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Racial Traits as a Social Construct

A number of efforts have been made since the onset of the scientific age toward measuring various traits in order to identify specific characteristics differentiating racial characteristics, often in an attempt to show that certain groups are inferior to the majority Caucasian group. Such "scientific rationality" often tries to prove that such characteristics as intelligence are racially linked, and statistics are developed to show that whites on the average are more intelligent than blacks and that there is a biological basis to differences seen in test scores. Such efforts have been undertaken many times in this century, most recently in the book The Bell Curve, which revived an old debate as to the possibility of proving this sort of theory and the biased nature of intelligence tests. An examination shows that scientific rationality continues to be trotted out from time to time by those seeking to create a provable division between the races, linking skin color to intelligence and even moral theory.

Stephen Jay Gould describes a number of these efforts as they were attempted in the early decades of this century, often as a means of classifying and even rejecting immigrants on the basis of supposed intelligence or criminal tendencies. Such efforts are attempts at proving a determinist perspective, and Gould wants to show that there are scientific weaknesses to this perspective and also that they occur in a political rather than a scientific context. We often confuse the concept of "racial" groups with "ethnic" groups, and we may use the terms interchangeably when they refer to very different types of group differences. In many ways, our society expresses confusion on the issue, at one time seeming to make the distinction, while at other times failing to do so. At other times, we may speak of the two as if they are one. Recently, of course, the entire issue has been complicated by a scientific view that race itself has n...

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Racial Traits as a Social Construct. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:50, March 19, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690783.html