sapp said, “I didn't know what a lanai was, and hadn't ever been around anyone talking about a lanai, but I damn sure knew what a porch was...” Indeed!

I was a senior at Morehouse in 1994 when "The Bell Curve," a study published by political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Hermstein, concluded that human intelligence is based on heredity. And lest we forget that a little over a decade ago, future President Donald Trump falsely accused then President Barack Obama of having had poor grades at Columbia and Harvard Law, a lie that became the truth in the minds of some Trump followers who already were conditioned to believe that a man who can hardly put together a coherent sentence (Trump), was intellectually superior to a man who was president of the Harvard Law Review—a distinction that all former law students know comes first and foremost from having superior academic marks due to blind grading—not subjective grading where the professor knows whose papers or tests are being considered!

In essence, there's all manner of intelligence within the human species, but over the past 400 years, the racist leaders of the academy have made assumptions about other races that vexes racial minorities to this very day. And unless parents or minority children are active at the schools that their kids attend, like my own parents wisely were and I and my daughter's mom are, the likelihood that some aggressive or passive aggressive racist may refuse to test your child for gifted—or track your bright child into slower classes due to their race—will only continue!

Lest we forget...