Abstract
The tendency to adopt a fatalistic view of American race relations is an easy posture to assume—especially in light of the contradictory realities of maintaining race as real and its obvious utter worthlessness as a scientific concept. The IQ controversy is a prime example of this problematic. Although most competent social scientists concur in the belief that race is not a valid scientific concept; and, more specifically that IQ tests are culturally biased, and, as a consequence, do not provide irrefutable proof that some so-called racial groups are superior to others in intelligence, there exist some influential neo-racists social scientists who maintain that IQ tests are valid indicators of the intellectual abilities of the so-called races.
Nevertheless, some social scientists who hold that race, although not a valid scientific concept, is real—that is, real in its consequences—argue, as did Robert E. Park in (1939, The nature of race relations. In Race and Culture. New York: The Free), that immigration and education, will change the social habits and mores of peoples, resulting in the increasing confusion of race and class.
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Notes
As examples of the criticisms of The Bell Curve this decade, see: C. Loring Brace, Race is a Four Letter Word (2005). John P. Jackson, Jr. and Nadine M. Weidman Race, Racism and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (2006); Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Race and Racism: An Introduction (2006); Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, Yolanda T. Moses, eds. How Real Is Race?: A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology (2007); Faye V. Harrison, Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age (2008).
The anthropologist Jonathan Marks (2007) has written that, :”at present there may be more agreement among the practitioners of all subfields of anthropology when the subject is race, than there is about any other subject (p.257).
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Williams, V.J. Fatalism: Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology and the IQ Controversy. J Afr Am St 13, 90–96 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-008-9074-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-008-9074-1