“Young, gifted and black

Oh what a lovely precious dream

To be young, gifted and black

Open your heart to what I mean”

—Nina Simone, “Young, Gifted, and Black”

Inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s autobiographical play “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” singer Nina Simone released her song “Young, Gifted, and Black” in 1969. First performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival, the song became an anthem of the Black Power movement. The track was taken up and reinterpreted by artists ranging from Donny Hathaway to Aretha Franklin and, as it permeated collective consciousness, gave expression to something that dearly needed to be articulated: that Black youth ought to know that they are wellsprings of intelligence and capability, even when the world around them denies this.

In the late 1960s and 70s when this song hit the airwaves, this capacious use of the word “gifted” was a crucial intervention into discourse.

About sixty years prior, psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman popularized the concept of IQ (or “intelligence quotient”) as measured by the Stanford-Binet IQ Test—the traditional basis for admission to gifted programs in schools. Terman’s framework measured intelligence in highly reductive ways that did not adequately account for the multidimensionality of intelligence nor control for a host of contextual factors. In his book The Measurement of Intelligence, Terman leveraged his test to argue that Black, Mexican, and Indigenous people were intellectually inferior to whites—a mode of explanation that was subsequently taken up by policymakers toward a number of destructive ends, including advancing forced sterilization policies that targeted people of color and the disabled.

Despite its stark limitations, IQ has endured as a legitimate measure of intelligence in the fields of psychology and education. IQ has also been invoked to explain a whole host of social phenomena, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life being one prominent example. Reviving aspects of Terman’s project inaugurated nearly a century earlier, their book posited that there is an intrinsic, genetic relationship between race and intelligence as measured by the IQ test. Though subsequently challenged in Stephen Jay Gould’s landmark book The Mismeasure of Man and elsewhere, IQ remains a widely-deployed measure of intelligence—shaping educational policy, institutional programming, and people’s self-perceptions in ways that have been limiting at best and extraordinarily harmful at worst. In schools, it remains the primary measure used to admit students to gifted programs.

So How is “Giftedness” Defined, Exactly?

Children have traditionally been labeled gifted if their IQ is measured at 130 or higher, but for the reasons noted above and more, this is an insufficient measure. IQ fails to capture a whole host of inner capacities central to intelligence including creativity and divergent thinking.

Traits traditionally associated with giftedness include:

• Specific academic aptitudes
• Rapid learning
• Creative and productive thinking
• High academic achievement
• Superior proficiency in one of more domains (including academic, artistic, interpersonal)

But this standard definition of giftedness continues to be challenged by experts in the field, particularly where academic achievement is concerned. Many of the children most capable of creative, divergent, and independent thought are bored by the pace and level of instruction that offers the average learner sufficient stimulation. As such, many of those students experience demotivation in the academic context, do not become top performers in school, and are not identified as gifted despite having inner needs that track with emerging conceptions of giftedness.

Uncoupling the gifted experience from the limiting framework of academic performance, psychologist Mary-Elaine Jacobsen is one of the figures complicating how giftedness is conceptualized. She identifies a number of additional distinguishing traits of gifted people in her book The Gifted Adult including:

• Uncommon levels of intensity, complexity, and drive
• Heightened perceptual abilities
• Elevated awareness of discrepancies between how things are and how they ought to be
• A profound need to live authentically coupled with more rapid inner evolution
• A profound need to make a broad social impact

Additional conceptions of intelligence have arisen in recent decades to complicate the simplistic picture of ability that IQ posits. One of them is developmental psychologist Howard Gardner’s notion of multiple intelligences which defines nine different domains of intelligence (i.e., verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial-visual, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, and existential).

The growing awareness of Gardner’s model has helped to reshape programming in many educational settings as well as many people’s perceptions of their own strengths (e.g., from someone with an “average” IQ to someone who exhibits elevated musical and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence as a high-performing athlete). It must be noted, however, that the multiple intelligences that every human exhibits are distinct from the intensity, complexity, and drive that Jacobsen pinpoints. She argues this latter group of traits manifest as a multiplier effect, lending unique shape to an individual’s expressions of intelligence across the nine areas that Gardner enumerates.

From Jacobsen’s vantage point as a researcher and clinician, it is the presence of atypical levels of intensity, complexity, and drive in the expression of one’s intelligences that denotes a gifted person.

It must be said that giftedness as it is defined here does not imply superiority, but rather a persistent and incontrovertible set of needs—in this case, for both authentic expression and appropriate stimulation. In Toward a Psychology of Being, psychologist Abraham Maslow famously wrote: “People with intelligence must use their intelligence… Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs.”

In other words, we are all driven by the urge to meet our needs, and the people to whom we apply this label “gifted” have needs that are substantially different from the norm. Just as students enrolled in special education present with their own constellations of needs, so too do students (and adults) who exhibit giftedness. Unfortunately, one of the most significant barriers to meeting these needs is that so many people who exhibit gifted traits are never identified.

Giftedness in Schools and Beyond

Despite the emergence of these more expansive definitions and frameworks for identifying atypical ability, barriers to identification endure, especially for many children of color.

Recent federal data reveals that white children in the U.S. comprise nearly 60% of the students participating in gifted education despite comprising 50% of the overall student population. Meanwhile, Black students made up only 9% of students participating in gifted education despite accounting for 15% of the overall student population. For many people, such statistics are evidence of the enduring mismeasurement of Black intelligence, and cast doubt on the sheer notion of giftedness and its measurability. Meanwhile, questions have arisen in some schools surrounding the efficacy of gifted programming while others have identified gifted programming as one more component of prejudicial tracking systems that sort students into remedial, standard, and advanced tracks and ultimately drive inequity. These and other concerns have prompted some school districts to dispense with gifted programming altogether and begin piloting educational approaches that do not attend to the needs of gifted students specifically.

Though these conversations surrounding educational policy are of vital importance, my aim here is to disentangle them from what I consider to be a separate, and perhaps more fundamental, task. This task is grasping that giftedness—however complicated its emergence as a concept and our attempts to measure it—is a real phenomenon that profoundly shapes people’s life experiences and most fundamental needs within and beyond the classroom throughout the lifespan.

Conversations about giftedness that foreground its academic manifestations have left a number of crucial questions largely unexplored—among them, the significance of giftedness as a core dimension of one’s being that presents specific challenges and opportunities in every area of one’s life (e.g., physical, social, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, artistic, etc). Seen through this prism, it becomes evident that the battles raging over gifted education represent only one component of a larger challenge to grasp the vastness of human neurodiversity and how to meet the wide array of needs that come along with that diversity.

Various thought leaders and organizations in the gifted space are pioneering crucial work in this area, reappropriating the insights of educational psychology to the broader task of elaborating gifted psychologies that extend across the lifespan and offering direct support. Among their aims is correcting the misguided notion that once a gifted child grows up, they will inevitably become an eminent superstar unburdened of the challenges that accompany uncommon ability in childhood. Irrespective of one’s outer signifiers of success, gifted adults navigate the world with atypical machinery that demands targeted, skillful support from others who can mirror their multitudes. The specific multitudes contained in the experiences of Black gifted adults have not been widely elaborated.

Adult, Gifted and Black

Black adults who are gifted face a unique constellation of challenges in the world. These include being someone who, simply by existing, thwarts racist conceptions of Black people that remain pervasive: namely that we are merely fleshly beings without interiority and high intellectual capacity. To depart from this script as a Black person is to elicit confusion, derision, disbelief, amusement, suspicion, pathologization, and even rapt fascination—all of them dehumanizing. These demoralizing, disorienting experiences—particularly when recurrent—induce trauma responses that induce numbness and hopelessness, promoting alienation from oneself and the world.

These expectations are reinforced by educators and mental health professionals who are often ill-equipped to encounter and support the Black people they serve on their own terms. To complicate matters further, the notion that Black people do not naturally exhibit intellectual giftedness—and that they are being disingenuous when they do—is sometimes reinforced by Black people themselves. Due to various factors including the racist history of intelligence testing and tracking that has already been elucidated here, there are some Black people who associate shows of intellectualism (including academic achievement and high verbal dexterity) with white people or, if a Black person is doing it, a misguided attempt to “act white” and gain the favor of white people through an act of deception.

Thought leaders in the gifted space often write about the social-emotional consequences of gifted people experiencing a lack of mirroring in their social interactions due to an underlying difference in the level of complexity that structures a gifted person’s life experience and the resulting challenge of having to “translate” the contents to someone without acknowledging that translation is occurring. For gifted Black people, this difficulty and barriers to mirroring is on an altogether different level, and it confronts us from multiple directions.

But the task of finding support has remained difficult. Though Black people on the whole are increasingly turning to psychotherapists for support, mental health practitioners are not generally trained to work with giftedness and often pathologize its manifestations out of ignorance. There are very few therapists who specialize in work with gifted client populations and, as of this writing, this author is not aware of even one such therapist who identifies as both gifted and Black in the U.S. Another challenge is that therapists, coaches, and others in the gifted space are overwhelmingly white and may exhibit an insufficient grasp of a number of important issues relevant to gifted Black experiences. These include the significance of racism in the lives of gifted Black people, the manner in which racism has shaped conceptions of giftedness itself, and the potential to fundamentally misunderstand the Black client’s interior experience. Any of these can lead to unhelpful or damaging experiences that are burdensome rather than supportive for the client.

For these reasons and others not enumerated here, gifted Black people need to have spaces of support that are Black-led and attend to the specific constellation of social and psychological factors that imbue our worlds with unique challenges and possibilities.

Nurturing Black Brilliance

At the time of this writing, this author is not aware of existing programming, coaching, or clinical services that attend to the particular experiences of Black people who identify as gifted and/or twice-exceptional (i.e., exhibiting both giftedness and disability). In light of this gap, I have decided to offer a first-of-its-kind online learning experience that does just that.

Drawing upon my training in psychodynamic psychotherapy, continuing education in gifted psychology, ecopsychology, and expansive humanistic education, my program—Black Brilliance Circle—will engage a group of gifted Black adults in a 6-month journey of community learning, healing, and reflection beginning in June 2023.

Learn more and apply to join the experience at ourwildminds.com/black-brilliance-circle.