Thread by @brooklynmarie

Christ

But since people are searching for #eugenics, here’s a handy thread that I just wrote yesterday about how all those “hardline immigration” groups are actually rebranded pro-eugenics groups trying to launder whites supremacist horseshit. Enjoy

https://twitter.com/brooklynmarie/status/1228871853625638912?s=21

https://twitter.com/brooklynmarie/status/1228871853625638912

Since IQ science seems to be a thing right now too: I was tested in the 1980s at the beginning of that whole gifted kids thing, which even back as kid I found wrong and disturbing. I was deemed "profoundly gifted" with an IQ that could not even be measured -- they gave my mom a

number with a plus sign at the end of it. Everyone told me I was going to save the world, just like the rest of us seminar kids. Don't ever do that to a kid, it fucks you up.

Anyway, I was also super troubled. I was interfered with in various ways by various shitty adults,

both within and without my family. All the people who told me I was a super-genius abandoned me at the first sign of moody adolescence. I won't get too into it, but I ended up dropping out of high school at sixteen and disappointing everyone who had thought that my IQ was destiny

But even in the weird-kids group, I was one of the weirdest. I was always asking questions that made everyone uncomfortable, I didn't fit in even there. And as I got older and less adorable, fewer people were willing to engage with me. Then puberty hit, and oh God did I ever get

a lesson in how intelligence isn't really a defining characteristic -- if you aren't a white male. To this day, I have all sorts of idiots wasting my time by explaining the obvious to me or parroting my own research back to me as though it's their own. To say nothing of the theft

of credit and content that has dogged my entire career. But anyway, because of all this, I ended up diving into the literature and research around the profoundly gifted, thinking that at least I could find someone out there like me -- an authority-despising dropout Bad Kid --

and found to my dismay that most of the literature on profound giftedness ended when the gifted kid turned 18. There was almost nothing out there around the lives of profoundly gifted adults. We were invisible. Why? I wondered. Part of it was that the concept of "intelligence" as

we recognize it is a straight up eugenics-based concept. What is it? Gestalt? Entelechy? Reasoning skills? A predisposition toward science, math, emotional intelligence? If I was so smart, why hadn't I been able to handle high school? My GPA when I dropped out was 1.9 lol

The truth is, it's a slippery concept that is too often conflated with wealth or earning potential in the United States (and elsewhere.) It's another type of negotiated identity. The truth is, what we recognize as intelligence, or did when I was scoring out of the Stanford-Binet,

is part of a constellation of other personality characteristics that has little to do with other issues commonly conflated with intelligence. It is profoundly misunderstood. It's also based on some pretty racist tests. I lived in a majority non-white neighborhood and the school I

attended was almost entirely non-white students. And yet my seminar cohort for five years of elementary school was almost all white. I hated it. It made no sense to me. I asked every adult who would give me the time of day and never got a straight answer, of course.

Anyway with all these experiences under my belt I started reading about the Raven test and the Dove test and the Stanford-Binet and all the rest. I found that those with characteristics commonly associated with what we call profound intelligence and giftedness were as follows:

1. Strong inner structure and moral compass - a highly developed internal sense of right vs. wrong.
2. Intense curiosity - a need to know and find out.
3. A sense of the world and its inhabitants as one, and a love for it in its entirety (big old hippies.)
4. Divergent thinking.

5. Extreme sensory processing sensitivity.
6. Prodigious energy and drive.
7. A strong sense of equality.
8. Vivid imaginations.

In other words, those our society recognizes as "profoundly gifted" -- the ones who go straight to the end of the test -- are the ones least likely to

champion known bullshit like eugenics. But because divergent thinking is not friendly to the status quo, they are generally sidelined from discussionz rather than embraced and valued for their own contributions to society -- especially by those who purport to value intelligence.

For further reading on the concept of "profound giftedness":

pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/GiftedP…
davidsongifted.org/search-databas…
sengifted.org/post/exception…