Colonial Legacies in Education: Historicizing the Making of the Bilingual Child as a Raciolinguistic Category in the United States

Background: Over recent decades, celebratory discourses on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism have flourished in education and popular media. But critical language scholars have raised concerns that such discourses conceal racialized and colonial legacies underlying prevailing definitions of bilingualism—and particularly how the co-naturalization of language and race racializes linguistic competence, making the bilingualism of some groups appear superior to that of others. Yet little attention has been paid to the material and epistemic tools that enabled such classificatory distinctions. Purpose: This study approaches the bilingual child not as a subject to celebrate or remediate but as a historical category requiring explanation. I argue that the bilingual child emerged as a raciolinguistic category within the eugenic project of measuring, ranking, and ordering degrees of humanness during the first decades of the 20th century in educational psychology—and that the psychometric tools developed to measure linguistic difference were constitutive of, rather than incidental to, this process. The central question is: How did these tools designed to address the “language handicap” reassemble racial hierarchies through the racialization of linguistic difference—and how do these raciolinguistic logics persist in contemporary educational research and practice? Research Design: The historical archive consists of educational psychology publications from the 1910s to 1930s—books, journal articles, dissertations, and manuals. The analysis centers on Rudolf Pintner (1884–1942), a Columbia University educational psychologist and leading figure in nonverbal intelligence testing, and his students. Nonverbal intelligence tests and Hoffman’s Bilingual Background Schedule are approached not as neutral measurement tools but as instruments that racialized linguistic difference. The argument unfolds in three movements: situating the 19th-century entanglement of race, language, and intelligence; historicizing the fabrication of the bilingual child as a raciolinguistic category in the 1910s–1930s; and tracing these raciolinguistic logics into contemporary educational research. Conclusions: The analysis situates these instruments within eugenic anxieties about heredity, intelligence, and human worth, showing how they reorganized racial hierarchies through linguistic traits while appearing to leave race behind. As this category traveled across the 20th century, it became a black box—the raciolinguistic logics through which it first emerged became invisible, reassembling as common sense. Contemporary categories such as “balanced bilingual” carry these raciolinguistic logics beneath the appearance of linguistic neutrality. Although the language has shifted from heredity to linguistic competence, the classificatory tools and logics that racialize linguistic difference endure—shaping what can be seen and said about bilingual children today.