The Science and Politics of Racial Research

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University of Illinois Press, 1994 - History - 371 pages
Unlike other critiques of the scientific literature on racial difference, The Science and Politics of Racial Research argues that there has been no scientific purpose or value to the study of innate differences in ability between groups. William Tucker shows how, for more than a century, scientific investigations of supposedly innate differences in ability between races have been used to rationalize social and political inequality as the unavoidable consequence of natural differences. Tucker structures his work chronologically, with each chapter describing how research on genetic difference was used in a particular era to support a particular political agenda. He begins with the use of science to support slavery in the mid-nineteenth century and ends with the effects of Jensenism in the 1970s. Highlights include one chapter describing a little-known but concerted attempt by a group of scientists to overturn the Brown v. Board of Education decision on the basis of "expert testimony" about racial differences, and another that presents a review of the eugenics movement in the twentieth century. The author also considers how to balance the rights and responsibilities of scientists, concluding that one generally neglected method is to strengthen the rights of research subjects.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Helping Along the Process Social Science and Race in the Nineteenth Century
9
For a Twentieth the Cost Sir Francis Galton and the Origin of Eugenics
37
Applying Science to Society The Eugenics Movement in the Early Twentieth Century
54
Science Giveth and It Taketh Away The Scientific Controversy over Integration
138
Unaided by Eugenic Foresight The Controversy over Jensenism
180
Science and Safeguards
269
Notes
297
Index
351
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

William H. Tucker is a professor of psychology at Rutgers University-Camden. He is the author of The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology and The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund.