What Colour is Intelligence?: Kent County and the Tanser Study

Abstract

In 1939 Dr. Harry Ambrose Tanser, the Superintendent of Schools for Kent County, published a study entitled The Settlement of Negroes in Kent County, Ontario, and A Study of the Mental Capacity of their Descendants. This book contained the findings of a racial intelligence study Tanser had preformed on Kent County’s children that earned him a PhD in Pedagogy from the University of Toronto. Tanser’s book was a product of and contributor to the centuries long practice of scientific racism. His book was also informed by and a contributor to the historiography surrounding Black Settlement in Kent County specifically. This dissertation explores Tanser’s racist intelligence study as both a piece of Kent County’s local history and part of the larger project of white supremacy’s use of science in North America.