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. 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. Similarly to the Williams test, the Chitling Intelligence Test is another example of a culturally biased test that tends to favor African Americans. 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. 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. 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.