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

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ed in its purpose, more political than scientific--to find a rationale for excluding certain immigrant groups and for elevating others. Charles Darwin developed his concept of evolutionary development and the survival of the fittest by observing animals on the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, and when he wrote his book, he was much criticized for various elements. In Darwin's time, Alfred Russell Wallace argued in various writings that human beings evolved from a single species, and he stated the likelihood that physical differences among the races probably dated back to the dawn of human reason, at which point natural selection ceased operating on the bodies of individuals and started to operate on the brains of social groups; from this time, "the most favored races" were preserved (Irvine 182). One reason for much of the criticism of Darwinism was the uses to which it was put by some, as noted by T. H. Huxley in 1893 with reference to a prevalent fallacy, the idea that Darwin said that plants and animals had evolved in a progressive direction because of the struggle for existence and the resulting "survival of the fittest," and that thus men in society must follow the same process to achieve perfection (Huxley 326). This was the

Category: Psychology - R