Under the rubric of biological determinism, there has been a long, and rather arduous, tradition that argues that social and economic roles in society accurately reflect the innate construction of people. This type of determinism holds that intelligence may be racially biased, and although psychologists have come a long way from the days of scientifically "proving" that certain races were of superior intelligence to others, many believe that there is still a contemporary bias in the testing and presentation of research materials on ethnic cultures and families (Gould, 1981). This has particularly become endemic in the ranking and reification of intelligence testing. Following this, it is natural to quantify certain aspects of testing, so that some groups are superior, and others inferior. In an early comment, the famous Black orator Booker T. Washington commented,
For my race, one of its dangers is that it may grow impatient and feel that it can get upon its feet by artificial and superficial efforts rather than by the slower but surer process which means one step at a time through all the constructive grades of industrial, mental, moral, and social development which all races have had to follow that have become independent and strong (Washington, 1904, p. 245).
This paper will begin by giving a brief historical overview of ethnic differences in American history and the trends in current testing dealing with ethnic families. It will focus on four primary groups; Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern, and four secondary groups; Italian, Greek, Jewish, and Armenian. The paper will then conclude with a brief look at the impact of testing on ethnic children, and the implications such testing may have on the future.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a dramatic difference in both schooling and economic achievements between White and ethnic minorities in American society. This discrepancy...