"How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives": Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought

Abstract

From the late 1920s into the early 1950s, a loose network of social scientists, known as the “culture-and-personality school,” collaborated in an epistemic shift in social thought that reverberated through the rest of the twentieth century. They explicitly rejected biological theories of race and investigated instead how different “cultures” produced diverse patterns of human behavior. In the past two decades, some historians, including Elazar Barkan, Lee D. Baker, and John P. Jackson, have applauded the liberalism of the culture-and-personality vision of race, while others, including Peggy Pascoe, Daryl Michael Scott, and Alice O'Connor, have critiqued it. In either case, historians agree that the cultural approach shaped the intellectual and legal history of race and the civil rights movement. For example, culture-and-personality theorists had direct and indirect roles in the writing of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944), the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (unesco) statement on race (1950), and the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision (1954).1