Racialization of Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 960 SAT Score

“I’m like you; I’m no better than you,” California governor Gavin Newsom told Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens and people in the audience at a recent event on his book tour. “I’m a 960 SAT guy. And, you know, and I’m not trying to offend anyone, trying to act all there if you got 940.” It sounded like many people in the room laughed. Newsom went on to talk about his inability to read a prepared speech.

Rebukes of his remarks were swift and strong, especially on conservative news channels and social media.

Tim Scott of South Carolina, our nation’s only Black Republican U.S. senator, wrote on X, “Black Americans aren’t your low bar. We’ve built empires, created movements, outworked, outhustled and outsmarted people like you. Stop using your mediocre academics as a way to patronize communities. Its [sic] ridiculous!”

Rapper Nicki Minaj, like Scott, deemed the comments racially problematic. “His way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can’t read,” the 12-time Grammy-nominated artist and recent high-profile MAGA ambassador wrote on social media.

“Take it from someone who was actually in the chair asking the questions: Context matters more than a headline,” Dickens noted in an Instagram post. “The conversation around his new book included him speaking about his own academic struggles, including not doing well on the SAT. That wasn’t an attack on anyone. It was a moment of vulnerability about his own journey.”

This was not the governor’s first time disclosing these personal details. He has done so in settings comprised predominantly of white attendees, as well as in a March 2025 podcast interview with Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk.

Inside Higher Ed has not authenticated this five-second clip from the Atlanta book tour event. It shows that the crowd was not entirely or perhaps even overwhelmingly Black. Newsom’s critics likely presumed it was because the event was held in Atlanta, a city that is 46 percent Black, according to U.S. Census data. Without confirmation of the demographic composition of the audience, conservative talk show host Sean Hannity declared that Newsom “thinks a 960 SAT makes him ‘like’ Black Americans.”

The governor did not appreciate the Fox News host’s apparent double standard. “You didn’t give a shit about the President of the United States of America posting an ape video of President Obama or calling African nations shitholes—but you’re going to call me racist for talking about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia,” Newsom posted on X. “Spare me your fake fucking outrage, Sean.”

No one, including white people across political parties, should give anybody a pass for associating Black Americans with low IQs, low SAT scores or any racist claim of intellectual inferiority. Nevertheless, in this situation involving Newsom, there are at least three noteworthy realities. First is that outrage about his comments emerged in the absence of actual data about who was in the audience.

Second, let’s imagine for a moment that the room was indeed predominantly Black: Would their mayor, a Black man, have allowed a white Californian to make such obviously racist remarks without calling him on it or inviting him to clarify what he meant? Dickens’s laugh in response to Newsom’s statements appeared neither awkward nor cringe. While much attention has been devoted to what Scott and Minaj had to say (and, to a lesser extent, a Fox News interview with Corrin Rankin, the California GOP chair, who is Black), there has not been an avalanche of outrage expressed by Black people who were actually at the event. Their voices on this matter most.

A long-standing critique of Democrats pandering to Black people is a third noteworthy dimension of this story. In an April 2016 Breakfast Club interview, Hillary Clinton was asked what is something that she always carries. “Hot sauce,” the then–presidential candidate replied within a split second; she required no time to contemplate this response. Some people interpreted this as a cheap attempt to appeal culturally to Black people. But, as it turns out, sources confirmed that the former secretary of state does, in fact, carry Ninja Squirrel hot sauce in her bag. Because Newsom talks so openly and repeatedly about his disability and relatively low SAT performance across a multitude of audiences, he was not seeking to connect with Black Georgians in particular over their presumably low scores on a standardized test.

The final two points are perhaps most important. According to the College Board, makers of the SAT, the average score is 1050. U.S. Department of Education data shows it is around 908 for Black students who took the test as high school seniors. There are long-standing racial differences in performance on this exam, as well as on the ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT and other standardized tests. Wealth disparities exacerbate these disparities.

This surely is not something for a governor or anyone else to recklessly leverage in attempts to connect with Black Americans. It is not a badge of honor for most of us, because we know how useless such exams are in measuring our potential, confirming our intelligence or predicting our futures (insists a very smart and extraordinarily successful Black academician—call him a Resident Scholar—whose GRE score never reached 1000 after four attempts).

Finally, it is plausible that Newsom wanted Georgians to understand that a dyslexic person with a 960 SAT score could become governor of our nation’s most populous state and stand a chance of being elected U.S. president in the future. If that was indeed his goal, then Newsom is right about one of higher education’s most powerful gatekeeping tools: The SAT does not determine long-term success.