Word: racial
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...issue of racial superiority, physical and mental, that all of mankind bitterly divides. Such value judgments are largely subjective and lack any solid scientific foundation, but that has never stopped men from making them. The Negro, who reached the U.S. in bonds, has ever since been classified in some quarters as a member of an intellectually inferior race. The attitude is not without historical precedent. Segregationists of the U.S. South often quote the Book of Genesis 9:25, which relates that Canaan, the son of Ham-whose skin was believed to be black-is ac cursed throughout time: "A servant...
...theory of racial inferiority lurks at the edges of current anthropological thought. In his book The Origin of Races, Anthropologist Carleton S. Coon suggests that Homo sapiens-modern man-evolved not once but five times, in five different places. The last to attain the fully human estate, says Coon, was the Negro-a conjecture that, if accepted, explains why Negro cultures in Africa lag behind the West's and why the Negro is not yet the white man's intellectual peer. According to Coon, he simply has not had enough time. Approaching the subject from closer range, University...
...want to say that an Australian Aborigine is dumber than I am, because there is no way to tell. In their noncompetitive society there is no way to make any tests and hence no way to make comparisons. We don't know what the differences are between different racial groups and there is a strong prejudice against finding out. Suppose you made a study to determine if there are differences between the brains of whites and Negroes and proved it?" Nobel Laureate William Shockley, a solid-state physicist, drew outraged reaction from the scientific community when he charged that...
...pertinent field put it in less provocative terms. "The idea that human races differ in adaptively significant traits is emotionally repugnant to some people," wrote Geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky in Mankind Evolving. "Any inquiry into this matter is felt to be dangerous, lest it vindicate race prejudice." Undeniably, racial prejudice is social or cultural in origin rather than biological, and it is understandable that anthropologists, who hesitate to make value judgments on the basis of biological fact, would hesitate also to enter what is fundamentally a sociological-and highly emotional-controversy. Anthropologist Morton Fried says that "participation in a 'debate...
Those who resist making value comparisons among groups do so on two grounds. The first is that science as yet lacks valid tools to sort mankind into biological races. The second is that even if science possessed such tools, the racial divisions could not conceivably be used to grade human worth. So meager is man's understanding of the complicated biochemistry of evolution and of the nonhereditary influences of cultural environment that no one can confidently assign that portion of intelligence with which man was born and that part he acquired. If heredity bestows his capacity to learn, culture...