Race in the Violence of Violence

This essay examines the work of Jewish social scientists who in the first decades of this century analyzed modern Jewish life from the perspective of anthropology and medicine. While the historiography of the social and racial sciences has focused almost exclusively on the Jews as objects of these sciences, scholars have begun to explore the degree to which Jews themselves were involved in social and racial scientific research about their own people. Trained in the natural and social sciences, Jewish researchers shared the same conceptual and methodological framework as their non-Jewish counterparts. Yet they had their own social and political agendas, and they used their research to achieve these. This essay demonstrates that Jewish social scientists, while united in their desire to counter scientific anti-Semitism through the use of social science, nonetheless were divided in the political or ideological conclusions they drew from their findings. More specifically, the essay shows how anthropological an...

6. The Evolution of Racism in GuatemalaHegemony, Science, and Antihegemony Richard N. Adams (bio) Over the past 100 years the meaning of "race" and "racism" has undergone a series of transformations as different sectors of the world's peoples constructed models for their particular needs. At the turn of the 20th century, race referred to populations that shared common cultural and biological origins and that were usually allocated within a hierarchical ordering of the larger society. It was widely but not universally held that behavior was in some manner hinged to biological inheritance. The term racism referred to ideas about the behavior-biology linkage that facilitated the political hegemony of one society or social segment over another. Colonial and European industrial society saw ethnically distinctive peoples as separate and inferior "races," and they, in turn, reciprocated with antihegemonic ideas about their oppressors, recognizing them too as separate races, although often accepting the characterizations of their own inferiority. The racism that emerged most clearly in this era was that of the dominant classes—be they socioeconomic classes of the industrializing societies or the colonialist classes of the imperial world. The clearest expression of prejudice and discrimination marked the behavior of these hegemonic classes and manifested what I will here refer to as "hegemonic" racism.1 A new construction emerged in the first half of the 20th century from the work of Euro-American scientists and social scientists who rejected the notion that biological inheritance could account for social behavioral difference. For them social behavior, culture, was socially transmitted. I will refer to this as "scientific" racism because of its origin among scientists, not as a claim to its value as truth.2 This development was particularly important in the United States, where race could then be argued to be less of an obstacle to the assimilation of European immigrants into U.S. society. The scientific view held that the term race was to be restricted to the purely biological. These arguments at first gained ground slowly in Western intellectual communities, but with the emergence of Nazi hegemonic racist politics, the differentiation of cultural behavior from the [End Page 132] biological race became politically significant for many Westerners. World War II brought these concerns further into focus, and with the founding of the United Nations, UNESCO formulated the first of a number of statements on race that basically conformed to the positions taken by the social and genetic scientists. They allocated "race" to being something that had to do with biology, whereas social and cultural behaviors were totally independent. These statements paid little attention to the hegemonic role of racism. With the end of World War II, the breakup of colonial empires challenged the hegemonic position on race and led to overt accusations of racism by colonized peoples against the imperial powers and their societies. This evolved into a distinctive position marked by characteristics that differentiated it from the previous hegemonic and scientific positions. I will call this "antihegemonic" racism.3 The principal elements that marked it were (1) the rejection of the hegemonic usage that linked culture and biology, and the acceptance of the scientific position; (2) the definition of racist groups by social opposition and political dominance rather than by common origins or inheritance of either biological or cultural antecedents; (3) the claim that racism is practiced only by the hegemonic; (4) the exhibition of discrimination and prejudice against the hegemonic racists; and (5) the use of any traits—cultural and/or biological—as identifying markers of race for purposes of identity and discrimination. This construction in many instances followed the prevailing elimination of the biological component but retained the earlier vocabulary and called it "racism." This racism was defined by colonialist oppression and was a racism without biological race. This perspective was central in the founding of many new states and became important to the New World subordinated indigenous peoples and peoples of the African Diaspora, who began to seek their revindication in the New World and other regions where "internal colonialism" prevailed. While this new racism gained wider acceptance in some parts of the world, the older forms of racist thought—hegemonic and scientific—did not disappear...

Reviewed by: Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity Keith H. Pickus Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity, by Mitchell B. Hart. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 340 pp. $55.00. Given the horrific legacy of Nazi racial policy, it is not surprising that Jewish historians have been hesitant to investigate how Jews employed racial categories to advance their own ideological and political agendas. The uninformed observer might mistakenly believe that categories of “otherness” based primarily on racial constructs were the exclusive purview of antisemites. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. As a race-based scientific discourse became the normative interpretive paradigm in the late nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals, fully acculturated within the European academic setting, utilized this model to evaluate Jewish society. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing unabated until the 1930s, Jewish social scientists actively contributed to the on-going debates about Jewry’s essential characteristics and the position of Jews within European society. Mitchell Hart’s book on the subject presents a richly detailed account of the “relationship between social science, Jewish scholarship, and Jewish politics” (p. 3). As social scientists developed “objective statistical criteria” to define the abnormal condition of modern Jewry, Jewish social scientists constructed “their own narratives around the statistics about the Jewish present and future” (p. 8). Rather than completely rejecting the pathological descriptions of Jews attributed to them by their Gentile [End Page 130] colleagues, Jewish social scientists explained their origins and offered ameliorative prescriptives. Zionists, in particular, used the tools of modern social science to reject the identification of Jews as solely a religious community and to redefine them as “Volk and nation” (p. 17). For both Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish social scientists, the politics of identity formation occupied center stage of their academic enterprises. Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity begins by examining the Verein für jüdische Statistik, the institutional basis of Jewish social science. Founded in 1904, the organization was largely, but not exclusively, a Zionist enterprise. The Democratic Faction of the Zionist movement saw the Verein as a mechanism to sub stantiate the “essential national characteristics” of Jews. The organization’s first direc tor, Arthur Ruppin, utilized the Verein to objectify and validate the Zionist discourse. Once the institutional basis of Jewish social science is presented, Hart turns to a thematic analysis of the debates that pre-occupied European and North American social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fertility, intermarriage, medical imagery, statistics, racial anthropology, iconography, and other topics serve as grist for the social scientific mill. In each case, Jewish social scientists situated themselves within established areas of academic discourse to produce works that addressed specifically Jewish concerns. Each level of analysis reveals the extent to which Jews were completely acculturated within the intellectual environment of the era, but still in need of explaining their foreignness. It is little wonder, therefore, that the Zionists eagerly took up the tools of social science to argue against the continued existence of Jewish life in the Diaspora and to expound on the need to establish a permanent Jewish national homeland. Their depiction of western assimilated Jewry as “sick and degenerate” reversed the enlightened narrative of progress that dominated throughout the nineteenth century (p. 108). Hart is at his best when explicating the multiple contexts that informed the work of Jewish social scientists. All Jewish social scientists, regardless of national orientation, were members of a single “interpretive community,” one united by “methodology” and “key assumptions” (p. 139). In spite of this common methodology, however, they were also partisans of an intense ideological war that proffered antagonistic interpretations of Jewish life in the Diaspora. Moreover, their analyses were informed by the national contexts in which they worked. Given the politically charged atmosphere in which Jewish social scientists operated, it is proper that the author pointedly challenges the readiness of contemporary historians to rely uncritically on the statistics produced by these “experts.” My criticism of Hart’s book stems largely from personal historiographical interests and biases. While the thematic organization illuminates “the fundamental discursive concepts . . . through which Jewish social scientific narratives were constructed” (p. 246), I...

Author’s introduction Over the last 20 years, there has been a technological advance and commercial boom in genetic technologies and projects. These developments include a renewed scientific interest in the biological status and genetic constitution of race. This aspect of genetic research is of interest to sociologists and others working in the field of race and ethnicity studies. While the consensus among sociologists is that race is a social construction with no biological foundations, innovations in genetic research have pushed sociologists and other social scientists to reflect upon the ways in which ideas of biology mediate everyday understandings of race. Anthropologists, cultural geographers and sociologists have begun to study the complex and ambivalent ways in which laypeople think about the biological and genetic constitution of racial identities. Central to this area of inquiry has been analysis of laypeople’s engagements with the new reproductive technologies, such as IVF. In addition, social scientists have begun to study laypeople’s uses of genealogical technologies that claim to trace family ancestries, including racial descent and ethnic origins. Ultimately, such studies enable a deeper understanding of the social construction of ‘race’, and in the course of so doing provide an important research avenue to challenge racism. Author recommends Wade, Peter 2002. Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective . London: Pluto Press. In this book, Peter Wade argues that anthropological studies of kinship provide a lens to think about how ideas of nature and culture mediate the formation of racial identities. Drawing upon studies from within anthropology, Wade contends that an increasing emphasis upon the ‘gene’ at the everyday level does not necessarily signify a growing genetic/biological determinism in laypeople’s conceptions of race and human nature. Rather, he suggests anthropological studies that explore the biological and social ‘origins’ of persons can be deployed to unpack ‘everyday’ understandings of the relationship between ideas of ‘race’, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. In his review of anthropological approaches to the study of ‘race’, Wade (2002, 15) writes that, ‘People…move between the biological and the social, the given and the developing, the permanent and the changeable, in ways that blur the boundary between them’. Skinner, D. 2006. ‘Racialized Futures: Biologism and the Changing Politics of Identity.’ Social Studies of Science 36 : 459–88. In this paper, David Skinner examines sociologists’ and scientists’ reflections on the social and ethical implications of recent research on race and genetics. He argues research on race and genetics has led to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future: ‘one in which scientific racism is revived, the other in which science finally abolishes race thinking’. Skinner contends that detailed critical attention needs to be paid to existing notions of relatedness, personhood and nature/culture, to understand the implication of genetic science on racial thinking. Franklin, S. and S. Mckinnon (eds) 2001. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. This book provides a collection of articles that represent the diversity of perspectives that constitute the ‘new kinship studies’ within anthropology. Chapters by Kath Weston, Charis Thompson and Signe Howell focus explicitly upon how ideas of biology, blood and culture mediate the formation of racial identities within everyday and popular discourses. In this vein, Thompson explores how kinship ideologies become reconfigured by people who take‐up the opportunities offered by the new reproductive technologies, for example, ova and sperm donation. In so doing, Thompson’s study illuminates the ways in which these recent clinical practices have opened a space for anthropologists to examine how ideas about biogenetic and social relatedness within families and across generations become intersected with ideas about the inheritance of ethnic and racial identities. Wade, Peter (ed.) 2007. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics . Oxford: Berghahn, New York. This book brings together a collection of essays written by scholars who worked collaboratively for 3 years exploring everyday articulations of race, ethnicity and genetics across Europe in the face of innovations in genetic science. The book draws upon a rich array of anthropological studies of ‘assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed‐race families, Basque identity politics and post‐Soviet nation‐building’ to explore how ideas of race, ethnicity, nation and nature are lived and experienced by people within differing European social contexts. Tyler, Katharine, 2009. ‘Whiteness Studies and Laypeople's Engagements with Race and Genetics.’ New Genetics and Society 28 (1): 36–48. In this paper, Tyler proposes a research strategy for examining laypeople’s thoughts and reflections on innovations in the science of race and genetics. While some sociologists have shown a reluctance to engage in such discussions, Tyler argues that social scientists need to take such views seriously. To do this, the paper brings together an anthropological approach to the study of scientific literacy and recent scholarship in the field of Whiteness studies. The combining of these literatures raises a set of interesting and sometimes uncomfortable questions about the ways in which social scientists and research participants contribute to the reproduction of White power and dominance in Western societies. Online materials ‘Ten commandments’ of race and genetics issued, Science in Society http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14345‐ten‐commandments‐of‐race‐and‐genetics‐issued.html This website describes 10 ‘guiding principles’ for the scientific community in relation to research on race and genetics. These principles were written by a multidisciplinary group including geneticists, psychologists, historians and philosophers. At the end of the principles are reflections from readers of the New Scientist . Motherland: A Genetic Journey , BBC Documentary, Director Archie Baron; Producer Tabitha Jackson http://www.rootsforreal.com/motherland_en.php The programme analysed the DNA of 228 Black African Caribbean descent men and women living in the United Kingdom. The research participants were selected on the criteria that they had two generations of paternal and maternal grandparents that were of Black African Caribbean descent. Twenty‐six percent of the Black male participants were told that their Y chromosome, inherited through the male line, traced them back to a European ancestor. The tests also showed that mitochondria DNA that is inherited through the maternal line affiliated many of the research participants with ancestors from African tribal groups. The documentary follows the journeys of three research participants who used their newly acquired genetic kinship to interrogate either their Black/African or their White/European ancestry, depending on which aspect of their identity was important to them. In this regard, the viewer is left with the impression that an individual’s DNA can be objectively coded, separated and divided into its racially distinct component parts. However, when the research participants embarked on their journeys to forgotten African and Caribbean ancestral home‐places, they unexpectedly discovered the entanglement of White and Black people’s colonial histories and origins. In this way, knowledge of genetic ancestry when combined with social relationships and history can be put to work to undermine the idea of racially pure li

American Progressivism inaugurated the beginning of the end of American scientific racism. Its critics have been vocal, however, largely confusing the ideas that Progressives inherited from those they developed for themselves. Progressives have been charged with promotion of eugenics, and thus with mainstreaming practices such as housing segregation, compulsory sterilization of those deemed unfit, and exclusion of immigrants on racial grounds. But if the Progressives were such racists, why is it that since the 1930s Afro-Americans and other people of color have consistently supported self-proclaimed progressive political candidates, and typically by very wide margins?When examining the Progressives on race, it is critical to distinguish the views that they inherited from those that they developed. The rise of Progressivism coincided with the death of scientific racism, which had been taught in American universities since the early nineteenth century and featured prominently in the scientific debate over Darwin’s theory of evolution. Eugenics, which attempted to use genetics and mathematics to validate many racist claims, was its last gasp. The most notable thing about the Progressives is that they were responsible for bringing scientific racism to an end, although that did not happen immediately.My argument here is, first, that one of the most powerful characteristics of the progressive State was its attentiveness to science – a characteristic that it retains to this day. When the Era was forming, however, genetic racism was the scientific model of the day, cutting across a wide range of disciplines and reaching people of all political persuasions, even into the most elite of American research institutions. By and large, non-Progressives were just as racist as Progressives and some significantly more so. Further, the period lay entirely within the southern era of Jim Crow legislated segregation, often making it impossible to identify particular racial attitudes in the New South as Progressive or simply as inherited features of long held southern racial ideas. The all important question for the historian is, Which racial ideas did the Progressives inherit from their predecessors, and which did they develop on their own?Second, if public policy on race differed from prevailing alternatives, it was that Progressives believed in a more active State. Racism supported by an activist legislative agenda can be much uglier than racism that is simply tolerated. One cannot characterize most of the segregationist, exclusionary, and other racist legislation passed during this era as Progressive, however. Southern states actively regulated racial exclusion by statute, and all of the racial zoning laws sometimes attributed to Progressives were passed in formerly slave holding states. Whatever the ideological or scientific sources of these laws, they were supported by staunch anti-Progressives. The same thing is true of compulsory sterilization laws. For example, the Supreme Court Justices who voted consistently against labor protective and other regulatory legislation voted to uphold compulsory sterilization of mental defectives. While many Progressives advocated for more restrictive immigration laws, nothing that was passed during the Era matched the explicit restrictions on Chinese immigration that came earlier, or the racist immigration restrictions enacted during the terms of anti-Progressive Presidents Harding and Coolidge after the Era had ended. Finally, the attempts to link support for minimum wage laws to racial exclusion fail because they misunderstand the objectives of the minimum wage commitment and, further, pick and choose a small number of idiosyncratic examples from an enormous economic literature.Third, the one place where a sharp difference emerged between progressives and their various opponents was in the subsequent rejection of genetic racism in favor of more environmentalist, nurture-based models of human nature and development. More environmentalist views began to take hold in the social sciences in the 1910s and 1920s and began to change legal thinking in the 1940s. They found expression in a Supreme Court that was almost unanimously Democrat and self-acknowledged progressive. The result was gradual emergence of a division that has endured to this day, with progressives largely appearing as promoters of racial inclusion and diversity.

This is the first full-length study of the history of intellectual and scientific racism in modern South Africa. Ranging broadly across disciplines in the social sciences, sciences and humanities, it charts the rise of scientific racism during the late nineteenth century and the subsequent decline of biological determinism from the mid-twentieth century, and considers the complex relationship between theories of essential racial difference and the political rise of segregation and apartheid. Saul Dubow draws extensively on comparable studies of intellectual racism in Europe and the United States to demonstrate the selective absorption of widely prevalent conceptions of racial difference in the particular historical context of South Africa, and the issues he addresses are of relevance to both Africanist and international students of racism and race relations.

On the Inequality of Skulls and Bones R. Laurence Moore (bio) Ann Fabian. The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xi + 270 pp. Notes and index. $27.50. In recent years, natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists have, in disparate ways, chipped away at the concept of race. We are not done with racial categories, but the meanings we attach to them are historical and cultural, not biological. We recognize that various communities of human beings who, over long periods of time, shared territorial space exhibit common physical traits, skin color being one. However, even in a largely bygone world of immobile populations, these communities did not span continents. Traits that owed something to genetic inheritance did not mark the most salient differences between one tribal group and its neighbor. Premodern human beings had many ways to differentiate themselves, but race was not among them. The Skull Collectors, Ann Fabian’s timely and insightful book, reminds us of how laborious and curious a task it was to construct scientifically a fixed typology of races out of the world’s polyglot and multicolored populations. Fabian places the initial focus of her book on Samuel George Morton, a well-educated doctor turned skull measurer, who inherited a notion of five racial groups—Caucasian, Mongolian, American, Malay, Ethiopian—each of which was originally located on a specific continent. Starting with this preposterous notion, Morton’s science could hardly proceed in a way that would earn him a permanent niche in a pantheon honoring the world’s great scientists. However, he was a painstaking observer and avid collector whose findings reinforced what we now call Eurocentrism. In time, Morton’s empirical researches convinced him that each race was a distinct, fixed species representing a separate act of a divine creator. His point of view on this matter was controversial, since many churchmen preferred a scientific racism that preserved the notion that all human beings descended from Adam and Eve. The passions that underlay this disagreement are hard to recapture since Darwinian theory swept away both notions. On the other hand, underlying both theories was a common belief in racial hierarchies that Darwinian science did little to disturb. This second point constituted the more important reason why Morton’s work got attention. His scientific measurement of the size of skulls convinced [End Page 660] him that Caucasians were the smartest of God’s people and Ethiopians were the least. His conclusion rested on a simply expressed finding: Caucasians had larger cranial capacities to store brain matter. Thus, the scientific “invention” (a word Fabian is careful to use instead of “discovery”) of race became scientific racism. Morton’s influence on the divisive issues of his time is difficult to track, since he did not write about the politics of slavery. His major work, Crania Americana, published in 1839, was an expensive tome that sold poorly both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line. Nonetheless, Frederick Douglass, in a commencement address delivered at Western Reserve College in 1854, appropriately gave most attention to Morton in a list of other respected figures whose claims pleased Southern slaveholders. Their defense of slavery as “benevolent” argued that black people were too mentally incompetent to take care of themselves if released from bondage. That assumption, as we have long recognized, was not special to Dixie. It was shared in the North by many abolitionists and was a founding principle of the “humanitarians” who launched the American Colonization Society. Many of Fabian’s themes build on the work of others. George Fredrickson is one of a number of historians who have traced the development of scientific racism from its origins in Enlightenment projects to make rational sense of the world. Enlightenment philosophers relied upon reason to declare the equality of all men. They used it again to create fixed exceptions to that principle. Scientists of the late eighteenth century dealt with the expanding European knowledge of the world by simplifying and categorizing what they found. An overriding and understandable goal of nineteenth-century science was taxonomy. We still live usefully with many of the results of that endeavor. The work was careful and...

Reviewed by: Lord of the Ants Lawrence Mastroni Lord of the Ants (2008). Produced by David Dugan. A NOVA production for PBS. www.pbs.org 54 minutes. David Dugan’s Lord of the Ants, a NOVA production for PBS, offers a compelling portrait of entomologist, Sociobiology founder, and biodiversity advocate E.O. Wilson. The documentary provides a chronological sweep of Wilson’s life and work, from his early childhood fascination with nature to the controversies surrounding his 1975 publication of Sociobiology: the New Synthesis and his more recent work with biodiversity. Reenactments of his childhood and early career are punctuated with comments from the narrator, Wilson, and his scientific supporters and critics. Lord of the Ants also provides stunning close-ups of the insect world, as well as footage of Wilson working in the field and laboratory. The images of Wilson at work highlight a repeated theme in The Lord of the Ants: Wilson never lost his boyhood enchantment with the natural world. This enchantment encouraged Wilson to approach science from the perspective of a naturalist, a perspective for which he won both accolades and derision. On the one hand, he was praised (at the age of thirteen) for his identification of a fire ant that had migrated to Alabama from South America. On the other hand, in his early days at Harvard in the 1950s, his approach to science was viewed as “stamp collecting” and out of touch with the new molecular biology that stemmed from the discovery of the structure of DNA. Soon, however, Wilson had his scientific “eureka moment” that placed him closer to the scientific mainstream (by drawing upon chemistry) and influenced his future work: he discovered that ants “communicate” with one another by exuding chemicals. Wilson realized that this chemical-exuding behavior is encoded in the ants’ genes. From this insight, the narrator notes, “Ed Wilson set himself a daunting task: to investigate the origins of all animal behavior, from ants to monkeys, right through to the most social of all primates, humans. He even invented a name for this new discipline: Sociobiology.” Wilson’s 1975 publication of Sociobiology: the New Synthesis ignited a heated debate about the role of genes in determining human behavior. The suggestion that behavior was biologically based had a strong association with nineteenth-century scientific racism and with the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. Some critics believed Sociobiology, like scientific racism and eugenics, sanctioned a biological determinism that justified existing hierarchies and inequalities. Wilson, however, gave an equivocal conclusion in Sociobiology about the exact influence of genes: “Although [End Page 76] the genes have given away most of their sovereignty [in determining human culture], they maintain a certain amount of influence in at least the behavioral qualities that underlie variations between cultures.” Lord of the Ants gives a sympathetic account of Wilson as he was subjected to acrimonious criticism from other scientists who saw the potential resurgence of scientific racism. However, the film fails to present the controversy over Sociobiology in all its complexity. More was at stake than a challenge to a liberal faith in the plasticity of human culture and the non-influence of genes. Some scientists and philosophers raised epistemological questions about Sociobiology and sociobiologists, suggesting that many of the field’s practitioners do not subject their claims to rigorous tests of falsification. Instead, according to Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, sociobiologists construct “plausible stories” that may or may not be true. The documentary also lacks an adequate transition from the controversy over Sociobiology to the controversy over biodiversity. The omission is puzzling: The strife over Sociobiology suggests that Wilson became a pariah in the scientific community, especially among social scientists. Despite his diminished status, the narrator states: “The Sociobiology controversy forced Ed Wilson, reluctantly, into the limelight. He learned to use his celebrity status to alert the world to another passion: his growing concern about the state of the world.” The camera reinforces the narrator’s point as Wilson is seen receiving an award, standing next to former President Clinton. However, no explanation is offered explaining how Wilson became a “celebrity” after being chastised for his views in Sociobiology and how his “celebrity...

Previous articleNext article No AccessScience in SpecialtiesHistory of the Social SciencesHamilton CravensHamilton Cravens Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Osiris Volume 1, Number 11985Historical Writing on American Science Published for the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/368645 Views: 13Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1985 The History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Chessa Adsit-Morris The Waring Worlds of H. G. Wells: The Entangled Histories of Education, Sociobiology, Post-genomics, and Science Fiction, (Dec 2021): 53–71.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79622-8_4Philippe Fontaine Introduction: The Social Sciences in a Cross-Disciplinary Age, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 51, no.11 (Nov 2014): 1–9.https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.21697Emil Walter-Busch Business Organizations, Foundations, and the State as Promoters of Applied Social Sciences in the United States and Switzerland, 1890–1960, (Jan 2012): 273–292.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284501_14John P. Jackson Argumentum Ad Hominem in the Science of Race, Argumentation and Advocacy 43, no.11 (Feb 2017): 14–28.https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2006.11821659Mark Soderstrom Family Trees and Timber Rights: Albert E. Jenks, Americanization, and the Rise of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3, no.22 (Nov 2010): 176–204.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781400003339Michael J. Zickar An Analysis of Industrial-Organizational Psychology’s Indifference to Labor Unions in the United States, Human Relations 57, no.22 (Apr 2016): 145–167.https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726704042925James H. Capshew, Roger E. Backhouse, Philippe Fontaine History of Psychology since 1945, (): 144–182.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794817.005

This paper proposes a research strategy for examining laypeople's thoughts and reflections on innovations in the science of race and genetics. While some sociologists have shown a reluctance to engage in such discussions, this paper argues that social scientists need to take such views seriously. To do this, the paper brings together an anthropological approach to the study of scientific literacy and recent scholarship in the field of Whiteness studies. The combining of these literatures raises a set of interesting and sometimes uncomfortable questions about the ways in which social scientists and research participants contribute to the reproduction of White power and dominance in Western societies.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature Steven Pinker Allen Lane, 2002, 0-713-99256-5 John Locke famously compared the mind to "white paper void of all characters, without any ideas". He claimed that its contents were furnished by experience. The Blank Slate is in part a history of this beguiling theory. Because of its influence, whether in the form of behaviorism, cultural anthropology or historical materialism, social science has not done justice to genetic factors. Until recently that is. For according to Pinker a model of the mind is now being developed that acknowledges the importance of heredity as well as the environment. Locke and his disciple John Stuart Mill were empiricists. They believed that human intelligence could be explained without recourse to the notion of innate organisation and they attributed all knowledge to experience. Behaviorism is a form of empiricism and it profoundly affected the social sciences of the last century, especially psychology. Indeed, according to a study carried out by Haggbloom (2002), B.F. Skinner was the most eminent psychologist of the last century. Because experience was all-important for the behaviorists, they blamed poverty and ignorance on defects in social institutions. A behaviorist could not have written The Bell Curve. Professor Arthur Jensen (1998a) recalls that when he began to study psychology at Berkeley in the 1940's the influence of genes was completely ignored. The orthodox view in American psychology was that "...individual differences in the behavioral realm originated entirely outside the organism, through its exposure to different environmental contingencies..." B.F. Skinner maintained that studying the brain was misguided. Even Hans Eysenck, the doyen of the hereditarian London School thought that overt behavior was the only legitimate domain of psychology. Eysenck regarded Freudian theory as empirically unverifiable and he championed a form of therapy based on the learning theory of Pavlov and Skinner Jensen, 2000). Robert Plomin (1997) has constructed a pleasing diagram that illustrates the historical swings of the pendulum between nature and nurture. It shows an emphatic movement towards the latter in the 1950's. Evidently the Holocaust made the concept of human nature, not to mention eugenics and racial science, anathema in that decade. Yet as Pinker observes, state sponsored mass murder also took place under Marxist regimes that had an explicitly anti-innatist ideology. It is therefore hardly logical to disapprove of behavioral genetics or evolutionary theory because of their historical association with National Socialism. Nor are twin studies immoral because Dr. Joseph Mengele undertook them. At the beginning of the 20th century the anthropologist Franz Boas elaborated what eventually became the standard social science model. Boas believed that differences between races and classes were cultural not biological. All ethnic groups were endowed with the same basic mental abilities, in his view. Although Boas regarded Western civilisation as superior, he thought that all peoples were capable of attaining it. Pearson (1993) has highlighted the pivotal position attained by Boas' disciples in American social science, in particular anthropology. "Boas created a monster", as Pinker colourfully puts it. Like E.O. Wilson, Pinker supports the unification of knowledge or consilience. The wall dividing biology from culture must come down. But arguably Pinker exaggerates the egalitarianism of those who built this wall. The autonomy of culture was the founding principle not only of cultural anthropology but also of sociology. Comte and Durkheim, two of sociology's founding fathers, regarded society as sui generis. Indeed, Durkheim feared that if the pre-social features of the individual, namely his race and heredity, were considered by sociology it would "dissolve into psychology" (Lukes, 1973). Yet both Comte and Durkheim were conservatives who sought a secular basis for social order. …

The contours and complexities of race and racism continue to confound the social sciences. This problem originates in the historical complicity of the social science disciplines with the establishment and maintenance of the systems of racial predation, injustice and indeed genocide upon which the modern world was built. All the social sciences originate in raciology and race management, a fact that is rarely acknowledged. A critical reappraisal of ‘mainstream’ social science’s theoretical and methodological approach to race is therefore overdue. The Ethnic and Racial Studies Review is the right venue for this rethinking. Andreas Wimmer’s distinguished oeuvre provides an appropriate ‘case’ of the tendency that this editorial essay seeks to revise. Concentrating on Wimmer’s 2013 Ethnic Boundary Making, whose publication was the subject of a highly laudatory 2014 issue of ERS Review, this essay criticizes the book as an instance of the problematic social science approaches mentioned.

The courts must bear a heavy share of the burden of American racism. An outpouring of historical scholarship on racism and the American law reveals the outrageous and humiliating extent to which American lawyers, judges, and legislators created, perpetuated, and defended racist American institutions. The law is not autonomous, however, particularly in areas of explicit public policy making. Lawyers did not invent racism. Rather they created racist institutions because society was racist and racism was implicit in its values. The trend in scholarship on the legal history of American racism, however, has been to place most of the blame for racism entirely on the lawmakers. C. Vann Woodward began the trend a half century ago by identifying the rise of the 'Strange Career of Jim Crow' with the passage of statutes that mandated segregation in the American South. Woodward studied both antebellum and post-Civil War America to about 1890 and argued that popular custom favored integration as a general rule, with segregation as the exception. He suggested that only after southern self-determination was restored at the end of Reconstruction did whites assert their hostility toward afro-Americans. This article disputes this view. It examines the relationship between law and the social sciences during the period in which many of America's segregationist legal institutions and practices came into effect. Before the turn of the century, a large number of scientific studies warned against the dangers of racial mixing. Elite scientists just as much as laypersons believed that Afro-Americans were intellectually inferior, that they learned much more slowly than white persons, and that their close association with whites could contaminate and weaken the white race. After the Civil War, the possibility of substantial racial mixing became real; the prospect most feared was that of interracial marriage. Nearly everyone assumed that the way to prevent interracial sexual contact was to keep the races separated, particularly in those institutions where young people's values and attractions were developed, such as the schools. The development of a ruling environmentalist paradigm to explain racial differences in test performance, physical integrity, criminal behavior, and economic status took more than half a century from the rise of the Jim Crow era. Scientific racism did not begin to disappear from American universities until the 1940's, until the publication of such consensus-creating documents as Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma in 1944.

Introduction 1. 'Wir mussen mehr wissen': institutional and ideological foundations of a Jewish statistics 2. The bureau for Jewish statistics and the development of Jewish social science 1904-1931 3. The wages of modernity: fertility, intermarriage, and the debate over Jewish decline 4. The pathological circle: medical images and statistics in Jewish social science 5. The diaspora as cure: non-zionist uses of social science 6. Measuring and picturing Jews: racial anthropology and iconography 7. National economy and the debate over Jewish regeneration Conclusion: a usable knowledge Notes Bibliography Index.

Real kinds or categories, according to conventional wisdom, enter into lawlike generalizations, while nominal kinds do not. Thus, gold but not jewelry is a real kind. However, by such a criterion, few if any kinds or systems of classification employed in the social science are real, for the social sciences offer, at best, only restricted generalizations. Thus, according to conventional wisdom, race and class are on a par with telephone area codes and postal zones; all are nominal rather than real. I propose an account of real kinds that recognizes the current reality of race but not zip codes and shows how a kind can be both constructed and real. One virtue of such an understanding of realism is the light shed on our current practice of racial classification. Race is not a real biological kind but neither is race a myth or illusion. However, the question of whether a social kind is real is separate from whether the category is legitimate. W. E. B. Du Bois maintained that while there are no biological races, race is real and should be conserved. My aim, in this paper, is not to argue for the legitimacy or conservation of race but to defend Du Bois's idea that kinds of people can be both made up and real and provide an understanding of realism that does justice to the social sciences.