Why mainstream research will not end scientific racism in psychology

Held (2020) provided an important analysis of racial “othering” in relation to epistemic objectivity and epistemic violence. She argued that mainstream psychological research on racial essentialization in nonothered folk might play an important role in efforts to “combat racist attitudes, acts, and policies, in pursuit of progressive reform” (p. 365). In this comment, I argue that such research, although certainly valuable for antiracist purposes, is unlikely to explicate, unseat, or diminish the traditions of “scientific racism” in academic psychology, and unlikely to reduce the most egregious forms of “epistemological violence” (Teo, 2008) created within the discipline. By “scientific racism” I mean the use of scientific concepts and data to create and justify ideas of an enduring, biologically based hierarchy (Winston, 2020). Such projects are not defined by and do not require an assumption of hatred or malice to be considered “racism.” These practices first appeared in a psychology journal with Bache’s (1895) description of racial differences in reaction time, and underwent repeated ebb and flow (see Richards, 2012). Held (2020) did not assert that mainstream research would eliminate scientific racism. My purpose here is not to claim that her position was incorrect, but to illustrate the long persistence of explicitly racist projects in our scientific literature.

After a decline in the 1930s, arguments by psychologists for the hereditary intellectual inferiority of Black people re-emerged during the Civil Rights Era and again during the 1980s and 1990s (Jackson, 2005; Tucker, 1994, 2002). Through the extensive mainstream publications of J. Philippe Rushton, Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, and others, new claims of evolved racial differences in intelligence and morality were presented and eagerly taken up by racial extremists and White nationalists. David Duke acknowledged the explicit personal assistance of Rushton and behavior geneticist Glayde Whitney, rendering untenable the view that the research had been unknowingly misappropriated (Winston, 2020).

Scientific racism in psychology survived over a century of well-formulated critiques from “above” and “below,” from othered and nonothered, from inside and outside the discipline. These critiques of both conceptualizations and methods repeatedly addressed the deceptive use of racial categories, brain size measurements, intelligences tests, heritability quotients, and crime statistics, as well as the damaging and oppressive uses of the data. The criticisms had very little effect. Discussing his 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair data, leading psychologist Robert S. Woodworth (1910) declared that comparing “negro” and “White” brain weights “partakes not a little of the ludicrous” (p. 172), but 103 years later, Jensen (2013) and others praised Rushton’s work on racial differences in brain size and their relationship to intelligence. The early 1900s image of the savage Black rapist constructed in scientific literature, popular literature, and film was revived in Rushton and Bogaert’s (1989) claim that “populations of African ancestry are inclined to a greater frequency of uninhibited disorders such as rape” (p. 1211). The very old and vicious stereotypes of Black male anatomy reappeared in Lynn’s (2013) survey of penis size across many nations, employed to support a pseudo-evolutionary explanation of racial differences in crime and “social organization.” Natural selection by “cold winters” in Europe versus “easy living” in Africa was an explanation for alleged European intellectual superiority used by early 20th-century Nordicists. Revived by Rushton (1995), with the variation of placing Asians as slightly superior in IQ to Whites, this untenable view of the late Pleistocene was still employed by Pesta and Poznanski (2014) in the mainstream journal, Intelligence. These discredited assertions on brains, intelligence, morality, and evolution (e.g., see Brace, 2005; Fish, 2002; Graves, 2001; Lieberman, 2001; Nisbett, 2009; Peters, 1995; Sussman, 2014; Weizmann et al., 1990, for critiques) were refashioned and redeployed in new social contexts, with new intelligence tests, modern multivariate methods, brain scans, and revised conceptions of heredity. But the same conclusions were always reached, even in 2020: racial differences in test scores, educational achievement, and economic success are partly due to heredity, cannot be fully explained by discrimination or other social conditions, and are unlikely to disappear (e.g., Winegard et al., 2020).

Held (2020) correctly noted the “short inferential hop” from asserting a heritable component to a “kind-defining essence.” The scientific use of essentialized racial taxonomy based on folk categories has been central to many of the critiques of scientific racism in anthropology as well as psychology (e.g., Brace, 2005; Yee et al., 1993). The concept of human races as biological entities, although maintained in forensic anthropology, was formally rejected by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA, 1996) and by many geneticists, largely replaced by the idea that human variation is not categorical but clinal, with continuous gradations across a geographic range (Livingstone, 1962). In psychology, the idea refused to die, prompting Teo (2013) to label the biological concept of race as a “zombie.” Since the 1990s, scientific racism has evolved in ways that sidestep or blunt the charge of essentialist categorization. Jensen (1998), Rushton (1995), and others began to speak of races as breeding populations with differing gene frequencies and fuzzy boundaries, using the language of population biology. They rejected the Platonic view of races as discrete and mutually exclusive, but maintained the idea that traits were inherited as a cluster, as in older, categorical race theories (see Weizmann, 2004).

Rushton and Jensen (2005) defined race in terms of “ancestry,” in turn defined vaguely as continent of origin, using category names that may cause concern: “Blacks (Africans, Negroids) are those who have most of their ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa; Whites (Europeans, Caucasoids) have most of their ancestors from Europe and East Asians (Orientals, Mongoloids) have most of their ancestors from Pacific Rim countries” (p. 237). How this is known for any of the participants in modern studies of intelligence test scores is unclear, but they referred to the literature on molecular genetics as supporting the “traditional” racial classifications. However, the extensive work of geneticist Alan Templeton (2013) has convincingly shown that the portrayal of human populations as separate branches on an evolutionary tree, central to the “ancestry” conception of race, has been “falsified whenever tested” with genetic data (p. 262). Studies of genetic clustering, particularly Rosenberg et al. (2005), have also been enlisted in the revival of nonessentialized concepts of race in psychology. The fact that the clustering program, STRUCTURE, yields whatever number of clusters the investigator selects, is never mentioned. STRUCTURE does not yield groups that are homologous to racial categories (see Fujimura et al., 2014).

Recent discussions of alleged racial differences in intelligence tend to be worded much more cautiously than earlier versions, often with more acknowledgment of the role of health care and education (see Winston, 2018). Objections, such as Lewontin’s (1970) classic and widely accepted statement on the irrelevance of sources of within-group variability for explaining between-group variability (also mentioned by Held, 2020), are considered and rejected in a recent defense of the hereditarian position by Winegard et al. (2020). Discussion of “race” is often avoided, replaced by analyses of “national IQ” of up to 90 nations by Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) and Rindermann (2018). Despite this new veneer, the same old conclusions are reached: according to Rindermann (2013), the average sub-Saharan African IQ is said to be 75, with severe social and economic consequences, and purely environmental explanations are said to be highly improbable. For the promoters of hereditary racial differences, dangers must be faced: Richard Lynn’s prediction of the decay of Western civilization through dysgenic breeding by “super-fertile low IQ non-Western groups” is given serious consideration by Nyborg (2012, p. 118).

Explanation of the persistence of scientific racism in academic psychology is less likely to be found in studying the cognitive habits of the nonothered than in studying the social genealogy and history of these practices, as Held (2020) suggested. Scientific racism must be treated as a community project, with its own networks, mentorships, journals, funding, conferences, heroes, origin myths, martyrs, defenders, and historiography. The ability of this work to capture and recapture the interest of psychologists in alleged racial differences may be partially understood by a persistent scientific “status anxiety” of the discipline, a persistent naïve empiricism that demands openness to any empirical question, no matter how conceptually unfounded or discredited, and a persistent belief that the study of human differences might somehow be made wertfrei and pure (see Winston, 2011). Understanding the promoters of scientific racism requires attention not only to the hegemonic and damaging consequences of their work, but also to their vision for a “progressive” transformation of society, one in which a natural hierarchy is understood and nourished by the alleged “true facts” regarding race. In this Weltanschauung, race scientists such as J. Philippe Rushton are presented as the courageous, Galileo-like warriors against ignorance, superstition, and the deliberate deception of Marxist “egalitarians.” This community of psychologists, small but relatively prolific and generally within the mainstream, will not be deterred by new studies of essentialization and othering.