ormation that omits any influence of background or experience that might explain lower performance scores of African American in a variety of areas. This analysis will provide a general overview of African American psychology in order to demonstrate that social science has misapplied genetic arguments to posit African Americans as inferior to whites; arguments that omit experiential difference and that are primarily due to bias and racism.
The tendency in historical psychological applications to African Americans is towards using race, genetics, and comparison to whites, using white measures, without regard for environmental influences, ethnicity, class or other factors. Beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and extending to the neoconservative movement of the most reason republican administrations, such a tendency has typically relegated Black psychology and being as inferior to whites. For many decades African Americans have been portrayed as inferior in intellect to whites due to contributions of social science to this image of African Americans. Focusing on race is one of the primary causes of such inferiority imagery and perceptions. In 1895, R. Meade Bache published an article in Psychological Review, entitled ôReaction Time with Reference to Race.ö Bache associated the faster reaction time of Blacks in comparison to whites as stemming from an inferior intellect compared to whites. Since Blacks were more primitive intellectually, Bache theorized, they were more primitively reflexive than whites. As Bache wrote, ôThat the negro is, in the truest sense, a race inferior to that of the white man can be proved by many facts, and among these by the quickness of his automatic movements as compared with those of the whiteö (Harris 1991, 26).
Other social scientists followed suit, with Baldwin reporting in 1914 that African Americans possessed only ôtwo-thirds whitesÆ learning capacityö, while Mitchell, ...