The Intellectual’s Power And Legacy
The time during which these academics wrote was key. The early 20th century marked an era of scientific discovery and an industrial boom, so the views of scientists and extremely well-educated individuals held a certain cache among public opinion.
That is, as long as they were white: Du Bois, a prolific author and accomplished academic in his own right, was still building a career in a field whose raison d’être seemed to be proving that he and others like him were fundamentally subordinate.
It also mattered that so many academics across so many disciplines agreed about the basic tenets of race. In general, the sciences would produce competing theories and impose a constant burden of replicating studies to prove their merit.
But at the time, many prominent academics appeared to present a unified front on race theory — and that certainty would lead the public to believe that said theory was correct. If so many highly regarded scientists believed it, the logic went, shouldn’t everyone else?
As long as academia has existed, some of its members have used the academy to justify racism, sexism, and essentially any other “-ism” for which they might have been chastised without their innumerable degrees. Not surprisingly, when confronted about racism, many adamantly deny it.
Consider Arthur Jensen, who most notably published research in 1969 that he said proved the average black child had an IQ of 85 — which no amount of education could improve. When critics ridiculed his study as racist, the well-funded psychologist fired back, stating that since the study was grounded in science it was not racist:
First of all, it is a known and uncontested fact that blacks in the United States score on average about one standard deviation below whites on most tests of intelligence. . .A difference of one standard deviation can hardly be called inconsequential. Intelligence tests have more than proved themselves as valid predictors of scholastic performance and occupational attainment, and they predict equally well for blacks as for whites. Unpleasant as these predictions may seem to some people, their significance cannot be wished away because of a belief in equality.
Do any of these “justifications” sound kind of familiar?
“I think the guy is lazy — and it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” — Donald Trump
Win McNamee/Getty ImagesDonald Trump speaks during the Presidential Debate at Hofstra University on September 26, 2016 in Hempstead, New York.
The tragic irony of it all is that while many academics today view the racism they see in the United States as the product of under-education, it is education at its extreme that helped propagate some of the most enduring, pernicious myths about race to-date.
Indeed, the racism that exists in America today clings to some of the same fallacies that it did when race became an object of “intellectual” expertise a century ago.
While scientists now largely dismiss the idea that biological difference among races explains a given health our socioeconomic outcome, that hasn’t stopped politicians from continuing to use these anachronisms as the foundation of their careers — careers which can have even broader impacts on public life than those within the ivory tower.
Next, learn about the alleged racism that led Woody Guthrie to write a song about Donald Trump’s father. Then, check out some of the most appalling names on the list of Donald Trump’s supporters.
