History of Race and History of Race and EugenicsEugenics

A misinterpretation and A misinterpretation and misuse of sciencemisuse of science

Social OriginsSocial Origins• Great emigration after

the Civil War from the South and southern Europe to cities resulting in inadequate housing, labor unrest, differential reproductive rate between the wealthy and the poor

• Introduction of progressivism and social Darwinism

• Revelations in genetics led to the belief that science could cure all social maladies

• First wave of “the gene for” explanation

• Therefore, societal problems could be cured by properly managing human breeding

• The wealthy supported research and applications aimed at cleansing society by diminishing the influence of labor unions, non-WASPS, socialism

• There was a combination of wealth and scientism

Scientific OriginsScientific Origins

• The term coined by Francis

Galton in 1883

• “The wealthy and intelligentsia should have more babies” (positive eugenics)

• “The poor and degenerate should be sterilized” (negative eugenics) (In the U.S.A., Germany, Scandinavia)

What Caused “Degeneracy”?What Caused “Degeneracy”?

• Masturbation

• Toxics in the environment

• Inbreeding (many eugenists were agricultural and animal breeding scientists)

• Plain bad ancestry

Research MethodsResearch Methods

• The methodologies were developed after the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws

• The main tools were pedigree trees

• Many traits such as intelligence and depression are very difficult to measure

• Numerous associations and institutions were created to promote eugenics

• IQ tests became widespread and used particularly among individuals in mental asylums, poor immigrants, and minorities

• Anthropometric data were also used

• The data was used to design forced sterilization and immigration laws

Traits StudiedTraits Studied

• Correlation between intelligence and eye colors

• Behavioral patterns

• Personality

• Ethnicity and social behavior

FlawsFlaws

• Definition of traits

• Reification

• Poor surveys and statistical methods

• False quantifications

• Ignoring social and environmental influences

Marriage LawsMarriage Laws

• Laws against interracial marriage up to the mid-20th. century in the U.S.

• Racial definitions (“a negro is a negro if one the parents is a negro even is the other is white”)

• Similar laws were adopted by Nazi Germany regarding the Jews

• In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court stroke down all these laws

Sterilization LawsSterilization Laws

• First: 1907 in Indiana

• By 1914 twelve states had passed laws

• One reason stated was to reduce taxes to pay for caring for the “insane and feebleminded”

• Even epileptics and felons were sterilized

• Up to the 1970’s up to 33 states had sterilized 60,000 people

Immigration LawsImmigration Laws

• 1882: Law prohibiting the immigration of Chinese

• 1924: A law restricted the number of Italians and Jews that could enter the U.S.

• That law remained in the books until 1965

• Francis Galton: heredity and human ability

• “Hereditary Genius” (1869)

I.Q.I.Q.

• Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1796-1874)

• Quetelet was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human characteristics, and actually discovered the concept of normal distribution--the tendency for the bulk population to fall somewhere between two extremes, with numbers dropping sharply at either extreme. If plotted on a chart, these values assume a shape roughly like that of a bell

• In the 1890s, an American student of Galton's, James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944), brought the idea of intelligence testing to America

• Cattell's work caused brief but intense mental testing in America. What proved to be the test's downfall, however, was that scoring well on the Galton test did not indicate if a student would do well on schoolwork, which was considered the practical proof of good mental ability

• Meanwhile in France, a psychologist named Alfred Binet (1857-1911) devised tests to rate child intelligence

• Like Galton, Binet was passionate about testing and measuring human capabilities

• His understanding of intelligence evolved through intense trial-and-error testing with local students. Working with groups of average students and groups of mentally handicapped students, Binet discovered certain tasks that average students could handle but handicapped students could not

• Binet calculated the normal abilities for students at each age, and could pinpoint how many years a student's mental age was above or below the norm

• The Paris educational authorities came across Binet's work and asked him to devise a test that could be used to separate normal children from special needs students

• These tests were held between an interviewer and a single student, with questions like: "What is the difference between wood and glass?" and "Make a sentence using the words, Paris, fortune, gutter"

• The idea that a test could determine a child's "mental age" became enormously popular

• Just before World War I, Wilhelm Stern, a German psychologist, suggested a better way of expressing results than by mental age--Stern determined his results by finding the ratio between the subject's chronological age and their mental age

• Therefore, a 10-year-old scoring one year ahead of their chronological age (110) would be not as significant as a 5-year-old scoring one year ahead (120)

• An American psychologist named Lewis Terman (1877-1956) coined the term intelligence quotient (I.Q.) for Stern's Binet test scoring system

• An average IQ score on a Binet test was 100. Any score above 100 was deemed above average, while any score below 100 was below average

• Recognizing that the Binet test had its limitations, both Binet and Stern doubted IQ scoring actually represented a fixed inborn quantity of intelligence

• As Stern wrote in 1914: "No series of tests, however skillfully selected it may be, does reach the innate intellectual endowment, stripped of all complications, but rather this endowment in conjunction with all influences to which the examinee has been subjected up to the moment of testing"

• Despite reservations of these two pioneers, the Binet test was enthusiastically accepted in America

• In 1916, a Binet test was administered to a prisoner on trial for murder

• Because the prisoner fared so poorly on the test, the Wyoming jury acquitted him by reason of his mental condition

• The greatest spurt in American IQ testing came in 1917, when America entered World War I

• Binet's original tests were designed to be administered to children on an individual basis, but the U.S. Army was faced with the dilemma of sorting huge numbers of draftees into various Army positions

• To solve this problem, the Army put together a committee of seven leading psychologists to devise a mass intelligence test

• The chairman of this committee was Robert Yerkes, who later admitted he was chosen simply because he was president of the American Psychological Association that year

• One of the seven selected psychologists, Lewis Terman, had a pupil named Arthur Otis, who had already begun constructed a group intelligence test when the Army decided it needed one

• The committee adopted the material Otis had already prepared, and in six weeks the tests were ready for the printers. A few weeks after that there was a trial run with four thousand men. Less than two years later, by the beginning of 1919, nearly two million American men had taken the Army intelligence tests

• The Army scores were not expressed using the intelligence quotient, but instead by simply awarding points for correct answers. On the basis of these points, men were divided into one of five classes, ranked from A to E

• One of the most intriguing results: whites, on average, scored higher that blacks but … blacks from the North scored higher than whites from the South

• The tests were culturally flawed

• In the late 1940’s the U.S. Army became the first American institution in being desegregated … nearly 30 years after the tests were shown to be flawed

• Many companies began testing programs to determine who would be hired, promoted or transferred

• But the greatest market for intelligence tests was the schools. In the years following World War I, practically every school system in the country began some sort of intelligence scoring program

• Intelligence testing had its share of detractors, including Walter Lippmann, a well-known columnist and social commentator. In 1922, he wrote: "One only has to read around in the literature of the subject...to see how easily the intelligence test can be turned into an engine of cruelty, how...it could turn into a method of stamping a permanent sense of inferiority upon the soul of a child...."

• Before World War II, sterilization and even euthanasia of the “mentally feeble” became legal practices in many states (>40,000 in California alone)

• Almost all “treated” were minorities and if whites, they were very poor

• The Nazis said they had copied the U.S. model (of course they took it many steps further)

• In the 1960s and '70s, IQ tests began to fall out of favor, partially because of racially and culturally specific test questions

• In 1964, the New York City Board of Education did away with IQ testing entirely, and other boards of education followed suit, often reluctantly

• Many lawsuits related to job hirings and denied education also took place during this time, usually finding the IQ testers guilty of discrimination

• The concept of intelligence has continued to evolve, despite problems with and misuses of IQ testing. In 1983, Howard Gardner argued that "reason, intelligence, logic and knowledge are not synonymous...", setting forth a theory of multiple intelligences

• Gardner defined seven distinct intelligences: logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences

• The concept of multiple intelligences helped broaden the idea of "intelligence" from a mathematical and verbal understanding, which had become cemented into American culture through years of national testing (i.e., the SATs)

• Gardner's ideas have made their way into education, and are currently being used by many school districts

• But traditional intelligence and scholastic aptitude testing has continued to gain acceptance and force in U.S. education

• Today, certain colleges refuse to accept students below certain prestigious scores on the SATs and many private and premier public schools accept students almost solely on the basis of test scores

• End