Race Laws, Whiteness, and Citizenship

Discussion Topic - Race Laws, Whiteness, and Citizenship

 

How are race laws, whiteness, and citizenship connected and how have these categories impacted people both positively and negatively?

Readings and References for this Assignment

Module 3: Race and the Law

This module examines race law, which includes the laws and legal theories that deal with race. In this module, race law also refers to the effects of laws—for example, laws that are not explicitly designed to differentiate between races but that disadvantage certain racial groups while privileging others. Our discussion of race law also will move outside the legal system to look at the intersection of race, law, and culture. Racial ideas are constructed from views in the culture; these ideas become codified into laws, or, sometimes, dismantled by laws constructed to change racial ideas.

We begin topic I from a perspective in the nineteenth century, when ideas about race operated to privilege white people and to exclude nonwhite racial groups from the benefits of American life. We focus on the concept of culture proposed by anthropologist Franz Boas. We discuss how his ideas were taken up by social scientists and legal scholars and how social science work began to be used as evidence in legal cases.

Topic II explores how ideas of whiteness were constructed and then used to deny or permit the attainment of citizenship for individuals in the United States.

Topic III concerns the antecedents, events, and consequences of the landmark legal case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. That case mandated racial integration in American public school classrooms.

In topic IV, we will discuss three contemporary topics: racial colorblindness, critical race theory, and white privilege. These distinct ways of viewing racial matters in society today suggest strategies for moving toward a more equitable society in the United States.

In 1853, legal scholar William Goodell observed, "No people were ever yet found to be better than their laws, though many have been known to be worse" (cited in Higginbotham, 2001, p. 3). This statement reflects the facts we will explore in this module—that our ideas of race and, in fact, our entire legal system have developed and grown from our culture and reflect the whole of American life.

Module 3: Race and the Law

After completing this module, you should be able to:

· define race law

· compare and contrast the effects the laws of our nation have had upon white and nonwhite racial groups

· use an intersectional analysis to understand the relationships among race, law, and culture

· explain the relationship between race and American citizenship

· evaluate the importance of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

· describe the benefits of mixed-race classrooms for all students

· explain white privilege and its relevance to our studies

· compare and contrast racial colorblindness and critical race theory

Module 3: Race and the Law

Topics

I. Race, Law, and Culture

II. The Legal Construction of Race

III. The Landmark Case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

IV. Race in the Legal System Today

V. Summary

I. Race, Law, and Culture

Laws are not developed in a vacuum. They are influenced by findings from social science, by religious beliefs, by economic and political interests, and by the values and beliefs of a culture at a given time. For example, laws supporting racial purity and laws banning interracial marriages were enacted as early as the 17th century in colonial America, reflecting views in that era that African Americans were inferior to white people and any mixture of the races would taint the white race.

Though the Declaration of Independence speaks of equality, the document was drafted and signed by some individuals who were slaveholders. Slaves were not considered citizens and thus would not enjoy the rights promised to others. The reality of slavery was very different from the prose about equality. Historian Edmund S. Morgan reminds us, "The fundamental ideas upon which the United States was founded were created under conditions of African chattel slavery, and the nation has been grappling ever since with the consequences of that original sin" (Morgan, as cited by Weiner, 2006, p. 7).

Read the Declaration of Independence and reflect on the conditions of the slaves and Native Americans in the United States when the Declaration of Independence was written, in 1787.

In the past, different laws were in place for nonwhite racial groups than for white racial groups. Laws, like race and like culture, are socially constructed, meaning they are built based on what people in a society believe at the time. Laws change over time, as society changes. We believe that laws enforce what is right and deter or punish what is wrong, but this view of the legal system is not complex enough to explain how race functions in our society. We need to excavate beneath the surface of laws and across time to discover how our legal system views race.

Intersectional Analysis

Some social scientists use an intersectional analysis to understand laws of race. To help visualize the intersectional approach, imagine a busy traffic intersection where ideas come zooming in from different disciplines to support, question, reject, or clash head-on with long-held beliefs. Some issues run straight through the intersection; others enter the intersection and become involved in the gridlock. An intersection is a positive thing if it helps you get exactly where you want to go. It can also become a headache of gridlocked vehicles driven by people with very different destinations in mind.

In mathematics, intersection has a precise meaning; it describes an area where different sets overlap. In the overlapped areas, sets share common ideas. Figure 3.1 illustrates three sets of ideas—race, law, and culture—with overlapping areas where those concepts share common ideas. In the center of the diagram is an area where all three intersect.

Figure 3.1 Graphical Representation of Intersectional Analysis

In the social sciences, intersectional analysis is a recently developed way to examine multiple causes for social phenomena.

In the past, social scientists most often studied white males and believed that whatever they discovered about white males could be extended to all Americans. In recent years, however, researchers have come to understand that the United States is a multicultural place and that culture, gender, and race make a difference with respect to societal treatment, perceptions, and behavior.

To correct the inaccurate and incomplete views of our past, scholars have proposed intersectional analysis as a framework for telling much more complicated stories (especially those that include women and minorities) than social scientists told in the past. Intersectional analyses address complex issues that were formerly studied in overly simplistic ways.

For example, sociologists using intersectional analyses suggest that race and ethnicity could be studied by "examining how race and ethnicity operate with and through gender, class, nation, sexuality, and other systems of social inequality" (Rojek et al., 2006, p. 214). Another researcher defines intersectional analysis as a way to see "the complex linkages among racial, gender-based, and class-oriented forms of domination and exploitation" (Winant, 2007, p. 567).

Intersectional analyses are not yet accompanied by research methods, but they have already brought about rich interdisciplinary investigations, including studies of the legal system and how it serves different racial groups.

Native Americans and Their Land

We continue our discussion of the intersection of race, law, and culture with an example of laws imposed on Native Americans in the nineteenth century. Recall the racial hierarchy we studied in module 1, wherein social scientists placed the highest value on white culture and believed that nonwhite groups were primitive and greatly inferior to white groups.

The Indian Removal Act

A series of solutions were developed by the United States government to deal with the "Indian problem," as it was known. In 1830, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act (1830) to seize lands historically occupied by Native Americans for government use and for private farming by white settlers. Native Americans were forced to move west of the Mississippi River.

Who benefited from the Indian Removal Act? To answer this question, and to learn more about how this legislation affected groups of people in different ways, read the  Trail of Tears  article at the National Park Service Web site.

Following the Civil War, President Ulysses S. Grant developed a policy of assimilating Native Americans into mainstream, white American culture. Assimilation is the integration of one group of people into the mainstream or dominant group of society (Marger, 2007, p. 574). When assimilation takes place, members of groups being assimilated give up their language, culture, and customs to conform with and be accepted by the dominant group.

In this case, two very different groups wished the Native Americans to be assimilated to white, mainstream, American life: religious reformers who intended to redeem primitive people, and individuals who were interested in selling land in the west. This latter group of people wanted to free more land for white settlement and for the railroads, and they wanted to make money by selling the land originally held by Native Americans.

The interests of these two groups—reformers and speculators—coincided and helped bring about an end to the Native American culture (Weiner, 2006, p. 24). Native American children were sent to so-called "Indian boarding schools," where they learned English, converted to Christianity, and were forbidden to speak their native languages or to celebrate their own culture. Tribal customs and culture were extinguished in an effort to make "individuals" out of members of collective Native American groups.

Until Grant's assimilationist policy was instituted, Indians had had their own laws and had been responsible for their own civil and criminal matters. Under U.S. rule, tribal law was replaced by American law "to assimilate native peoples socially by altering their law" (Weiner, 2006, p. 26).

What does this 1909 photograph reveal about Native Americans? Have they been able to continue their native customs and culture?

Source: Library of Congress, "American Indians of the Pacific Northwest"

The Dawes Severalty Act

In 1887, the U.S. Congress approved the Dawes Severalty Act, which mandated cutting up Native American communal lands into plots that would be individually owned, or held in severalty. Native Americans had long hunted and gathered from vast communal lands, so severalty was an idea foreign to their culture.

Read the opening statement of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. What impact would you expect this act to have on Native Americans? Model Answer

According to a PBS documentary on Native Americans, Congressman Henry Dawes, author of the act, "once expressed his faith in the civilizing power of private property with the claim that to be civilized was to 'wear civilized clothes…cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker [horse-drawn] wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property'" (Dawes Act, 1996).

After reservation lands had been broken into individually owned plots, the "excess" land—that is, the land that remained after each Native American received his or her allotment—was given to white settlers. The plots given to white settlers were purposefully checkerboarded throughout the reservation so that white people could provide a good example to the Indians. The Dawes Act became a way to continue the wars with Indians "with the weapons of the rule of law" (Weiner, 2006, p. 37). There were complicated regulations about claiming land: waiting periods, age requirements, and other restrictions. Because Native Americans tended to keep poor birth records or none at all, many did not or could not ever claim their land. According to historian and legal scholar Mark Weiner, "Over the next ten years, Indians lost 75 percent of their lands, over 90 million acres (40 percent of the land remaining [to them] was desert), and they began to suffer even more than before the scourges of poverty, despondency, and spiritual death" (Weiner, 2006, p. 37).

The power of Congress to allocate communal lands to individuals and to destroy a collective economy and culture was, in this case, absolute. At the time, "the act was viewed as a legitimate, unproblematic exercise of Congressional authority under the terms of what became known as the plenary power doctrine of Indian affairs" (Weiner, p. 37).

Executive Order 9066: The Japanese Internment

The U.S. government's authority to exercise control over racial groups continued throughout and beyond turn of the twentieth century. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, many Americans developed strong feelings against Japanese Americans and believed that the Japanese Americans were a danger to the security of the nation. In 1942, in another exercise of plenary power, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which mandated the immediate removal of Japanese American individuals from coastal areas in Washington, Oregon, and California (Saito, 2007).

Virtually all Japanese Americans in this region were asked to leave the universities where they studied and ordered to abandon their businesses, homes, and farms. About 10,000 Japanese Americans were able to relocate to other parts of the United States in time to avoid the internment, but over 110,000 were evacuated to hastily built relocation centers (Saito, 2007). With so little time to prepare for relocation, most lost their entire businesses, farms, and all personal possessions.

In many cases, exiled families included older Japanese immigrants, to whom American citizenship was denied, and their children and grandchildren, who were American citizens by birth. The families were collected at centers, tagged, and put onto trains, accompanied by armed guards. Many trains had their windows covered, presumably to prevent the internees from being able to retrace the route to coastal areas. For the next three years, the exiled Japanese American families were housed in these relocation centers (figure 3.2), policed by armed guards and surrounded by tall fences topped with barbed wire. Housing consisted of uninsulated wooden shacks vulnerable to 100-degree-plus temperatures in summer and frigid conditions in winter. Each family was given one room, so privacy was nonexistent. Internees had "poor and often insufficient food" (Saito, 2007, p. 54). All adults were forced to sign oaths pledging loyalty to the U.S. government. At the camps, officials "cultivated informers and deliberately fomented discord as a means of keeping internees divided and resultantly disempowered. Families broke apart and the community splintered" (Saito, 2007, pp. 54–55). The prisoners who found work in the camps were paid about one-tenth of the wages paid outside the camp.

Figure 3.2 Manzanar Relocation Center in California, 1943

Source: Library of Congress, "Ansel Adams's Photographs"

Health conditions inside the camps were abhorrent. According to one resident:

We had five doctors to take care of 10,000 people in one camp. There were open sewers; the barracks had no water, no stoves. And we had young families, many with new babies and no vaccines…or sanitary conditions for making baby formula.… There were in fact outbreaks of malaria in the Arkansas camps, epidemics of dysentery at Topaz, Minidoka, and Jerome; a typhoid epidemic at Minidoka; widespread polio at Granada; and tuberculosis at Poston. In addition, many evacuees reported deaths, particularly among the very young and elderly, which might have been avoided with adequate medical facilities. (quoted in Saito, 2007, p. 61)

Recall that although the immigrant Japanese had been denied citizenship, the younger generations were, for the most part, U.S. citizens. Many of these younger individuals worked to redeem themselves in the eyes of the government (and to escape the camps) by volunteering to join the armed services. In 1944, President Roosevelt openly discussed the fact that, "on his order, American citizens of Japanese descent were, as a group, being 'kept locked up in concentration camps'" (Saito, 2007, p. 59).

Was the U.S. government justified in carrying out this internment? Why or why not? Compare and contrast the Japanese American internment in the 1940s to the treatment some American Muslims have experienced following 9/11.

Discover the efforts made by the U.S. Congress and Executive Orders issued by U.S. presidents in efforts to right the wrongs of the Japanese American internment. These efforts took place between 1948 and 1988. Use the UMUC databases and the Internet to research the reparations effort.

What was done to make amends for the Japanese American internment? Do you believe enough was done?

In 1983, nearly four decades after the end of WWII, Fred Korematsu, who had been imprisoned for attempting to avoid internment, had his wartime conviction cancelled in a federal district court. Here are his words at his successful hearing on the coram nobis petition:

According to the Supreme Court decision regarding my case, being an American citizen was not enough. They say you have to look like one, otherwise they say you can't tell a difference between a loyal and a disloyal American. I thought that this decision was wrong and I still feel that way. As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing. That is if they look like the enemy of our country. (Korematsu, as cited by Ancheta, 2006, p. 62)

Legal scholar Angelo Ancheta has found the racial experiences of Americans who are neither black nor white—specifically Asian, Latino, and Arab Americans—to be different from the racial experiences of black Americans. "The axis is not white versus black, but American versus foreigner," he observes (2006, p. 63).

Separating Culture from Race

Scientific racism, the belief in the racial hierarchy, began to fade around the beginning of the twentieth century. The racial hierarchy, as we discussed module 2, embodied two beliefs: that nonwhite groups were inferior to white groups, and that nonwhite groups occupied lower places on the continuum toward civilization. The end of scientific racism came about with the development of anthropology as a professional discipline, with careful and unbiased observation by ethnographers, and with the entrance of social scientific data into legal cases. Ethnographers, who study individual cultural groups, made it evident that there were no such things as fixed and stable racial designations. As these more open-minded scientists—now with women and minorities among them—produced factual research findings, the racial hierarchy, with its negative views of nonwhite populations, began to disintegrate.

As this occurred, an interesting change took place. "The denigration of…[racial groups] began to look less like a rational scientific conclusion and more like a pathology" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 129), and racists, as well as racism itself, became subjects of investigation by sociologists and psychologists.

Two last blows to scientific racism came during WWII, when refugee scientists from Germany encountered racism upon arriving in the United States. They argued vociferously to end it. Also, as the war came to an end, Americans came to realize the role American eugenicists played in providing ideas the Nazis used in creating their "final solution" for the Jews. At that point, the ideas that racial types existed, that one race was in any way superior to others, and that racial groups could be ranked from superior to inferior became very unappealing (Jackson & Weidman, 2004).

Boas's Work to Establish Culture

"No one did more to defeat scientific racism," say authors John P. Jackson, Jr., and Nadine Weidman, than American anthropologist Franz Boas. A German and a Jew, Boas studied the Inuit people of Baffinland (Northwest Territories, Canada), finding "the idea of a cultured individual was a relative one: while the Inuit were not cultured according to the Europeans, the Europeans were not cultured according to the Inuit" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 131).

Read how Boas changed the scientific view of race. Born and educated in Germany but working in the United States, he rejected the eugenics agendas of the Nazis, and his writings were banned in Nazi Germany. Read a brief description of his work and his life.

After immigrating to the United States in 1887, Boas studied a number of issues, among them, the changes in head measurement and height and body type (anthropometric measurements) of immigrants and their descendents. His work refuted the idea of "racial types" because he found groups became taller and even skull development changed with length of residence (and adequate nutrition) in the United States.

By dismissing the concept of racial types, Boas at the same time criticized the longstanding racial hierarchy. Boas found, "Cultural variation among distinct peoples could not be ranked hierarchically or classified along a scale that ran from civilization to savagery" (cited in Winant, 2007, p. 550). Culture, then, could be defined as "humankind's entire stock of material objects, skills, customs, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as the whole realm of economic, political, legal, religious, and familial institutions" (Camic, 2007, p. 230).

Boas and his students reoriented the field of anthropology—and by extension, sociology—away from the racial hierarchy and from racial types, "toward culture, which was a concept that could not be reduced to biology" (Camic, 2007, p. 230). His was a "social constructionist view of race" that he shared with W. E. B. Du Bois, a friend and professional colleague (Morris, p. 514, Jackson & Weidman, 2004). He shared with Du Bois the idea that "many of the differences between so-called primitive and civilized men were in fact not racial but environmental and cultural" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 134).

Including Culture in Law

The new view of culture and the new social science findings that came from this perspective entered the legal system through the efforts of Louis D. Brandeis, who later became a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1908, Brandeis was the first to urge judges to take "the actual social impact of their decisions into consideration when deciding what might constitute a just result in a particular case" (Weiner, 2006, p. 176).

Weiner describes this as the beginning of a time when information from the professional social sciences first began to be used. Brandeis once successfully argued a legal case by basing his argument on more than 90 pages of social scientific research. The "Brandeis brief," as it came to be known, became a term for a trial argument that relied upon social scientific evidence (Weiner, 2006). The use of such evidence has continued; extensive psychological and statistical analyses of the effects of discrimination on schoolchildren were used in the case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 (Hans and Martinez, 1994), which we will examine later in this module.

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II. The Legal Construction of Race

African Americans

In 1857, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Scott v. Sandford (1857), stating that African Americans were not citizens and therefore were not entitled to the benefits of American citizenship. This decision is popularly known as the Dred Scott decision. Scott was a Missouri slave who filed a lawsuit in 1847 in the Federal District Court of Missouri, asserting his claim to freedom. The court ruled that African Americans were not citizens and therefore did not have the rights as other citizens, such as bringing claims to courts. In addition, Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Maryland slave owner who was the key spokesman in the case, held that Scott was not entitled to freedom based upon his residence in Missouri, a slave state. (The court seems to have disregarded the fact that for two years, Scott had lived as a slave in an area of the Louisiana Purchase where slavery was prohibited by the Missouri Compromise.)

In 1868, following the Civil War (1861–1865), the Fourteenth Amendment granted full citizenship to African Americans:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (14th Amendment, 1868)

In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted African American men the right to vote:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude…. (15th Amendment, 1870)

Immigrants

The early 1900s were a time of peak immigration and industrialization in America. By the 1930s, about 12 million immigrants had entered this country through the Ellis Island receiving facility (Haney López, 1996). The first wave of immigrants, in the mid-1800s, had come from northern Europe, Scandinavia, and England, and from Asia and the South Pacific. Beginning in the 1880s, a second wave of much poorer and less-skilled immigrants began arriving from eastern and southern Europe. Meanwhile, immigrants from China were denied entry to the west coast from 1882 until the restriction was repealed in 1943 (Marger, 2006; Saito, 2007). Fears of foreigners overcrowding schools, depleting social services, and committing crimes fanned an anti-immigration sentiment that resulted in a series of immigration laws and quotas. The American government passed a strict immigration law in 1924 (Immigration Act) that forbade the immigration of anyone who was not considered by American law to be white (Weiner, 2006). Thus, the act completely stopped immigration from Asia and greatly decreased the number of people arriving from eastern and southern Europe. 

Immigrants Attempting to Become Citizens: The Racial Prerequisite Cases

When the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886, Americans took pride in posting Jewish immigrant Emma Lazarus's sonnet The New Colossus on a bronze plaque at the base of the statue. The poem ends with the now-famous lines:

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free The wretched refuse of your teeming shore send these. The homeless tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

In light of this stirring sentiment, it is perplexing to find the United States has generated a very long legal record of determining that many, if not most, ethnic and racial groups were deemed "not white" and thus did not quality for the benefits and privileges of citizenship accorded to white individuals in America.

Learn more about Lazarus and see photographs of her and her poem on the Statue of Liberty.

The American government had restricted naturalization, the process for gaining American citizenship, to white people only. Whiteness was a prerequisite for attaining citizenship in the United States from 1790 until 1950. Legal scholars have studied the racial prerequisite cases—those cases in which an immigrant asked for a ruling determining whether he or she was white. As the social sciences developed the new paradigm of culture to replace the racial hierarchy, new ideas flowed into the legal system. But in the realm of American citizenship, categories of race and the racial prerequisites for citizenship were so well established in the culture and in law that little change was seen for many decades. Laws stipulating which racial or ethnic groups would be categorized as white flourished from 1878 until restrictions on race ended in 1952 (Haney López, 1996, p. 49). These laws opened or closed doors to citizenship based on race, for immigrants could become citizens only if they were judged to be white.

Weiner finds the laws that govern the United States are more fair today than they were in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but still tend to favor the white majority while drawing a "circle of we" around dominant groups and keeping minority groups as "perpetual foreigners" (Weiner, 2006, p. 7; Ancheta, 2006, p. xi). African Americans, Native Americans, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Latinas, and people of Middle Eastern descent are among the groups who have been deemed "ineligible to citizenship" at one time or another (Saito, 2007, p.7). The racial prerequisite cases focused on the immigrant "others" and whether they deserved the privileges of American citizenship.

Until 1952, when racial prerequisites for people applying for citizenship ended, immigrants needed to be white become American citizens (Haney López, 1996, p. 15). How did people define whiteness? They went to the courts for legal rulings. To make their rulings, judges used information from scientists, from popular culture, and from popular understanding.

The courts cited specific rationales for their decisions:

· Common knowledge: The judge reflected on popular belief.

· Scientific evidence: The judge consulted with anthropologists or other scientists.

· Congressional intent: The judge referred to the longstanding laws preventing nonwhite people from becoming citizens.

· Legal precedent: The judge used previous legal rulings to back up the ruling in a subsequent individual case.

· Ocular inspection of the skin: The judge looked at the petitioner's skin color.

We will discuss each of these rationales in greater detail.

Between 1878 and 1944, dozens of racial prerequisite cases were heard and decided around the nation. Review the summary tableand consider the following questions:

1. What patterns do you notice?

2. The table is arranged in chronological order; look at the dates. Are there inconsistencies?

3. Were there firm and fast rules for who was white? If so, did those rules change?

4. What can you conclude about race and about whiteness from studying this list of cases?

5. What do these cases show us about the concept of race—is race scientifically established or socially constructed?

The rationales the courts used to classify some groups as white and others as nonwhite demonstrate how culture and science legally construct race. Various kinds of legal reasoning were used to explain, for example why Ah Yup, a Chinese immigrant, was considered not white in 1878, or why Syrians were considered white in a 1909 decision but nonwhite in a 1913 decision. These rationales serve as informative examples of how legal decisions were influenced by the intersection of culture, science, and the racial thinking of the time. The decisions themselves illustrate the fluidity of race (Haney López, 1996).

Common Knowledge

The common knowledge rationale was based upon a shared understanding of what it meant to be white. In 1878, when the decision was made in Ah Yup's case, whiteness was identified by an individual's outward appearance, such as skin color. The one-drop rule was also used. The court opinion classifying Ah Yup as nonwhite was partly based upon this racial reasoning. The court's decision stated that "The words 'white person'… in this country, at least, have undoubtedly acquired a well settled meaning in common popular speech, and they are constantly used in the sense so acquired in the literature of the country, as well as in common parlance" (Haney López, 1996, p. 5).

Scientific Evidence

Evidence from science was also used as a means to determine who was white. The scientific evidence referred to here originated from anthropology and the social sciences. The courts appealed to several tenets of race science; the most basic of these were that race was biological and the various races could be identified, classified, and labeled from inferior to superior, as we discussed in module 2. The courts appealed to the racial classification and racial hierarchy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ah Yup was classified as nonwhite and therefore unable to become citizen based upon biased science. The decision stated:

In speaking of the various classifications of races, Webster in his dictionary says,

The common classification is that of Blumenbach, who makes five. 1. The Caucasian, or white race to which belong the greater part of the European nations and those of Western Asia: The Mongolian, or yellow race, occupying Tartary, China, Japan, etc. 3. The Ethiopian or Negro (black) race occupying all of Africa, except the north. 4. The American, or red race, containing the Indians of North and South America; and, 5, The Malay, or Brown race occupying the islands of the Indian Archipelago,

etc. This division was adopted from Buffon, with some changes in names, and is founded on the combined characteristics of complexion, hair, and skull…. (Haney López, 1996, p. 6)

Congressional Intent and Legal Precedent

Other legal decisions appealed to congressional intent. This was the case where the court ruled in 1909 that Asian Indians were probably not white. In basing a case upon congressional intent, the court referenced the will or the intent of Congress in various pieces of legislation. For example, court decisions affirming that Chinese were nonwhite used the rationalization that Congress maintained the whites-only naturalization requirement as an affirmation that excluded Chinese as being white. In other words, Congress's original intent specified that only white people were able to naturalize. This was relied upon in the ruling that pronounced the Chinese as nonwhite.

The legal precedent argument worked in a similar manner. The cases that used legal precedent relied on previous cases that had already ruled on that particular nationality. This is why the rulings in the racial prerequisite cases involving the Chinese in 1890 and 1895 were based upon the 1878 ruling that Chinese were not white.

Common Knowledge versus Scientific Evidence

In some legal decisions regarding racial classification, the common knowledge rationale conflicted with scientific evidence. This was true in the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, an Asian Indian. In 1923, the court reversed its earlier pronunciations that Asian Indians were white. In Thind's case, the courts decided that science had been "manipulated" toward including far more racial diversity in the white race than actually existed (Haney López, 1996, p. 8). The decision stated, "We venture to think that the average well informed white American would learn with some degree of astonishment that the race to which he belongs is made up of such heterogeneous elements" (Haney López, 1996, p. 8). Thind went from white to nonwhite in one stroke of a pen. When science and common knowledge conflicted, common knowledge often won. In other words, culture prevailed just as science was starting to recognize the arbitrary nature of race.

Performance of Whiteness

John Tehranian, a legal scholar investigating the racial prerequisite cases, reports that from the case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), another criterion was used in the rulings about whiteness. Tehranian uses the word performance to describe what was intended from the 1920s forward. He finds the potential for each of these plaintiffs to assimilate to American culture was examined as part of the legal ruling. Religion, beliefs, social class, ability to intermarry, and many other characteristics were investigated and became the rationale for deciding whether an individual was white (Tehranian, 2000).

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III. The Landmark Case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

We move now into the middle of the twentieth century, to examine a legal case that served as a major turning point in race relations from a legal standpoint.

The decision in the legal case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954; hereafter referred to as Brown) serves as an excellent example of the intersection of race, law, and culture. The landmark victory of Brown was decided in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. The New York Timesdeclared that the Brown decision, which denounced segregated and unequal schools, "reaffirm[ed] its faith and the underlying American faith in the equality of all men and all children under the law" (Ogletree, 2004, p. 3). The Topeka State Journal announced the landmark legislation on the front page of its May 17, 1954, edition. The Brown decision was referred by many as the civil rights victory of the modern age. It is illustrative of how laws can open doors to formerly closed schoolhouses for racial and ethnic minorities.

Oliver Brown and his daughter, Linda, were the plaintiffs in the Brown case. Brown was aided by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was joined in the lawsuit by other parents. Brown, a railroad worker living in Topeka, Kansas, petitioned the court for permission for Linda to attend the nearby public school, which was for white children only. Under the law, Linda was forced to walk a mile to a segregated and inferior black school even though a white school was much closer to the Brown home. The Brown lawyers used social psychologists that "participated actively in the process as expert witnesses and authors of an influential social science brief" (Pettigrew, 2004, p. 522). Kenneth Clark, a psychology professor, and his wife, psychologist Mamie Clark, testified to the detrimental effects of segregation on the self-concept of black children, using the now-famous doll study.

What was the doll study, and what did it reveal about the self concept of African American children?

Before Brown, there was  Plessy v. Ferguson  (1896). In Plessy, the courts found that segregation of public facilities was acceptable as long the facilities were equal. The Plessy decision has come to be known as the "separate but equal doctrine" (Franklin & Moss, 2000, p. 452).

There were 11 other unsuccessful challenges to the "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy before the successful Brown case in 1954. Other cases were brought before the state supreme court in Topeka, Kansas, arguing that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional. Brown was the only one that was successfully argued in the U.S. Supreme Court.

When the Brown decision was handed down, the negative reaction by the white community was intense. For a time no integration took place. However, through the efforts of courageous African American individuals and over many years, schools gradually became desegregated.

Who were Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine?

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to help nine young African American students desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The situation received nationwide media coverage and in time became emblematic of the nation's movement toward desegregation.

An African American resident of Little Rock named Daisy Bates was the president of the Arkansas branch of the NAACP at the time. Mrs. Bates was an outspoken advocate for the students and adamantly supported the students involved in desegregating the school. The Bates house, located near the high school, became the official drop-off and pick-up point for the school's nine African American students and subsequently served as an unofficial meeting place for the press.

President Eisenhower's statement to Chief Justice Earl Warren of the Supreme Court at a White House dinner in 1954 exemplified the sentiment of some white southerners: "[Southern whites] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school beside some big overgrown Negroes" (quoted in Ogletree, 2004, p. 3).

Despite the resistance that President Eisenhower alluded to, some school districts did manage to desegregate through court-ordered busing and other strategies. As desegregation orders were challenged in court, some school systems developed magnet schools and other mechanisms to attract a diverse body of students. Magnet schools—developed around a theme, such as the arts, science, or communications—attained only partial success, as magnet schools tended to gradually segregate themselves. For example, white children and black children would be assigned to separate floors, thereby thwarting integration efforts.

What are the benefits of multicultural classrooms? Use the UMUC online library databases or online search engines to research ways in which students of every skin color benefit from attending integrated schools.

Today, more than 50 years after the Brown ruling, we can see that the ruling was not entirely successful. Social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew finds that in the decades since Brown, a number of legal cases have dismantled the Brown case brick by brick. Furthermore, Pettigrew reports (2004) that our nation's schools are more segregated today than they were in 1954.

Pettigrew finds that the gains brought about by Brown have been stalled and that the dream of equality is now even further away for black students. Race relations in America, he says, seem to be going backward, to its status in the nineteenth century (2004). He finds black children every May 17 celebrating Brown in all-black classrooms. Pettigrew maintains that while the U.S. Congress established a National Historic Site at the high school in Topeka, Kansas, where the case began, "Americans are simultaneously memorializing what they are destroying" (Pettigrew, 2004, p. 528). Pettigrew finds celebrate to be the wrong verb; instead, he suggests rededicate to be a more fitting word, that we as Americans should be rededicating ourselves to the "goals and visions of an integrated America." He concludes, "What is so difficult to understand about Brown's profound six-word insight: 'Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal'?" (Pettigrew, 2004, p. 528).

In trying to understand the implications and impact of the Brown decision, educator Gloria Ladson-Billings uses the framework of the racial optimists, racial liberals, and racial realists (2006). These are broad terms created by Ladson-Billings to capture complicated ideas about social phenomena such as racism and ability of the law to eradicate it.

· Racial optimists believe that the Brown decision reaffirmed American democracy and has moved America toward a more equitable society.

· Racial liberals, like racial optimists, believe that Brown was rightly decided, but its full impact has not been fully realized due to setbacks in implementation.

· Racial realists believe the Brown decision was rightly decided and stands as the hallmark legislation of the century.

Where do you stand? Are you a racial optimist, a racial liberal, or a racial realist? What evidence about your beliefs can you use to support your choice?

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IV. Race in the Legal System Today

Several views represent current thinking and current legal discussions on race. We will look at two prominent perspectives: racial colorblindnessand critical race theory.

Racial Colorblindness

Racial colorblindness is the idea often held by conservative scholars that race no longer matters in American society. People who espouse racial colorblindness believe we have enough laws in place (and sufficiently enforced) to protect African Americans and other nonwhite groups. They argue that we have passed civil rights legislation and legislation to integrate the public schools and voting rights legislation, and therefore, the civil rights revolution has succeeded in America. These individuals believe that longstanding and continuing educational and economic inequalities among racial groups continue because minority populations fail to make the effort or fail to take advantage of the opportunities that are now available to them.

Scholars who believe in racial colorblindness see no need for programs of affirmative action to assist African Americans and other nonwhite groups educationally or in the workplace and, in fact, have brought about legal rulings to end such programs (Brown et al., 2003).

Read the discussion of racial colorblindness among several experts who contributed to the television program Race: The Power of an Illusion. In light of this discussion, do you think we are ready for a colorblind society?

Those who say we have a colorblind society believe we have achieved the goal that Dr. Martin Luther King famously pronounced in his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. In what came to be known as the I Have a Dream speech, Dr. King expressed his dream that his "four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" (King, 1963).

You may have heard Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech mentioned many times in your life. But have you ever heard or read it in its entirety? Read or listen to the complete speech, and then consider this: do you feel the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has been realized?

Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory (CRT) is an investigation of explicit and implicit racism by scholars who oppose the colorblind view of race in our society. Critical race theorists look below the surface to uncover white privilege—a set of privileges enjoyed by white people, which we will discuss in greater detail later in this module—and work to expose marginalization and oppression faced by people of color in American society. Scholars of CRT assert that racism is so institutionalized and so accepted in American society that its effects on people of color cannot be seen by most white individuals (Bartlett et al., 2006). Critical race theorists do not believe that the civil rights revolution has succeeded in the United States; they find that racial inequality remains deeply embedded in our society (Bell, 2000).

Where scholars with a colorblind view don't see race as an issue, those using CRT emphasize the presence of hidden or implicit racism. Scholars who embrace CRT—many of whom are nonwhite—use race as a lens to focus on the American legal system. CRT scholarship in law emerged in the 1970s with the highly controversial work and activities of an African American legal scholar named Derrick Bell.

Bell argues in his book Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992) that racism is permanently embedded in American life. Sociologist Howard Winant finds that Bell's work suggests "progress toward racial equality for blacks only occurred in U.S. society when the state policies designed to achieve it also and immediately benefited whites" (Winant, 2007, p. 569, note 57).

How can policies designed to achieve racial equality immediately benefit white people, at the expense of racial minorities and immigrants? Historian and political scientist Ira Katznelson presents several examples of such policies (2005). He reports on programs developed in response to the Great Depression, such as the New Deal policies of the 1930s and 1940s. The development of housing programs during the 1930s designed to renovate old communities, and in some cases to create new ones, fits this category.

In the 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt secured funding to create a new community called Arthurdale to replace the rundown, poor mining community of Scott's Run near Morgantown, West Virginia. The future community of the residents of Scott's Run would be composed of small but well-built homes, equipped with plumbing, appliances, and tidy yards. Arthurdale was so nice in comparison to the old community of Scott's Run that one resident stated, "We woke up one morning in hell [Scott's Run], and went to bed the next night in heaven [Arthurdale] (Cook, 1999, p. 143).

However, not all residents were allowed to share in this new found "heaven." Scott's Run had been a diverse community in the 1920s and 1930s because of the influx of minorities and immigrants to work in the mines. The dilapidated mining community had no plumbing or sanitation, and more than 60 percent of its population were immigrants and poor, black miners (Cook, 1999). When Arthurdale was complete, the foreign-born and African Americans were forbidden to move in. Eleanor Roosevelt requested that the Homesteader's Club (the committee in charge of selecting the new community's residents) rethink their decision; committee members resisted by declaring that Arthurdale would be a "haven for whites only" (Cook, 1999, p. 139). Eleanor Roosevelt relented, and only white people were allowed to move in. The Homesteader's Club committee had no minority representation.

Katznelson (2005) also cites a recent example of how affirmative policies intended to benefit minorities chiefly benefited white individuals. Affirmative action refers to policies, programs, and funding set aside to help minorities and women overcome the history of discrimination. Katznelson (2005) argues that although affirmative action has been very successful in helping African Americans, its chief benefactors have been white women. He asserts that this fact has been largely ignored in the media and among policymakers.

The central tenet of CRT is that some aspects of racism are invisible and need to be made visible to everyone in order to understand who is privileged and who is oppressed by certain legal rulings. Critical race theorists examine all groups and all aspects of the culture in, for example, the legal system to ensure that key components or ideas or effects that are hidden may become visible.

Critical race theorists find race law and social policies have interrelated, historical, and socially constructed meanings that often promote continued white privilege. Critical race theorists also challenge the idea that the experience of white Americans should be the standard by which all others are judged. CRT focuses on an intersectional analysis of all aspects of the lives of minorities. It began as a movement by minority legal scholars, but today it has moved into the mainstream, and CRT analyses—including analyses of the complex narratives involving society, culture, race, gender, and privilege—are conducted by scholars of all races. Critical race theorists argue that inequality is built into our society and its institutions at the most fundamental levels. They find that a much more substantial effort needs to be made to make American society more equitable; the law alone cannot create a just society (Ladson-Billings, 2006).

White Privilege

One major difference between the perspectives of racial colorblindness and CRT hinges upon the concept of white privilege, a topic of much research and debate today. White privilege is the set of "benefits and advantages" in society that white individuals assume, usually without thinking (Feagin, 2001, p. 175). Our institutions often favor white people, many of whom do not recognize "how race permeates American institutions—the very rules of the game—and its distribution of opportunities and wealth" (Brown et al., 2003, p. 34). Feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh reports, "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my [white] group" (McIntosh, 1990, p. 31).

McIntosh discovered white privilege by studying male privilege. She has "often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's [privileges]" (McIntosh, 1990, p. 31). She believes white privilege is similar. Just as males are not aware of male privilege, white people are not aware of white privilege. She describes white privilege as an "invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks" (McIntosh, 1990, p. 31).

McIntosh reports that feminists working to recognize the effects of male privilege ask males to give up some of their power. She feels the same must be true about white privilege. Once white privilege is recognized, she says, what are white individuals to do to decrease it? Will they give up some of their power?

White privilege is so longstanding and so pervasive it is invisible to most white individuals (Feagin, 2001). Brown and colleagues find "these advantages seem so natural [to white people] that they are taken for granted" (2003). Whiteness is so invisible that white college students asked to write about their race often cannot. Some white college students explain that they have no race (Cornell & Hartmann, 2007, p. 88). And, when asked to discuss inequality in society, many white students do not connect the advantages of white privilege with the disadvantages of nonwhite people (Feagin, 2001). Some scholars believe that this lack of identification with race makes white people unable to recognize their overprivileged status.

Complete the interactive exercise on estimating privilege. Your score will be calculated for you. Once you have seen your score, reflect on the following questions:

· Was your score negative or positive? In what ways might you be privileged or disadvantaged?

· Do you think the score you received accurately reflects the level of privilege you have enjoyed (or been denied) in your life?

· How did this exercise make you feel? What were your thoughts as you went through the exercise?

Source: Adapted from Bailey, 2007

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V. Summary

In this module, we examined race law and the way laws reflect the whole of American culture. We found that laws are socially constructed—that is, built from ideas in our culture—and that culture is constantly changing. We also found that race is legally constructed through the law. Using both science and culture to rationalize legal opinions within the contemporary framework of the moment, race laws have helped construct race by determining the boundaries of whiteness at a given point in time. This conclusion contrasts with what we learned as children: that what is lawful is always right or ethical. The process of reexamining legal opinions and decisions through court decisions can sometimes correct the balances among law, ethics, and morality.

We used intersectional analysis to study race, culture, and law. We examined many kinds of evidence, in particular, evidence of social inequality. Two federal acts—the removal of Native Americans from their lands in the nineteenth century and the internment of Japanese Americans in the twentieth century—were used to illustrate legal views of race. For each of these examples, we looked at the acts and the consequences of those acts, and we evaluated efforts to make reparations to these groups afterward.

Because much race law concerns immigration, we looked briefly at immigration and contrasted the message of welcome on the Statue of Liberty with the fact that until the 1950s, only persons designated as white were eligible for American citizenship. We looked at a long list of prerequisite cases of individuals hoping to be designated as white in order to attain citizenship. We looked at the rationales for the legal decisions in those cases and found many kinds of evidence were used: ocular inspection of the skin, congressional intent, legal precedent, scientific evidence (social science evidence), and common knowledge (from culture).

We also examined the well-known case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka from 1954. We found, as Pettigrew stated, "What seemed in 1954 as the final breakthrough in America's long struggle against racism now stands as a high mark from which the nation has been retreating steadily in recent years" (Pettigrew, 2004, p. 521).

Finally, we discussed contemporary viewpoints about race that characterize legal scholarship today: the colorblind view that race is no longer a problem and the view of critical race theorists that racism and serious inequalities continue to persist in the United States. We examined the concept of white privilege and its effects on white and nonwhite populations in our society.

Once again, we find ourselves at that intersection of race, law, and culture where we began the module:

The intersection of race, law, and culture is not just a busy intersection; it is nearly total gridlock in a mammoth traffic circle at rush hour, cars pushing one another aside, crumpling fenders while edging one another out, horns honking, fists raised. Traffic is ever-changing.

How does this traffic analogy relate to race, culture, and law in America today? In this intersection, race, law, and culture come together to create the expression of American values. There is no permanent consensus about our laws; sometimes there is no clear right and wrong. The laws of a nation represent the nation's collective values at a given time. Laws are a set of arrangements (social constructions) that, for a time, serve to regulate and direct society on its way. Hopefully, over time, our laws will help move us toward a more equitable society. Although changing our laws alone cannot achieve racial justice, doing so represents a very important first step.

References

14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868). Our Documents initiative Web site. Retrieved August 23, 2007, from: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=43

15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870). Our Documents initiative Web site. Retrieved August 23, 2007, from: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=44

Ancheta, A. N. (2006). Race, rights, and the Asian American experience, 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Bailey, M. (n.d.). Privilege Exercise. Retrieved September 28, 2007, from http://www.msu.edu/~bailey22/Privilege_Exercise.htm

Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. New York: Basic Books.

Black's Law Dictionary, abridged 5th ed. (1983). St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co.

Brown v. Board of Educ., 347 U.S. §483 (1954).

Brown, M. K., Carnoy, M., Currie, E., Duster, T., Oppenheimer, D. B., Shultz, M. M., & Wellman, D. (2003). Whitewashing race: The myth of a color-blind society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Camic, C. (2007). On edge: Sociology during the Great Depression and the New Deal. Pp. 225–280 in Calhoun, C. (ed.) Sociology in America: A history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cook, B. W. (1999). Eleanor Roosevelt: The defining years: 1933–1938. New York: Penguin Books.

Cornell, S., & Hartmann, D. (2007). Ethnicity and race: Making identities in a changing world, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

The Dawes Act: February 8, 1887. (1996). Archives of the West, Episode 8: 1887–1914. PBS: Washington, DC. Retrieved July 20, 2007, from: http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/eight/dawes.htm

Feagin, J. R. (2001). Racist America: Rules, current realities, and future reparations. New York: Routledge.

Haney López, I. F. (1996). White by law: The legal construction of race. New York: New York University Press.

Hans, V. P., & Martinez, R. (1994). Intersections of race, ethnicity and the law. Law and Human Behavior, 18, 211–221.

Higginbotham, F. M. (2001). Race law: Cases, commentary, and questions. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Holt, M. I. (2001). Indian Orphanages. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. §153 (1924).

Indian Removal Act, 21 U.S.C. §148 (1830).

Jackson, J. P., & Weidman, N. M. (2004). Race, racism and science: Social impact and interaction. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Katznelson, I. (2005). When affirmative action was white: An untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Kull, A. (1992). The color-blind constitution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). The meaning of Brown, for now. Pp. 298–315 in Ball, A. F. (Ed.) With more deliberate speed: Achieving equity and excellence in education-realizing the full potential of Brown v. Board of Education. Malden, MA: National Society for the Study of Education.

Library of Congress Web site, American Memory: "American Indians of the Pacific Northwest." Spokane Chief Oliver Lot and William Three Mountains in group photo with other men, Colville Indian Reservation, ca. 1909. Frank Fuller Avery, Colville Indian Reservation, Washington, ca. 1904–1914. Retrieved July 20, 2007, from: http://content.lib.washington.edu/cgi-bin/htmlview.exe?CISOROOT=/loc&CISOPTR=2176

Library of Congress Web site, American Memory: "Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar." Manzanar street scene, spring, Manzanar Relocation Center. Ansel Adams, Manzanar, CA, 1943. Retrieved June 10, 2007, from: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/manz:@field(NUMBER+@band(ppprs+00225))

Marger, M. N. (2006). Race and ethnic relations: American and global perspectives, 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth.

McIntosh, P. (1990). White privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent School, 49(2), 31–36. Retrieved August 20, 2007, from: http://ezproxy.umuc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9604164115&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Morris, A. D. (2007). Sociology of race and W. E. B. Du Bois: The path not taken. Pp. 503–534 in Calhoun, C. (ed.) Sociology in America: A history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ogletree, C. J. (2004). All deliberate speed: reflections on the first half-century of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Orfield, G., & Lee, C. (2006). Racial transformation: Changing nature of segregation. Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.

Pettigrew, T. F. (2004). Justice Deferred: A half century after Brown v Board of Education. American Psychologist, 59, 521–529.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. §537 (1896).

Rojek, C., Turner B. S., & Calhoun, C. J. (2006). The Sage handbook of sociology. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Saito, N. T. (2007). From Chinese exclusion to Guantánamo Bay: Plenary power and the prerogative state. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press.

Schaefer, R. T. (2007). Race and ethnicity in the United States, 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. §393 (1857).

Tatum, B. D. (2007). Can we talk about race? And other conversations in an era of school resegregation. New York: Beacon Press.

Tehranian, J. (2000). Performing whiteness: Naturalization litigation and the construction of racial identity in America. Yale Law Journal, 109, 817–851.

United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).

Weiner, M. S. (2006). Americans without law: The racial boundaries of citizenship. New York: New York University Press.

Winant, H. (2007). The dark side of the force: One hundred years of the sociology of race. Pp. 535–571 in Calhoun, C. (ed.) Sociology in America: A history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Module 2: Science of Race

Topics 

I. Cornerstones of Race Science

II. Philosophy and Practices of Eugenics

III. Measurement of Character and Ability

IV. Exploitation of Vulnerable Populations

V. Race Science and Modern Genetics

I. Cornerstones of Race Science

Two cornerstones of race science in early-twentieth-century America were race as biology and the racial hierarchy. Both concepts were elements of racial pseudoscience, meaning they helped to confirm the beliefs scientists held about the inferiority of people who belong to nonwhite racial groups. 

Race as Biology

In the nineteenth century, Americans in general—including this nation's social scientists, medical scientists, and natural scientists—believed some races were genetically and physically superior to others. They also believed that cultural differences, economic differences, and historical differences between groups were not as important in defining race as were the inheritable, biological differences they could observe with their own eyes. Reasoning from what you see—different skin colors, hair textures, and eye folds, for example—is an idea that appears again and again in this module. 

But today we hold a different view. We believe that the differences we can see are only one facet of race, and an unimportant one, at that. We find that race has important historical and cultural determinants as well. Human geneticists today illustrate genetic mutations and variances that congregate by race, but these differences are no longer interpreted as indicators of the inferiority or superiority of any racial group. 

Relying on visible differences among races to draw conclusions about individuals is like sorting all the books in a library by the colors of their covers, to borrow and build upon a metaphor from philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. "Only a tiny portion of an individual's genetic inheritance, like a tiny fraction of a book's character, is taken into account by such a system," and no librarian would believe that deep knowledge about people would be revealed by such a system of classification (Appiah, 1992, p. 38). However, for centuries, we believed that what we see is the most important source of information for categorizing people into groups.

The Racial Hierarchy

There are two components to the racial hierarchy, both of which are examples of Eurocentric thinking. A hierarchy by definition assigns order to items or concepts: from top to bottom, from best to worst—in this case, from most advanced to least. The racial hierarchy placed a value on each racial group: white racial groups (that is, people of European ancestry) were considered better, more advanced, and more civilized than others, in terms of genetic inheritance.

Second, the racial hierarchy also marked the progress each group was making toward civilization. In this way of thinking, the groups deemed most primitive had shown the least capability of advancement and change. These Eurocentric values, held by white people and "confirmed" by white researchers engaged in the pseudoscience of race science, placed white racial groups at the apex of civilization and found nonwhite groups to be more primitive and incapable of improvement.

II. Philosophy and Practices of Eugenics

The Philosophy

The quest for racial purity and human perfection formed the foundation of the eugenics movement in America around the end of the nineteenth century (Black, 2003). Historians John Jackson and Nadine Weidman describe eugenics as "the idea that 'good people' should be encouraged to reproduce and 'bad people' should be discouraged from it" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 109). After World War II, it became widely known that Nazi Germany had patterned their programs of eugenics after those in the United States. At that point, American eugenic organizations dropped the name eugenics and began to use the term genetics (Black, 2003). Figure 2.1 reproduces the logo from the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921. The logo illustrates the wide range of disciplines that were associated with the racial science of the eugenics movement.

Figure 2.1 Tree of Eugenics 

Source: International Eugenics Discussion, 2007

Eugenics became a familiar concept among Americans, and its proponents used elements of popular culture to extol its virtues. A popular film titled The Black Stork, referred to as "the eugenics love story," played in theatres from 1916 to the 1940s and promoted forced sterilization of defectives and withholding necessary medical treatment of defective newborns (Lombardo, 1997). Also, during the height of the eugenics era (the early 1900s), "Fitter Family" contests were popular at state and local fairs throughout the country, in which used such criteria as health, family pedigree or genealogy, race, intelligence, and even cleanliness (Black, 2003) to determine which families most closely embodied the tenets of eugenics.

Better Breeding

When English researcher Sir Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883, he defined the concept in terms of being "well-born," implying similar outcomes for humans as for cattle. Borrowing from the science of animal husbandry that focused on selected breeding of domesticated animals like cattle, sheep, horses, cats, and dogs, eugenicists advocated the same methods to develop a racially pure and fit stock of humans.

Animal husbandry, also known as animal science, has long been preoccupied with the selective mating of animals to produce a certain pedigree or stock with superior characteristics. For example, animal scientists were—and continue to be—interested in breeding cattle with increased resistance to disease. Much as a selected pairing of stock animals might be deemed fit or unfit, and evidence of "taint" in a breeding animal would be frowned upon, eugenicists similarly judged the levels of purity and fitness required for a fit marriage, often using the same terminology.

This same language was also used in defining the levels of racial hierarchy for centuries. The emphasis on fitness and breeding was also a preoccupation of slave owners in the south. Slaves who were strong and who were perceived as good workers were often purchased as "breeders" to produce children with similar characteristics (Black, 2003).

The American Breeders' Association

The American Breeders’ Association (ABA) was an early and ardent supporter of race science research and eugenics in the United States (Black, 2003). Created in 1903, the ABA was made up of agricultural societies that supported research in animal husbandry and hereditary science. Agricultural science, now known as agronomy, focuses on food and plant production using the latest tools and technology of science. Charles Davenport, a Harvard-trained zoologist and a leading American eugenicist, convinced the ABA at its first annual meeting in St. Louis in 1903 to include a focus on eugenics. The Eugenics Committee "would devise methods of recording the values of the blood of individuals, families, people, and races" (Black, 2003, p. 39).

It did not seem out of place to combine research on the breeding of superior plants and animals with the breeding of superior humans in the early 1900s. An animal breeder stated that "every race-horse, every straight back bull, every premium pig, tells what we can do [for animals] and what we must do for man" (Black, 2003, p. 39). The ABA undertook studies in genetics and encouraged better breeding in humans—work that contributed to a biased form of race science.

The ideas spread by the ABA became so popular because they focused on the problems of the day. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people believed that an individual's propensity toward criminality, poverty, deviousness, or feeblemindedness was inherited (Black, 2003; Cravens, 1978). In other words, people who were poor or mentally ill and people in prisons, reformatories, orphanages, and poorhouses (institutions for the poor) were believed to have come from "poor native stock" (Barr, 1992). Environmental factors, such as poverty, malnutrition, mistreatment, a lack of opportunities, racism, unemployment, and lack of schooling were not regarded as factors that might affect a child's development or a family's ability to pay their bills. Instead, many believed that an individual's behaviors were incorporated into the genome, so that misbehaviors of sin, sickness, drunkenness, laziness, and criminal tendencies were passed on as genetic heredity to the next generation (Barr, 1992; Cravens, 1978).

Conditions in Society

Around the time eugenics peaked in the United States, our nation was experiencing the largest waves of immigration it had ever seen. Beginning in about the 1880s, immigrants were increasingly the poor, unskilled, and uneducated people from southern and eastern Europe. Many immigrants came from lives of desperate poverty and filled the slums of New York and other port cities. Sentiment against ethnic minorities rapidly increased as cities and their services became overwhelmed serving families of destitute immigrants. Discrimination against racial minorities continued as well.

Some researchers have found that when the number of immigrants to a particular region greatly increases, anti-immigrant sentiment there becomes stronger. What might be a few of the reasons?

Figure 2.2 Immigrants Admitted into the United States: Fiscal Years 1900–1999

Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 2002, p. 15

Note: The spike around 1990 resulted from the passing of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, which provided legalization for illegal immigrants living in the United States. Following the passage of IRCA, 2.7 million illegal immigrants of the United States were able to become legal residents (Marger, 2006).

The Remedies

Eugenicists hoped to "cleanse" society of the unfit and of those whose genes were considered impure. Remedies consisted of forced sterilization of the unfit, denial of medical treatment that would prolong the lives of the unfit, mandatory segregation, restrictive marriage laws, and withholding of medical treatment that could save the lives of newborns with serious birth defects. Paul Popenoe, California's leading advocate for eugenics and the author of the textbook Applied Eugenics, argued, "The easiest way to counteract feeblemindedness was simple execution" (as quoted in Black, 2003, p. 251). Eugenics societies focused on ways to rid society of the unfit. Swiss psychiatrist and eugenics supporter August Forel issued a dire warning of the dangers of bad breeding when he stated, "The law of heredity winds like a red thread through the family history of every criminal, every epileptic, eccentric, and insane person. Shall we sit still…without applying the remedy?" (as quoted in Black, 2003, p. 257).

Sterilization

Some states passed mandatory sterilization laws for the unfit and legislated restrictive marriage clauses. Virginia, for example, made it illegal for a white person to marry a person who had "one drop" of black blood (Black, 2003, p. 165). These laws were intended to prevent "mongrels and mental defectives" (terms the 1924 Virginia legislature used) from reproducing and spreading their damaged genes through society. Mandatory sterilization laws were applied in the United States, where many individuals in mental institutions and in institutions for the feebleminded were sterilized without their consent. In California, over 11,000 inmates of institutions were sterilized.

The United States was not alone in this respect: Switzerland passed its own sterilization laws in 1928. Denmark soon followed in 1929. Many other countries passed similar legislation in the ensuing years.

Not Mixing the Races

The Richmond Times-Dispatch published an editorial in 1924 supporting the measure to prohibit marriages across racial lines. The editorialist wrote, "Once a drop of inferior black blood gets in his [that is, a white person's] veins, he descends lower and lower in the mongrel scale" (Black, 2003, p. 167). (Mongrelization is a term borrowed from animal husbandry that designates a mixed-breed animal, specifically a dog.) Clearly, the racial hierarchy was the underlying foundation for eugenics policies in America.

Valuing Nordic People

At the opening of the twentieth century, many believed that the Nordic race was the most superior of the European races. Historians John Jackson and Nadine Weidman reported that so-called "Nordicists" looked for Nordic roots in culture, democracy, and social order and believed that even the "capacity for civilization was racial in nature" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, pp. 105). Nordic people were "long-headed, blond, blue eyed, creative, strong, natural leaders" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 108). There were calls to discard "all moral sentiment that would stand in the way of a massive breeding program that would eliminate racial inferiors" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 108) and to help increase the numbers of Nordics. The idea of Nordic superiority is a familiar theme in Nazi propaganda before and during WWII.

German Eugenics

The Nazis borrowed heavily from the race science ideas developed by American eugenicists. Race science in Germany was aimed at creating a master Nordic race and was used to justify Jewish persecution and extermination that resulted in the Holocaust (Black, 2003). The Nazi remedy for the unfit and the Jews was referred to as the Final Solution (Black, 2003).

With money from the United States as well as other international funding, Germany founded the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in 1927 to conduct research on eugenics. One of the contributors of ideas to this enterprise was American eugenicist Charles Davenport, the head of the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor (New York), where he founded the Eugenics Record Office. In Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), Davenport examined how race and disease were biologically based and determined that the "racially robust" were destined to rule the earth (Black, 2003, p. 386). Davenport’s subsequent book Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929) was of special interest to the Germans. His contribution enabled the Nazis to use "pedigrees," or family trees, to identify Mischlinge (mixed-race Jews). Davenport had ties to several German journals and institutions in the prewar era. 

Eugenics laws came quickly under the Nazi government. The first was a law for the prevention of genetically diseased offspring, to provide for the involuntary sterilization of people with "hereditary defects" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 123). In 1935, Hitler signed the Nuremberg laws to "strip Jews of citizenship," to prohibit "marriage between Jews and non-Jews," and "to require all couples wishing to marry to take medical examinations to ensure the purity of the race" (Jackson & Weidman, p. 124). (Similar racial purity laws were in effect in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) The second part of the Nuremberg Laws was the Reich Citizenship law, which defined anyone with three Jewish grandparents as a Jew and therefore a noncitizen. Anyone who had two Jewish grandparents was considered a Mischling and was also denied citizenship. The Nuremberg Laws proved critical in the oppression of the Jews, stripping them of their citizenship and making them targets for extermination (Bergen, 2003).

American eugenicists were delighted with the German laws. Harry Laughlin, an American geneticist who ran the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor for Davenport, was proud that the German law relating to sterilization was based on the law he had written. Jackson & Weidman report that Laughlin received "an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1936" for his work on the law of mandatory sterilization (2004, p. 123).

The American form of eugenics was similar to that practiced in Germany but a bit less extreme. This American version of race science was focused on developing the tools and technology to identify, manage, manipulate, or eliminate from the breeding pool people who were considered undesirable or defective. The way to improve the human breeding stock, eugenicists reasoned, was to prevent the survival of defective newborns and to remove defective individuals from society, relocating them into institutions to prevent their breeding.

Research in the Era of Eugenics

In the early twentieth century, anthropologists and physicians studied the growth of children of different immigrant and racial groups. They found that on average, these youngsters were considerably shorter (by several inches in middle childhood) and weighed considerably less (tens of pounds less in middle childhood) than the children of white, middle-class American families to whom they were compared. Children of immigrants, children of minority racial groups, and inmates of orphanages (who tended to come from poor families) experienced delayed puberty in comparison to children from white, middle-class families. Yet, scientists assessing such information interpreted the data to infer "poor native stock" and "inferior heredity" of these racial groups, rather than pointing out the evident poverty and malnutrition that characterized the lives of immigrant families and families of the poor (Barr, 1992, p. 159). 

III. Measurement of Character and Ability

Phrenology

Race scientists had long been interested in human ability and in ways they might measure it. We begin with an idea from the nineteenth century: visible and measurable attributes of the human skull and their relationship to character, ability, and temperament. Phrenology—reading and interpreting the bumps on the skull—was one method used to assess an individual's abilities and character.

How do you measure up? 

Feel your own skull for especially well-developed bumps, and determine the corresponding areas on the phrenology chart in figure 2.3. What would a phrenologist have determined about your character and personality in the late 1800s?

Figure 2.3 A Typical nineteenth-century Phrenology Chart 

Source: Adapted from Fowler, 1856

Anthropometry

In the nineteenth century, scientists used anthropometric measurements (body and skull proportions) and psychophysical measurements (strength of grip and speed of reaction), believing these to be related to general mental ability. Galton, a scientist and a cousin of Charles Darwin, was trained in statistics. He began collecting such information and developing averages and other statistics for each skill he measured, in an effort to discover more about human ability. Galton ran an anthropometric laboratory in London and also collected data at the immensely popular world's fairs. Remember from our discussions in module 1 that there was an American anthropometric laboratory at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, where measurements of "primitive groups" were compared to those of European white people (Rydell, 1984).

It is important to recognize that measuring skulls and bodies and gauging physical reaction speeds and muscular strength are not racist activities, but are genuine science, part of an attempt to measure the variability of human beings, even of racial or ethnic groups of human beings. A biasexists when scientists interpret these data by using them to support the idea that one racial or ethnic group is inferior to another. That value judgment is what makes real science into pseudoscience.

How might you be measured and tested if you had entered Galton’s anthropometric laboratory in London? Explore the online Galton Collection to see photos of the curious instruments Galton used to measure his subjects' heads and bodies.

Viewing "Types"

In the 1800s, lithography was used to sketch "types"—that is, the faces of individuals who exemplified certain personality attributes. By the end of the century, photography began to be used to record these types. It was believed that by looking closely at facial features, you would be able to discover greatness or ordinariness, or even criminality. Furthermore, by examining and interpreting the features of criminals, it was believed, you could even perceive the particular type of crime committed by a given type of criminal, as defined by certain facial features.

As well as taking anthropometric measurements, Galton experimented with composite photographs to construct "racial types." He used multiple negatives superimposed one over another to create an "ideal" type of face from many facial photographs. Such a composite might have been used to gather "a group of persons resembling one another in some mental quality" in order to determine "the external characteristics and features most commonly associated with that mental quality" (Study, 1877, p. 573). Galton proposed combining measurements of height and weight with age, hair color, and temperament to determine a "personal equation" that could be correlated with "mental characteristics" (Study, 1877, p. 573). Each of these projects, and Galton's later system of classification of fingerprints—which we still use today—was based on what you see and what it could indicate about character and mental ability (Kenna, 1964; Study, 1877).

Screening Immigrants

In 1912 and 1913, researchers from the Training School (an institute for the feebleminded) in Vineland, New Jersey, carried out a series of experiments. Working alongside physicians at Ellis Island, where immigrants entered the United States, they sought "to see whether or not persons of considerable experience in institutions for the feebleminded can and do have the ability to pick [mental] defectives at sight." They hoped to identify and turn away defective individuals attempting to enter the United States, and also to discover which countries "supply the largest amounts of defectives" ("Notes and News," 1913, p. 245). While physicians were looking at individual immigrants as they entered the United States, the Training School researchers were observing the faces of youngsters to see if they could determine intelligence and character by looking at the faces of children.

One characteristic observed in some children that was imbued with artificial meaning was a tendency to breathe through the mouth, rather than through the nose with the lips closed. "Mouth breathers" were children whose mouths hung open because chronically swollen adenoids made it difficult to breathe through the nose. In the early 1900s, it was thought that children who had problems with adenoids were also deficient mentally. Once again, we see a belief that came about because of what you see. Today, we realize that a child with chronically infected tonsils and adenoids might do poorly in school because respiratory infections can cause a student to miss school.

The idea that you could see intelligence in human faces was very slow to disappear, even decades after tests of intelligence began to appear and were in common use. Psychologist Florence Goodenough felt it still needed to be discussed when she wrote her 1934 textbook on developmental psychology. She displayed six head-and-shoulders photographs of preschool children and asked readers to rank the intelligence of the children from high to low. Here is how she defined the task: 

Look over the photographs of these six children and decide which you think is the brightest. Write the corresponding letter on a sheet of paper. Then examine the remaining photographs and decide which child you think is next in order of intelligence. Continue until all have been ranked. Then turn to the list of IQs and see how closely your ranking agrees with the test results. (p. 318)

Measuring Mental Ability

Around 1900, efforts at assessing character and mental ability were under way in medicine, criminology, and psychology, using physical measures and photography. But no one had developed a test that seemed satisfactory to characterize intelligence, then called mental ability or mental capacity. For decades, the focus had been on what you see in the human face that could be a valid indicator of intelligence.

The Binet Scales

We now focus on young children, for the first successful test of intelligence was developed for use with school-age children. In 1904, the minister of public instruction in Paris appointed a commission to make recommendations for the education of children in the slums. Biologist Alfred Binet and his physician colleague Theophile Simon were tasked with developing a way to separate children with subnormal mental ability, who needed a simpler, slower program, from children who were normal and could benefit from regular schooling.

At the time the Parisian school system categorized "subnormal" children into two groups: "those of backward intelligence, and those who are unstable." Unstable children were "turbulent, vicious, rebellious to all discipline; they lack sequence of ideas, and probably power of attention." Unstable youngsters were not considered in this sorting of students; instead, Binet concentrated on separating the "normal" from those who were "backward" in intelligence (Binet, 1916, p. 191).

There was a great need to organize and systematize elementary schooling at this time. Providing an adequate education—sometimes even a desk—to the crowds of children who came to already overcrowded, free public schools in France and in the United States was very difficult. Classrooms in both countries were filled with students of all different ages and sizes, and teachers struggled to manage. Students entered school at very different ages. In the United States, attendance was not compulsory, so children attended when their parents could spare them. Students were often ill for months on end and thus made very poor progress through school. By one estimate, between one-third and one-half of schoolchildren in the United States failed to progress through the grades as they should have. Teachers were often unwilling to promote students who scored poorly, so the lower grades of schools became overcrowded with older students who failed to progress (Barr, 2002).

To meet the challenge of sorting Parisian slum children by ability, Binet and Simon borrowed experimental tasks from many sources and studied strategies in use for detecting subnormal mental ability. They reported studying and then discarding the psychologists' techniques of reaction time and speed of counting dots. They carried out and likewise discarded the old ideas of phrenology and palmistry, and they discounted studies of handwriting and measures of fluency of speech. Finally, Binet borrowed questions used by French neurologists who had the responsibility to identify children who should be admitted into institutions for the insane or the feebleminded.

Binet's 1908 scale was successfully used in Paris. The questions Binet and Simon used were chosen to reflect the ordinary items in a child's life (remember, these were children living in the slums of Paris). By testing many children, they were able to discover how many and what types of questions an ordinary six-year-old could answer, and how many and what types of questions seven-, eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds should be able to answer. Using this information, they constructed average scores that represented the ordinary knowledge of typical children from age six to age ten. If a child could answer the questions expected of an average six-year-old, that child received a designation of mental age of six. If the child's chronological age corresponded to his or her mental age, then he or she was deemed normal. If, however, a child of ten was able to answer only the types of questions a seven-year-old would be expected to answer, then that discrepancy marked the child as subnormal. An especially bright child might have been found to have a mental age two or three years beyond the child's chronological age.

Binet and Simon's test succeeded primarily because they intentionally chose what Binet called the "questions of practical life," rather than material learned in school (Binet & Simon, 1916, p. 72). The men believed their 1908 scale was just one part of an important investigation of a child and also requested that a physician examine each child for health problems ("the medical method") and a teacher report on school problems ("the pedagogical method"). The Binet-Simon Scale was, in their words, "the psychological method" (Binet, 1916, p. 40). 

Information from the child's physician and teacher would be combined with the results of the Binet-Simon scale to arrive at a decision as to whether a child could benefit from normal instruction in school. Thus, a child of six who had a mental age of six would be placed into a normal classroom (assuming no indication to the contrary from the other reports). A ten-year-old who scored a mental age of seven, if evidence from the physician, teacher, and parents were considered to confirm the "diagnosis," would be placed in a classroom of students who were subnormal mentally. 

The Stanford-Binet Test

The American version of the Binet Scale was developed by Lewis M. Terman, an American psychologist and professor who had a very different agenda from that of Binet. Terman greatly admired Alfred Binet. Unlike Binet, however, Terman was a committed eugenicist and an enthusiastic fan of the work of Galton and other European and American eugenicists. Terman believed mental ability was inherited. He also embraced the racial hierarchy, and he strongly believed that environment made no difference; heredity was, to his mind, the whole story. Reflecting on intelligence test scores, Terman asserted, "It would hardly be reasonable…to expect that a little incidental instruction in the home would weigh very heavily against these…native [genetic] differences in endowment" that his test illustrated (Terman, 1916, p. 116).

Because he was a committed eugenicist, Terman’s goal was not to sort, but to sift. Sorting would be arranging children into different classes by ability level; to sift would be to get rid of the least capable children and not allow them to attend school at all. To prevent wasted resources, Terman wished to remove from school all students who were incapable of learning (Barr, 2003). Terman was adamant about removing subnormal children from schools, for they "wasted the resources of the state" (Terman, 1914, pp. 15, 16). He claimed, "When we know more about the physical basis of mental life we shall quit teaching grammar to feeble-minded children who cannot learn to count money" (Terman, 1914, pp. 15, 16).

Terman had graduate students in a seminar course help him adapt the Binet test to use with American schoolchildren. However, by the time he, his students, and several statisticians had constructed the American test, the intention, the assumptions, the administration process, and even the questions had changed.

In using Binet's test with American children, Terman was proud to tell others that American children did much better than the children of Paris, neglecting to mention that the Paris test had been designed for children living in the slums, whose opportunities for learning were far scarcer than those of Terman's subjects. When the American test—now a very different test from its French precursor—was completed and published in 1916, Terman named it the Stanford-Binet test.

There are many differences between the Binet-Simon Scale and the Terman's Stanford-Binet test, leading to divergences in the ways each researcher interpreted his test's findings. Four of these distinctions are critical in the context of our discussion:

· First, Terman's Stanford-Binet test focused on school-learned abilities, in contrast to Binet's focus on practical knowledge gained in everyday life.

· Second, Terman's version, unlike Binet's original, was timed. The Stanford-Binet Test of Intelligence was not a leisurely activity, nor was it part of a long, careful investigation by physicians and teachers. The Stanford-Binet test took about an hour. Group tests of intelligence had been developed during WWI, so thereafter, tests could be given to many students at once. For Terman and his colleagues, time was money, and the advent of group tests made it possible to assess intelligence for many individuals in comparatively little time.

· Third, Terman attached much greater significance to the results of the Stanford-Binet test than Binet did with his test. Terman believed his test indicated the level of ability with which one was born, a claim not made by Binet. Terman believed a very young child (a baby awaiting adoption, for example) could be tested and by that test, it would be possible to tell whether that child would grow up to be capable of going to graduate school. Further, Terman believed the test assessed much more than intelligence: he thought his test assessed moral character and physical excellence as well. Binet believed children had different paths and speeds of mental growth; Terman believed that children could be tested once and that from the results, parents and teachers could predict that child's accomplishments in life.

· Fourth, Terman believed the results of his test reflected the entire value of an individual child. One could imagine lining children up and pinning a number (an IQ score) onto their shirts, and ranking the children from the most inferior to the most superior.

The Stanford-Binet Test of Intelligence immediately became a best-seller in schools, clinics, orphanages, and asylums for the feebleminded. It became the most widely used instrument in psychological research and school placement in the United States from the early 1920s until after WWII.

In a typical application of the test that occurred in the early 1920s, Terman and a graduate student used the Stanford-Binet test to classify first graders in Oakland, California. There were no kindergartens in Oakland, so children began schooling at age six. Within a month of entering school, students were tested and placed into classes of children with homogeneous mental ability. This was a great help to teachers, for they had as many as 40 to 60 students in a class. Following Terman's advice, teachers slowed down and watered down the curriculum for the subnormal children, provided a normal curriculum for the average children and accelerated the curriculum for the brightest youngsters (Barr, 1992).

Now, let's shed some light on some additional relevant facts that seem to have been ignored at the time. In Oakland, a port city, many of the dock workers who loaded and unloaded ships were Portuguese-speaking immigrants. Nearly every child in the "subnormal" classroom was a Portuguese-speaking child from a dock worker's family. Children in the normal and accelerated classes were, for the most part, children born to English-speaking American parents. Why did the results fall along these lines? Quite simply, the test was administered in English (Dickson, 1920).

Such bias was not confined to the West coast. Researchers in Delaware used the Stanford-Binet test to measure the intelligence of African American children who lived three or four miles from the only school they were allowed to attend. It was too far for most to walk, and no transportation was provided. Many of the children researchers tested had never attended school (Mental Defect, 1919). You probably can guess the conclusions drawn by researchers based on the test results.

There was another element to the bias, as well. Although the test was used principally to study normal children, Terman's particular, lifelong interest was in the extremes of the scale: those children with the lowest mental abilities, and those with the highest. While developing the test, Terman reported in his personal correspondence to others that children living on farms, minority children, children of immigrants, and children in orphanages performed more poorly on the test of intelligence than did white, middle-class, city-dwelling children (Terman, 1919, pp. 67–68).

Based on the performance discrepancies he observed between the city-dwelling, middle-class, white children and those without the same advantages, Terman concluded that children from farms and orphanages, and children of minority and immigrant populations, were subnormal. That is, he believed they had inherited lower levels of mental capability than white children in cities. This idea becomes especially interesting when you consider that Terman grew up on a farm in a rural area of Indiana.

Today, we would say that Terman's Stanford-Binet Test of Intelligence assessed, with fair accuracy, the aptitude of white, middle-class children who had attended very good schools. We also would point out that the test was biased against all those other groups of children. We now recognize that environment, culture, and—in particular—language play important roles and are as important as heredity in determining a person's mental ability.

Standardized Achievement Tests 

After group tests of intelligence were developed to assess and sort soldiers during WWI, Terman and others developed standardized achievement tests in the 1920s. Standardized achievement tests (the Stanford Achievement Test, for example) even today are highly correlated with tests of intelligence. That means that much of what the achievement test measures is the same as that which a test of intelligence measures: both types of tests measure the quality and quantity of education. Test makers assumed children taking either test had access to fine schools, capable teachers, quality textbooks, and families with resources to enrich their lives.

Studying Race Using Scores from Tests of Intelligence

In the decades after Terman's first Stanford-Binet Test of Intelligence appeared, it rapidly became the leading outcome measure used in a variety of educational and psychological studies. From about 1920 to 1945, a number of studies were organized around racial or ethnic groups. During these years, researchers were describing intelligence (and achievement) and the differences between these measures in racial and immigrant groups and groups of white, middle-class children born in the United States. During this era, as immigrants settled in and prospered, and especially as Americans emerged from the Great Depression and WWII, the differences among groups of children began to diminish. Goodenough—incidentally, one of Terman's students—claimed in this era that race was the most important variable of investigation, but findings became less and less interesting as poor and immigrant children became assimilated into middle-class life. Additionally, rural children began to be brought to consolidated village schools, and African American and Native American children began to have access to schooling, or to improved (though still not quality) schooling. As more groups of children gained access to adequate schooling, the gap in intelligence and achievement test scores between white, middle-class students and racial minorities diminished somewhat. But gains have stagnated during the past couple of decades, owing to a contemporary movement toward resegregation of schools (Barr, 1992).

Minority students often come from poorly funded schools with fewer facilities and older textbooks, and they frequently live in homes where there are fewer opportunities for academic stimulation than you would find in a middle-class, white household. In the past, children of minority races attended schools that received only a fraction of the funding that schools for white children received, meaning that the parents of minority students sometimes are less educated than the parents of white American children. Furthermore, in families who immigrate to the United States, children may be just learning English, far later than their classmates whose first (or only) language is English. These factors profoundly influence the results of tests of intelligence and achievement, but they have not generally been assigned sufficient weight when results are interpreted.

The Legacy of Testing

The test of intelligence and standardized achievement tests were developed in the era of eugenics, when racism was rampant and the racial hierarchy was accepted as an explanation for different levels of performance between individuals with different backgrounds. Because the test was constructed using white, middle-class youngsters as the standard of performance, children who did not fit that description, or who did not have access to excellent schools, were not accurately assessed. Those criticisms still stand today.

The Stanford-Binet test and its cousin the Stanford Achievement Test could have provided opportunities for researchers to investigate the lives of poverty lived by so many of the children who performed poorly on the test. The tests could have thrown a spotlight on the inequalities in school funding and teacher preparation and textbooks that made schools unequal and resulted in unequal student outcomes—and continue to do so today. Instead, in the eugenics era, all outcomes were interpreted as the results of heredity. The inferior performance of children of different races was attributed to poor heredity and to real differences among the races, rather than to the unequal distribution of resources and advantages in American society.

Today, with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind program, the effects of standardized tests are even more evident in classrooms now than in the past. The same criticisms still hold: children who are not fluent in English, children who come from homes where no adult has time or education or resources to help the student learn, and children of racial groups for which poverty is commonplace on the whole perform more poorly on these tests than children with more advantages.

Where does the bias in testing originate? It comes from a false assumption that all children are on a level playing field—that every child taking the test has a good home life, enough food to eat, restful sleep, kind parents with time and interest to help their young scholar, a well-trained and sympathetic teacher, a classroom with up-to-date books, and a well-funded school. Test developers believe all children have equal opportunities in life and are treated equally fairly in the classroom. We know those assumptions are often not true.

IV. Exploitation of Vulnerable Populations

From around 1900, when physicians and scientists began in earnest to carry out formal research studies, they were always short of test subjects—people they could test or on whom they could perform experiments or surgeries. Physicians often found subjects among those living in institutions such as jails, hospitals, mental institutions, homes for the feebleminded, and orphanages. They also found subjects among the uninformed, rural poor; among nonwhite racial groups; and, in the past, among slaves (Lederer, 1997).

Today we call these people vulnerable individuals and these groups vulnerable populations because they do not have the usual protections that we expect individuals in our society to enjoy. They are available to be used by ethical and humane researchers, and, unfortunately, also by unethical and inhumane researchers. 

Children

Research on children has always been difficult because many parents refuse to grant permission for experiments using their children as subjects. Physicians struggled to obtain the cases they needed. One example of such a situation was the difficulty researchers had in obtaining blood samples from children for the study of antitoxin treatment for diphtheria, a dreaded childhood disease. Around 1915, a physician named Abraham Zinger ran clattering down a wooden stairway of a hospital in New York City, the hospital superintendent in angry pursuit. With permission to take a few blood samples from hospitalized children, Zinger had instead taken blood samples from nearly all the children on the ward before he was discovered (Barr, 1992).

Sometimes physicians even performed surgeries on schoolchildren without parental permission. In 1906, Jewish parents rioted outside a school in New York where physicians were surgically removing their children's adenoids without parental permission (Tyack, 1992). 

Children in orphanages often were subjects of scientific experimentation. Physicians who attended to ill children in orphanages frequently were granted permission by orphanage superintendents to use the children in scientific studies and experiments. Though most children living in orphanages at that time had at least one living parent, orphanage superintendents assumed parental responsibilities for their charges. Believing they owed some favor to physicians who attended ill orphans, the superintendents permitted these experiments.

In 1921, after learning that children in an orphanage had been allowed to repeatedly develop rickets and scurvy (medical conditions that are caused by vitamin deficiencies) in order to test cures, social worker Konrad Bercovici spoke out against those studies. In an article in the magazine The Nation, he wrote, "A child is placed in an infant asylum because it is left 'without proper guardianship' because its parents 'are too destitute to care for it properly.' It is never intended to take the place of a guinea pig in a…laboratory" (Bercovici, 1921, p. 913).

Though the researchers' intent was to learn about the normal course of disease and the development of normal children, their efforts were based on false premises. Children in orphanages were most definitely not normal (i.e., typical) in many ways. Most came from destitute families where they had been poorly fed, and many were considerably underweight. The orphans had received poor medical care, if any, all their lives. They lived in crowded, lonely, stressful conditions that affected their health. Their immune systems were compromised from the stress of institutional life; in an epidemic of measles in an orphanage for infants, for example, over 30 percent of infants would die, even though few if any children in nearby middle-class families would have died from the same infection. Thus, using experiments conducted on orphanage children to draw conclusions regarding typical children, although intended to make medical research easier, produced some findings that were very difficult to explain (Barr, 1992).

Adults

Children were not the only vulnerable populations used for medical research. Many adults were vulnerable to medical experimentation because of age, disease, disability, class, or circumstance. For example, prisoners were once considered acceptable subjects, even if they did not grant permission, owing to their stigma as prisoners and the relative ease of access to them. In 1910, in fact, the Journal of the National Medical Association suggested in an editorial that prisoners could help pay their debt to society by offering themselves for scientific experimentation (as cited in Washington, 2006).

Other vulnerable adult populations included individuals who had been deemed feebleminded. Feeblemindedness was a broad label that was used to refer to the poor, the mentally ill, and the sexually promiscuous, especially unwed mothers (Barr, 1992). Incidentally, more women than men were labeled as feebleminded by their physicians, by mental health institutions, and occasionally by their families. Women who were considered feebleminded were prime subjects for medical experimentation and abuse (Washington, 2006).

African Americans

Even now, African Americans continue to be considered one of the most vulnerable populations for medical research (Washington, 2006). In 1910, Dr. Thomas Murrell of the U.S. Public Health Service stated that "the future of the Negro lies more in the research laboratory than in schools" (Washington, 2006, p. 157)—a statement that seems unimaginable to us today, but that reflected a common perspective of the era in which it was made.

Some reasons for the increased vulnerability of African Americans are a low level of awareness of the risks of medical research; high incarceration rates (prisoners are still a prime population for medical research); and high levels of poverty, causing high use of the public areas of the health care system where researchers can reach them. Furthermore, stigma, discrimination, and racism are thought to enter into some researchers' decisions regarding which groups to subject to risky medical procedures.

Today, because of codes of ethics, much medical research has been moved from American soil to "offshore" locations: in other words, into the third world. Recently, there has been an increase in the participation of Africans in medical research that cannot take place in the United States because it would violate accepted codes of ethics (Washington, 2006). In the past, the most common purposes of medical experimentation were observation (especially to see if a disease process was the same in the black human as in the white human), the search for cures for various diseases, curiosity about the black body, perfection of surgical techniques, and development of treatments that promoted a political or racist agenda.

From the time African Americans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, African American men women and children have been consistently targeted for medical experimentation and research in the United States (Washington, 2006). A slave named John Brown is known to have fallen prey to the experimentation of a physician named Thomas Hamilton. Using heat, Hamilton blistered Brown's legs, arms, and hands to find out how deep the blackness penetrated his skin (Washington, 2006). James Sims, a gynecological surgeon who is commemorated with a statue at New York's Central Park, near the New York Academy of Medicine, conducted painful vaginal surgeries on slave women without anesthesia in the 1850s. Sims was looking for a cure for vaginal infections that were routinely caused by the distressingly poor conditions that slaves and other poor people lived under (Washington, 2006).

Case Study: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Observing Syphilis

One of the most egregious abuses was the federal government's "Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male," commonly referred to as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. It began in Macon County, Alabama, in 1932 and did not end until its aims and abuses were exposed in 1972. Though the study was portrayed as a therapeutic activity that would help poor black sharecroppers, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) carried out the study only to observe the course of untreated syphilis in black men. Here was their justification:

…Such individuals seemed to offer an unusual opportunity to study the untreated syphilitic patients from the beginning of the disease to the death of the infected person. An opportunity was also offered to compare the syphilitic process uninfluenced by modern treatment, with the results attained when treatment had been given. (Vonderlehr et al., 1936)

Race science in the early 1900s held that African Americans were more sexually promiscuous and had higher levels of venereal disease than white people. Following a very old common belief that black people and white people must be different subspecies of humans, physicians believed that venereal diseases in black populations were different than those in white populations (Lombardo, 2006).

Enticing Participants

Researchers did not explain to participants that they would be untreated and that even when effective medications became available, participants would be prevented from obtaining them. In other words, there was no "informed consent." (Washington, 2006; Lombardo, 2006). Men were encouraged to participate with the promise of free medicine, meals, and burial insurance. They did not know the purpose of the experiment; some, in fact, may not have known that they had syphilis. Participants were told that they would be treated for "bad blood" (Lombardo, 2006; Washington, 2006)—a term that was commonly used in the African American community to designate ailments that were not understood. Figure 2.4 shows a copy of the letter that was sent to potential participants in the study inviting them to be treated for their "bad blood."

Figure 2.4 Letter to Potential Participants in Tuskegee Syphilis Study 

Source: Tuskegee Study, 2007

The "special treatment" offered in the letter was, in reality, a diagnostic lumbar puncture (Washington, 2006), an extremely painful procedure that had no possible benefit to the subject. Often, subjects experienced problems such as severe headaches after the lumbar puncture, and there was a risk of serious infection. 

Not all the men in the study actually had syphilis. Out of 600 hundred participants, 201 healthy men made up the control group; the rest were in the "experimental" group. The existence of an experimental, or treatment, group in a medical study usually implies that an attempt is being made to help cure some illness or to try out some promising new treatment or cure. This treatment group, however, was a sham, because the study intended only observation, not treatment. When men in the control group contracted syphilis, they were switched to the experimental group.

In some cases, men tested erroneously positive for syphilis. A disease called yaws, common in the south in the 1930s, had symptoms similar to those of syphilis and was caused by a closely related bacterium. Thus, a man infected with yaws might have tested positive for syphilis.

Figure 2.5 A USPHS Doctor Collecting a Sample of a Participant's Blood (date unknown)

Source: Tuskegee Timeline, 2007

The Sham Treatment

Instead of medicine, the men were given vitamins, low-dose arsenic, and mercury, all of which were older, less effective versions of treatment (Washington, 2006). Over time, many of these essentially untreated subjects died. Even when penicillin was found to be an effective agent for curing syphilis in the mid-1940s, the men were denied its use. Participants who attempted to obtain the drug from local doctors or from the military could not obtain it, because the USPHS physicians regularly forbade its use with study participants (Washington, 2006). Approximately 30 men did manage to receive treatment from doctors outside the study, even though PHS doctors had discouraged black physicians and military physicians from administering treatment to study participants (Washington, 2006).

The key researchers in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study—all USPHS surgeon generals—were Hugh Cumming, Taliaferro Clark, and Raymond A. Vonderlehr, who oversaw the study from 1932 to 1942. All three were graduates of the medical school at the University of Virginia, which at that time used eugenics as a medical model for understanding venereal disease among the different racial populations (Lombardo, 2006).

Exposing the Abuse

In 1965, a white physician named Irwin Schatz read about the study in a medical journal and was outraged. In a letter to the USPHS, he wrote, "I am utterly astonished by the fact that physicians allow patients with potentially fatal disease to remain untreated when effective therapy is available" (Washington, 2006, p. 168).

For seven more years, the study continued, until a young Polish immigrant by the name of Peter Buxtun, who worked as an interviewer for the USPHS in the 1960s, became aware of the details of the study. Buxtun began to write letters to the USPHS requesting that the unethical study be discontinued. Frustrated with his lack of progress, Buxtun ultimately shared the information with Associated Press reporter Jean Heller in 1972. The next day, the story ran in the New York Times under the headline "Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated for 40 Years." 

Following the publication of the article, the study was promptly discontinued, and the government began to examine its own medical practices. The investigation led to congressional hearings, a class-action lawsuit, a multimillion-dollar out-of-court settlement, and, in 1997, a public apology from President Bill Clinton on behalf of the U.S. government to the study participants and their families.

Looking back at the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, we see that it is one of the most atrocious examples of racism and perverted race science in the annals of American medicine. Race science flourished in an era when there were not yet codes for the ethical conduct of research. Today, we recognize the vulnerability of certain populations and the need for special protection for them. Medical codes of ethics have been established—and adherence thereto is closely monitored—to prevent any human rights abuses of this type in the future.

Read the Tuskegee Syphilis Study page of the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where you'll find a timeline of events and the full text of President Clinton's 1997 apology to participants. Also, learn the origins and mission of Tuskegee University's Legacy Committee and its enduring impact on the biomedical profession.

Worldwide codes of medical ethics were not in place when the Tuskegee study began, but were in put into practice during the study's 40-year duration. Following WWII, the Nuremberg Code, a worldwide code of ethics for the medical profession, was written and ratified following the discovery of Nazi medical experimentation on captive Jews during the war. The World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki, originally adopted in 1964, is the international code of medical ethics in force at present.

V. Race Science and Modern Genetics

A New Idea

In the 1970s, American statistician and geneticist Richard Lewontin, who was studying variability in fruit flies, decided to study the variability of proteins for different blood groups among people. He was attempting to answer the age-old question: Are there different subspecies of human beings? And if so, did those differences correlate to the varying races of humans?

He was surprised to discover that within each racial group was 85 percent of the protein variation in blood types found in the whole human race. Between racial groups, he found even less difference—a mere 8 percent. This result demolished the old idea of race as something real and biological. Dividing people into racial groups made no sense in light of his study, because much of the variability in humans across the world was found inside every racial group, and only small differences were noted between racial groups. Lewontin's research findings, subject to some criticisms on statistical grounds, suggested that the picture of genetic diversity in humans did not represent borders that separate races (Wells, 2006, 20-21).

Dr. Spencer Wells

Today, some of the most encouraging research on race is being carried out by geneticist Spencer Wells. Director of National Geographic's Genographic Project and author of the 2002 book The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, Wells addresses the questions of how groups of humans came to settle where they did and what routes brought them there. He uses genetic information from people around the globe to trace human migration patterns from Africa to various locations all over the world. Using tools and technology developed through years of genetic research, Wells discovered that "humans were still living in Africa until 50,000–60,000 years ago, and only after this time did they leave the continent to populate the rest of the world" (Wells, 2006, p. 160).

The Genographic Project has led to some fascinating conclusions about the origins of humans of all nationalities and ethnicities. Visit the Genographic Project's Web site to learn more about the project. While you're there, be sure to click on the tabs marked Genetics Overview and Atlas of the Human Journey.

Dr. Wells's research has provided the information we needed to trace the roots of modern humans out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. He used DNA to discover that people all over the world are genetically related—in other words, we all share a common ancestor.

One large group of Africans migrated south and east—in many cases, crossing land bridges that no longer exist—populating India, southern Asia, and Australia along the way. The other major group migrated north to populate most of North Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Wells's research found that this latter group accounts for approximately 90 percent of the world's current population (Wells, 2006). The Journey of Man, a video produced by Wells, explores this research. Wells's work, building on previous research by many other geneticists, added to our knowledge of human history, using the analysis of the DNA samples collected from around the world and enabling the development of a history and a map of how our ancestors populated the planet. Wells's work helps confirm Lewontin's earlier finding that we are all members of a single extended family that can be traced back to a common ancestor in Africa.

Are you interested in your genetic ancestry? Your personal DNA can be analyzed to determine your genetic history. You can find out who your ancient ancestors were and learn about their genetic journey across the globe.

Another Paradigm Shift

These fairly recent discoveries have brought about another shift in the meaning of the word race. Earlier in this module, we discussed the discarding of racist views that prevailed during the opening decades of the twentieth century, when anthropologists began to reject the view that nonwhite people were inferior to white people. That change—still not completely embraced in all corners of American society—is now being supplanted by another change in the meaning of the word race.

In the past, race was a name for visible characteristics: skin color, eye folds, hair texture. Then, geneticists discovered that we are all members of one race—the human race—and that we are all descended from a small group of African people, making race an attribute that is nothing more than skin deep. Still suffering from the painful legacy of eugenics, geneticists have dismissed the term race as meaningless (Royal & Dunston, 2004).

Modern geneticists now believe that visible racial indicators and each person's own description of his or her race are imperfect, but moderately useful, indicators, or proxies, for the path one's ancestors took out of Africa. Such information provides clues about the possibility of genetic mutations and susceptibilities to disease that occurred in a given group migrating out into other parts of the world. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, finds

'race' and 'ethnicity' are poorly defined terms that serve as flawed surrogates for multiple environmental and genetic factors in disease causation, including ancestral geographic origins, socioeconomic status, education, and access to health care. Research must move beyond these weak and imperfect proxy relationships to define the more proximate factors that influence health. (2004, p. 1)

So, race once again has meaning, but this time, it is not used as a way to disparage any particular groups of people. The "more proximate factors" that Collins references arise out of individual genetic heritage. For scientists, race and racial categories now take a backseat to the individual variability of the human genome, for each of us is genetically unique.

Can race be a reliable indicator of any genetic or biological feature? In some cases, the answer is yes, and that is why race still noted in medical research. Tay-Sachs disease is a fatal condition that affects infants, causing serious problems that lead to death around age 4. Carriers of the genetic mutation that causes this disease are often found in Eastern Europeans and in Jews of Askhenazy descent. A great deal of research has been undertaken to better our understanding of the disease. Researchers have also investigated how race is involved, because the members of one group of humans that share a common ancestral migration pattern are more likely than any other individuals to carry this specific genetic mutation.

Individual Variation

To geneticists, race is completely overshadowed by the individual variations found in our genes (Royal & Dunston, 2004). There is so much genetic variation among us that grouping people by traditional ideas of race helps only in relation to conditions like Tay-Sachs disease, where a genetic mutation follows an ancestral migration that has been defined as a racial group. Geneticists more often examine the genes of an individual to find maximally useful treatments for disease, or to find patterns that suggest greater susceptibility to a disease that is found within a patient's immediate family.

Summary

We have looked at several types of race science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After examining some critical issues underlying race science in topic I, we examined eugenics, a detrimental version of race science, in topic II. Eugenics is the belief that heredity is the only factor that determines a person's value, and that through careful control of reproduction, the human race can be "improved," just as strains of pigs, cows, sheep and horses were improved by good breeding and bettering the stock. Eugenicists advocated the control of reproduction through sterilization of unfit people (those with mental or physical ailments or defects, and those with low levels of intelligence), often without their permission.

Like prize livestock contests, Fitter Families contests were held at state fairs, bestowing awards upon families that met certain criteria, such as intelligence, healthiness, and racial purity. These contests popularized and promoted the values of "good breeding" among human beings.

Eugenicists believed that even a person's level of morality and tendency toward criminality were coded into his or her genes, and that the environment a person lived in and the varying opportunities and advantages of life made little difference. Eugenicists turned a blind eye to the ways extreme poverty, malnutrition, poor schools, child abuse, discrimination, and lack of opportunity derailed the normal development of children and adults in different racial groups.

Eugenicists celebrated the Nordic type of person—blond and blue-eyed—as the most desirable type of individual. Immigration laws were passed in our nation to favor people from Germany and Scandinavia and to greatly limit the entry of people from southern and eastern Europe. Only when the Nazi agenda was shown after WWII to have been built directly on American eugenics ideas did Americans finally turn away from their preoccupation with "breeding" and their fascination with the Nordic type.

In topic III, we followed the development of tests of intelligence created in the age of eugenics. We looked at the study of ability and character in the common practices of observing and photographing the faces of people. There is a long history of searching for criminal types, and the equally long history of searching in the facial features of children for evidence of mental inferiority or superiority. Surely, it was popularly believed, something—bumps on the head, speed of reaction time, skull measurements, facial features ("types"), or a mixture of these (as in Galton's "personal equation")—would reveal the secrets of the human character to investigators. Finally, Alfred Binet found a way to assess everyday, practical thinking and reasoning in children and was thus able to develop a scale for measuring mental ability.

But American researchers, it seems, were not content with the examination Binet developed to sort children in the Paris slums. They disregarded Binet's insistence on a careful, leisurely investigation of the home life and school progress of children before decisions were made about mental abilities. Stanford professor and psychologist Lewis Terman, a committed eugenicist, modified Binet's scales for America and changed the nature of the test entirely.

Terman's test, the Stanford-Binet Test of Intelligence, measured school learning and was standardized on white, middle-class children. It was initially a quick one-hour screening, administered one on one, but after WWI, when group tests were developed, group testing of hundreds of children at a time became possible.

Because children in poor families and children of minority groups do not always have access to good schools that is equal to that of middle-class, white children, there have always been visible gaps among the test scores of these groups. Terman's test was biased by its assumption that each child taking the test enjoys the opportunities and advantages of the white middle-class child. The Stanford-Binet test and its very close relatives, standardized achievement tests (also related to the tests used in the No Child Left Behind program today), ostensibly confirmed the racist views of social scientists of the day—that nonwhite racial groups had inferior ability levels. Critics argue that these same biases still hold for today's tests.

Another type of objectionable race science, as we discussed in topic IV, involved the use of members of vulnerable populations as involuntary subjects in medical research. Groups that were deemed inferior were of great interest to scientists seeking subjects for medical experimentation. When parents refused to allow their children to become subjects, children without parents to stand in the way—that is, children in orphanages and other institutions—were used instead. Similarly, adult prisoners, patients in mental hospitals, and, poor, uneducated black people in rural areas were used as guinea pigs in medical studies that withheld treatments that could have saved or prolonged their lives. The most infamous of these studies, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, was conducted by an agency of the U.S. government. Starting after WWII, an ever-evolving series of medical codes of ethics has been written, enforced, and continually updated to protect all subjects of research from being used in ways that we now recognize as inhumane.

In topic V, we looked at some of the responsible and legitimate science going on today in an effort to answer such questions as, "Where did we come from?" and "How did we get here?" The work of Spencer Wells and the Genographic Project has used the latest scientific tools and technologies to discover that all humans share a common ancestor that originated in Africa some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. The differences we observe among individuals in different racial groups—skin color, hair texture, facial features—resulted from migration and climatic adaptation to the environment, as we discussed in module 1. The migrations branched out like the limbs of a tree, as descendents of the original African group fanned out to people the rest of the earth.

Toward the end of the module, we examined a new view of race that is emerging in light of modern discoveries about human genetics. Studying blood groups in 1970s, statistician and geneticist Richard Lewontin was amazed to discover more blood-type variability within a single racial group than between different racial groups. This suggested that our familiar definitions of race made no sense in the context of blood types. Lewontin's discovery has been confirmed as modern race scientists have become able to read our genetic history by analyzing the mutations we all carry in our DNA.

An upbeat, empowering message has emerged from the most recent research: Separate races are not biologically based; they are merely social constructions, a part of our cultural history. Racial groupings are considered meaningless by contemporary geneticists, for they find that at the molecular level, we are all members of one great extended family—one single race, the human race.

After discarding the term race, however, geneticists recently have begun to use the word again. It now stands as a proxy to suggest the branching paths that a person's ancestors took as they migrated out of Africa. This notion of race permits the investigation of genetic mutations related to diseases that appear only on certain branches of the human tree. Thus, the term race once again has meaning, but not the derogatory valuation given to racial groups by white scientists over a century ago. In the twenty-first century, the word loosely correlates to strands of human migration, and no value judgments are attached.

Race science is a term that has been used to describe both admirable and dubious sciences, for genuine investigations of differences and for differences that can be interpreted in a biased way, to demonstrate inferiority. Some race science, as we have seen, helped to further racist ideas about the inferiority of nonwhite groups. However, we find that race science today can be a tool for helping us understand that our differences are only skin deep, that we as human beings have much more in common than we ever believed.

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