Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity

The Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity, or BITCH-100, is an intelligence test created by Robert Williams in 1972 oriented toward the language, attitudes, and life-styles of African Americans. The original sample used in the experiment consisted of 100 white and 100 black high school students, aged 16-18 years old – half of them being from low socioeconomic levels and the other half from middle income levels. The results of the test showed that the black group performed much better than the white group. White students perform more poorly on this test than blacks, suggesting that there are important dissimilarities in the cultural backgrounds of blacks and whites. Some argue that these findings indicate that test bias plays a role in producing the gaps in IQ test scores.

Both of these tests demonstrate how cultural content on intelligence tests may lead to culturally biased score results. Still these criticisms of cultural content may not apply to "culture free" tests of intelligence. This test is criticized to test instruments of racism. This can affect people emotionally, leading them to engage in a specifically negative mental experience due to patterned physiological activity. But this intelligence test is seen as less of a threat because it is supported by scientific validity studies. The BITCH-100 and the Chitling test both have explicit cultural assumptions, while normal standardized tests are only theorized to have implicit bias. The fact that a test can have bias does not necessarily prove that a specific test does have bias. However, even on cultural free tests, test bias may play a role since, due to their cultural backgrounds, some test takers do not have the familiarity with the language and culture of the psychological and educational tests that is implicitly assumed in the assessment procedure.

In the case of African-Americans, there is a particular problem in the test environment. Some Blacks came to America as slaves, so they came there not because they wanted to, but because they didn’t have any other choice. Therefore, these slaves and their descendants spent much of their time keeping with the behaviours of their African cultural roots, becoming conditioned by American slavery and learning these behaviours, and then trying to function successfully in the mainstream American society.

Beverly Daniel Tatum writes that dominant cultures often set the parameters by which minority cultures will be judged. Minority groups are labeled as substandard in significant ways, for example blacks have historically been characterized as less intelligent than whites. Tatum suggests that the ability to set these parameters is a form of white privilege.

Before the Civil Rights Bill was passed Blacks were existing in America so as to bolster its growth because despite of being a growing country it required free labour. However, after the Bill was passed Blacks gained the power to at least verbally be involved in protecting their rights. But the significant institutions by that time had become a strong part of the mainstream many of them engrained with the nonacceptance of the coloured population. For example the institute of testing Wechsler rejected to accept the integration of Blacks' population with the Whites' because different races, they said, would cause differences and difficulties. The greatest difficulty being the increase in number of individuals to be examined in order to adapt to norms that are feasible for all.