I’ll be straight with this: I think that intelligence assessments and quotients have the potential to be geared against a great plurality of the wide breadth of neurodiversity.
Humanity and human culture already have a long-standing bigotry against those humans who are born with or gradually develop conditions which pull us away from long-accepted (and long-shifted) norms and typicalities of neural processing and projection. The most vocabulary-laden languages, especially English, possess multiple words which describe those people or things which are not up to the intellectual or behavioral snuff of the beholding individual, and most such words are most commonly used in a highly-pejorative manner.
Furthermore, there’s the long-standing controversy about past scholastic and medical correlations between race/ethnicity and intelligence, including controversy about the origins of IQ tests and the controversy about eugenics. I think that the fact that such correlations between race/ethnicity and intelligence occurred or were given such credence in favor or protest in rejection at all is a "big red sign" that points more to our historic fears and hang-ups of alteration of stereotypical mental or behavioral standards which are expected from every human individual than our fears and hang-ups of alteration of ethnoracial (or even ethnoreligious) statuses quo; otherwise, the Germans and Americans would not have enforced the Jewish quotas on college entries (and restrict what the Germans called "Jewish science") nor would the Americans (and South Africans) have enforced segregation laws against people of African ancestry to such extents as they did. In human society (especially Western society), intelligence = money = power = respect, and to be an ethnoracial or ethnoreligious minority with stereotypically too much or too little of "intelligence" makes you a target of a manipulated majority.
What if such hang-ups over intellectual, mental or behavioral assessments have an effect on how we assess the full breadth of neurodiversity? Should hang-ups over past correlations between race and intelligence affect how we assess such a breadth, or should those who advocate for neurodiverse equality and recognition before the law and the market also work to empower those who may be at a disadvantage due to the standard neurotypical bias against them?
Even if the concept of neurodiversity can be expanded to include all of the WHO’s ICD-9 codes for mental and behavioral disorders rather than just the particular subset of pervasive psychological/developmental disorders (in which you’ll find autism, Rett’s syndrome and Asperger’s syndrome), I don’t think that we should discard race or ethnicity from such-dependent mental or behavioral assessments, but I do think that being assessed within this range should be a source of shame for anyone, either.
Hmm
Very interesting. Thanks for posting this, its very interesting to think about