Word: jensenism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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These hypotheses, which are widely accepted by behavioral scientists, are restated in a lengthy article by Arthur R. Jensen in the current issue of the Harvard Educational Review. But Jensen, 45, an educational psychologist at the University of California in Berkeley, chose to build on such postulates some less plausible ones of his own. He argues that in some ways the American black is intellectually inferior to the American white. And he suggests that the explanation lies not so much in the Negro's deprived environment as in his genes...
...author intended it, this is an inflammatory statement, and it has reverberated far beyond the modest circle of the Review's 12,000 subscribers. Columnist Joseph Alsop and Geneticist Joshua Lederberg, who writes a weekly column for the Washington Post, have entered demurrers. In a Virginia court, Jensen has been quoted by attorneys resisting the integration of schools in Greensville and Caroline counties. Well aware of the article's incendiary value, the editors of the Review will publish five closely reasoned rebuttals to Jensen's thesis in their next issue...
...charge that Negroes are inherently inferior to whites is not new. Neither is it demonstrable. Among other things, it is a canon of racist faith, invoked first to justify slavery and then the Negro's status as a separate-but-unequal U.S. citizen. But Psychologist Jensen is no racist, as his article repeatedly makes clear. "Since, as far as we know, the full range of human talents is represented in all the major races of man," he writes at one point, "it is unjust to allow the mere fact of an individual's racial or social background...
Forgive me for having mentioned "human dignity." I almost forgot that it has been stated in a recent Harvard publication that blacks are "genetically inferior." I am referring, of course, to Arthur A. Jensen's article on black inferiority (Harvard Educational Review), which reads more like the gossip column of a South African newspaper, than like a purportedly scientific document. What is a black man to think of this institution when such a scandalous article is allowed to go unchallenged by the same professor who signed the Hunt Hall counter protest--some of whom were eminent geneticists. I suppose...
Since the appearance of Jensen's article, friends at Oxford & Cambridge, McGill, and the University of the West Indies have written to me and seriously questioned the merits of an institution which could allow its name to be appended to such an article. In true American style, Southern courts have already begun to quote the article as fact. I suspect, too, that our friends in South Africa will exult when they read it. All things considered, the article should go a long way toward establishing cordial relations between black statesmen and educators around the world and Harvard and the Americans...