The African American Critique of White Supremacist Science

Abstract

This article avers that African American critical thought must be rooted partly in knowledge of the writings of past African American intellectuals. It excerpts and categories responses of Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. DuBois to White presumptions of innate Black mental inferiority, and applies their analyses and that of others to a review of the contemporary scientific racism found in The Bell Curve. Ideas are suggested for incorporating this critical tradition into current efforts to prevent the resurgence of White supremacist thinking. Important theoretical issues for the development of contemporary African Americanist thought are raised. INTRODUCTION West (1982) argues that African American liberation depends in part upon the creation of an African American critical thought. He further proposes that the examination of the historic roots of White supremacy is an essential component of such thought while the description, categorization, analysis, and critique of African American intellectual traditions constitutes a second critical component. In examining the origins of White supremacy, West acknowledges the importance of the rationalization of racial exploitation and other economic and political factors. He also contends that from its beginning in the Enlightenment, Western science has had an anti-Black bias built into its modes of discourse. According to West, this bias derives from the combination of (a) the repudiation of Christianity as the source of knowledge of the world in favor of scientific investigation; (b) the conception of scientific methodology as observation, measurement, comparison, and ordering (p. 54); and (c) the retroactive glorification of Grecian physical and cultural aesthetic standards as the standard by which all things are measured. Greek aesthetic standards in this case included not only conceptions of the beautiful body, but also conceptions of cultural standards of moderation, self-control, and harmony (p. 54). West therefore concludes that Black bodies and Black cultural modes of discourse will be judged inferior as long as this frame of reference and reliance upon this method remain the foundation for Western conceptions of science. By West's logic, science can divest itself of White supremacy only by giving up on the idealization of a pure-White Greece as the biological source of Western European peoples. Further, it must abandon the belief that a commitment to a methodology of observation, measurement, comparison, and ordering alone is sufficient to divest scientific analysis of racist bias. My convictions about African American critical thought differ slightly from West's. I hypothesize that African American liberation requires an African Americanist critical thought that is developed and guided primarily, but not exclusively, by African Americans; one that is committed to African American liberation; and one which has at its core a commitment to the incorporation of past African American intellectual thought, along with that of other persons of African ancestry, into current scholarship. However, this article, inspired by the controversy over Herrnstein and Murray's (1994) The Bell Curve, addresses questions posed by either of these propositions: What has been the past response of African American intellectuals to White supremacist arguments that Black mental inferiority is the primary cause of the low economic, educational, and social status of African Americans? How valuable is that response for analyzing and responding to works of scientific racism like The Bell Curve in the present? By analyzing African American intellectual traditions, I do not mean to deprecate predominantly White traditions of critiques of theories of Black mental inferiority. These are traditions I deeply respect and value. I seek instead to incorporate into American scholarship a valuable but ignored tradition, namely, that of African American intellectual thought. …