For all of our technological marvels, a No. 2 pencil and sheets of paper filled with oval boxes remain a key determinant of success.

Sure, plenty of high achievers didn’t ace the SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, and GMAT. But the vast majority of wealthy and influential Americans notched high scores in the alphabet soup of standardized tests, which are key gateways to the American dream.

And yet, even as we invest these measures with tremendous power, we feel uneasy about them. Sifting and sorting, differentiating people by their abilities, may be crucial to a well-run society, but it also runs counter to our bedrock commitment to equality. Hence the common narrative that these tests simply reflect privilege; scores are not earned so much as bought by people who game a rigged system for unfair advantages. As the Black Lives Matter riots arose in 2020, this thinking led top universities to stop requiring test scores for admission – a policy many have now reversed after finding it difficult to assess applicants without them.

While the intelligentsia seeks to have it both ways on standardized testing, depending on and demonizing them at once, they remain committed to casting another effective measure of ability as beyond the pale: Intelligence Quotient tests. IQ may be scientifically sound and powerfully predictive of outcomes, but it is political dynamite because of the profound challenge it poses to the equality thesis. This concept holds that, by and large, we are all born to the same. Differences emerge almost immediately as the environment, especially family life and access to quality education, starts writing on the blank slates of our minds.

IQ challenges this narrative because it measures innate capacity. You can’t study for the test or hire tutors to boost your score, which remains stable throughout your lifetime. The prince and the pauper can swap their positions of wealth and status, but not their ability to solve problems.

A person’s IQ, of course, does not reflect one’s human worth, dignity, or goodness – lots of rotten people have high IQs. But those with high IQs are better able to master complex ideas and processes, to perform the tasks that often lead to material success. A successful society identifies and empowers these people so their gifts can benefit the rest of us.

We may bow to the importance of IQ by acknowledging the genetic advantages of those at the tippy-top of their fields – hard as we try, you and I were never going to be another Albert Einstein or Marilyn Vos Savant. But we also pretend that the rest of us are pretty much the same.

This is nonsense – and everybody knows it. Intelligence isn’t distributed along a sideways hockey stick but along a bell curve. Human beings evince a range of intellect. But our commitment to equality is so strong that in society – though not in private conversation – we deny it.

Unlike the similar critiques of standardized tests, this equality argument is more often implied than voiced when it comes to IQ because the science leads to the opposite conclusion. Basically, we try to wish and censor it away.

IQ is doubly taboo because on the rare occasions when it is discussed, it is usually in the context of race. Charles Murray, for example, was pilloried two decades ago for exploring these connections with co-author Richard J. Herrnstein in “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.” Today, another American academic, Nathan Cofnas, is facing criminal charges for violating Belgium’s antiracism laws regarding his work exploring the persistent IQ gap between African Americans and other groups.

While our free speech laws protect Cofnas – who discussed his research in a recent episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast – from prosecution in America, his work remains verboten. Two black scholars, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, expressed a prevailing view about this issue in their recent interview with Cofnas when they acknowledged that the data about race and IQ – which has found African Americans, as a group, score about 15 points lower than whites and Asians – was accurate but questioned the point of discussing it. “Why do we need to talk about that?” McWhorter asked. “What is the point in how we are organizing society … [in] show[ing] us that black people have the lowest IQs?”

It is hard to argue with Cofnas’ response that, given the predictive value of IQ, intellectual honesty demands that we consider it when interpreting outcomes and devising public policy. The code of silence McWhorter advocates would only remove a key data point from our understanding of the obstacles people face. Cofnas’ focus on race, however, also clouds the issue.

If anything, the IQ gap provides a strong argument for a colorblind society. It is absurd to categorize people according to race and ethnicity. No group has a pure lineage. Asian, black, and white Americans came from far-flung corners of the globe, with different cultural and genetic histories.

Dumping these disparate peoples into concocted entities erases these significant differences. It engenders racist thinking by prompting us to see people as members of groups rather than unique individuals. By assigning them to artificially created entities – and then expecting those constructs to have equal outcomes – we falsely advance a form of biological determinism sharply at odds with the equality thesis by casting race and ethnicity as overriding determinants of success rather than ability. Your race is your destiny. This makes it hard for us to identify the consequential factors shared by many individuals across these groups that may make it hard for them to reach their potential.

Now a reality check: A truly colorblind society is not going to emerge any time soon because race and ethnicity serve as sources of identity and belonging. They may be arbitrary social constructs, but they also serve a powerful purpose. In addition, the equality thesis is so attractive from a moral and a political perspective that we are unlikely to abandon it. Believing that anyone can rise to the top is, after all, the essence of the American dream.

Since we seem destined to continue embracing the equality thesis, the persistent gaps in IQ and other test scores behoove us to acknowledge that our efforts – robust anti-discrimination laws and massive social spending – have not worked. In some sense, DEI efforts are an admission of that failure, as they seek to reapportion society’s spoils based on race rather than merit. This brute-force approach, however, also leads to division and discrimination while doing nothing to help people become more qualified. 

Greater minds than mine will have to figure out the path forward. But expecting a different result from the same action is stupid.

J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. Follow him on X @jpederzane.