'Race', Racism, and Psychology
David Hume was also contemptuous of Africans.
The Enlightenment notion of history as progressive and directional made it inevitable that differences between peoples and cultures would eventually be construed evaluatively as reflecting levels of advancement.
Although the 'negro's' physical appearance facilitated white racism, whites' attitudes to Africans were, initially, primarily a function of their view of slavery, which, as such things usually are, were in turn a function of economic and cultural circumstances.
Ironically, the unchangeability of human nature is a common racist dogma; we all allegedly possess an instinctive and legitimate dislike of people of other 'races', and if we do not we are ipso facto degenerate mongrels. One can then see the danger: if we perceive no differences between Elizabethan, Enlightenment and modern 'racisms' we may come to view 'racism' as some inherent feature of white human nature—a not unracist conclusion in itself, entailing perhaps unwarranted gloom regarding the possibility of its elimination.
Racism is an absolutist doctrine if nothing else; in countering it prudence surely dictates that we stress the extent to which it arises from ultimately transient constellations of cultural and economic forces, even if these then enable it to exploit more enduring psychological mechanisms.
It has also been observed that nobody would want their dinner served by a paw—as would be the case if you genuinely saw your black slaves as animals. Exercise of raw social (and sexual) power over other humans is what gives slave-owning its kick.
The faults heaped upon the 'Negro' were unique, but in degree, the nether end of a scale which bovine Slavs and violent, porcine, Irish Celts were the starting point.
Continued biological natural selection served primarily to eliminate the physically and behaviourally unfit rather than to improve fit.
This last point was seen as a potential Achilles' heel for Europeans: their hiigh sensitivity, compassion and moral ideals, the very hallmarks signifying their exalted evolutionary level, were ironically misleading them into helping the unfit in their societies to survive and breed. This created an exquisitely painful demand on 'fit' middleand upper-class whites—they must bow to the verdict of scientific Reason and override, however sorrowfully, the imperatives of their uniquely refined feelings. If the white race ever lost is supremacy, it would be because it had weak-mindedly let sentiment or a misplaced moral and 'philanthropic' consciousness prevail over Reason.
There is a continuing desire to see science as containing some transcendental core immune to the impact of 'external' factors, such as funding and ideological interests. It may now be grudgingly admitted that the appeal of evolutionary theory as a metaphor and rationale for capitalism and imperialism contributed to its acceptance and cultural impact but beneath that, it will be said, exists some 'pure' ahistorical scientific nucleus of objective knowledge. In the case of the extensive scientific work on race, however, this certainly seems highly dubious. To put it bluntly, all this research was on something which was not there. All that exists is a vast range of human morphological diversity. The very concept of 'race' was entirely a product of non-scientific forces, and no core of objective scientific knowledge bout it, no enduring gains in scientific understanding, were obtained.
The civilisation he represents is thus, for Galton, not essentially a specifically European cultural product, rather the 'white man' has elevated the species as a whole to this new evolutionary height, albeit by virtue of his (no 'her' about it) peculiar evolutionary merits. Being in a sense a natural phenomenon, any reflexive critique of contemporary white civilisation becomes impossible. This view of white civilisation as civilisation per se persists, if increasingly contested, down to the present (still underpinning the policies of international financial institutions) and its importance can hardly be overstated.
'Racism' is not one thing but many.
That their mode of consciousness might be other than objectively superior to everyone else's would have been a disturbing prospect. That their 'objectivity' might in some fashion have been corrupted by the manner in which their class or nation had achieved its present privileged niche and by its ongoing needs to remain there never seems to have occurred to them (or perhaps to any non-Marxist prior to the 1960s, though Thomas and Dewey nearly see it).
White America thus saw itself beset on two racial fronts. On the one hand, the legacy of slavery had laid upon it the responsibility of somehow managing a huge minority population of 'Negroes'—whom it now believed to be truly inferior in evolutionary terms. The fact that these included substantial numbers of 'mulattoes' and 'mixed race' people only made things worse—for these represented a route by which this inferior breed could irreversibly contaminate the pure white stock. On the other hand, the land now also seemed imperilled by a flood of inferior European stock—inferior either racially or on eugenic grounds as being drawn from the 'dregs' of its source populations. This latter paranoia was being ruthlessly stirred by the leading eugenicist C.B. Davenport and his allies such as Madison Grant. Such a situation had not been foreseen by the Union's Enlightenment founders with their combination of bling egalitarianism (for whites) and insousiance about slavery's durability as an institution able to keep whites and 'Negroes' forever separated, notwithstanding the consequences of white male sexual peccadilloes. America's Manifest Destiny was being manifestly soured.
From early in the century some, like W.I. Thomas, John Dewey, and Franz Boas, were disputing the race-difference hypothesis (including Harvard's Josiah Royce, William James's close friend). During the 1920s this opposition mounts. Their arguments are of four basic kinds. First, that any differences can be accounted for environmentally. Second, outside Psychology, there is the occasional philosophical or ideological argument that egalitarianism is a moral imperative unaffected by empirical evidence. Third, there are those arguing on methodological grounds that innate race differences either have not been, or cannot in principle be, demonstrated. Fourth, and in the end most profoundly, there is the argument that 'race' is an unscientific category, a myth for rationalising oppression and injustice.
The crux of the matter is that the new cross-cultural approach to ethnic psychological diversity, fusing Anthropology and Psychology, was offering a far richer, better informed, more humane, and ideologically congenial way of dealing with the 'race' issue than anything Race Psychology could offer. From this perspective, psychological diversity emerged from culture and social structure and was explicable in historical and environmentalist terms (although the Marxist implications of this were discreetly ignored and the individual generally remained the unit of analysis), reversing the orthodox Scientific Racist doctrine that biology determined culture.
As the proto-civil rights struggle intensifies, a number of psychologists and sociologists turn their attention to 'race prejudice', attitudes, and inter-race perception. Initially this is seen as a subdivision within Race Psychology, but their mutual incompatibility rapidly becomes clear: the supposed, highly evaluatively loaded, psychological differences between races cannot be studied except as part of an intrinsically racist project, promoting the very social pathology that researchers on attitudes and prejudice seek to combat.
My impression is that until about 1930 the tone of academic opposition was relatively unheated and concentrated on methodology, with few critics actually challenging the good faith in which race-difference research was being conducted or outrightly accusing researchers of 'race prejudice'. Only after 1930 do white critics really start becoming conscious of the inherent racism of their colleagues' approach.
For egalitarians the ball is in the inegalitarians' court—race differences need be invoked only when all other options have been exhausted. For Mayo and the inegalitarians it is the reverse, that until the contrary is positively proved, we must assume race differences as a significant factor in addition to obvious cultural and historical ones.
These flaws, which seem to the present-day reader so glaring, were presumably largely invisible to most contemporaries, and certainly to the authors. Are we dealing here with genuine dishonesty, intellectual naivety, a defunct but internally consistent 'paradigm' into the spirit of which we can no longer enter, or unthinking conformity to implicit culturally racist assumptions and modes of thinking? Although no single answer is likely to be universally applicable, my feeling is that the last of these is the most common. Race psychologists were trapped within culturally pervasive racialist modes of thought which rendered them either unable to see such failings or unable to grasp their seriousness.
One is faced with performing a balancing act between hermeneutic identification and retrospective diagnosis, between treating the authors as 'children of their time' and criticism that may become unfairly anachronistic. The fact that oppositional voices were present in the cultural arena to some extent mitigates this anxiety. One is forced to conclude that many Race Psychologists (especially earlier ones) were indeed defiantly blinkering themselves from the full range of contemporary analysis and commentary, particularly choosing to ignore Chicago School sociology and Boasian anthropology, as well as the growing body of African American-authored sociology and history.
This is not to deny that Race Psychology was by current lights racist—of course it was—it does, however, suggest that engaging in the project was itself on occasion a route by which psychologists came to discover their own white racism for what it was. While this holds overtly for only a handful of individuals, at another level it applies to the discipline as a whole: I would argue that in the USA it was the experience of the failure of Race Psychology, and the associated insights into why it failed, that actually enabled contemporary US psychologists to really begin to see racism (a term only dating from 1936) as a phenomenon.
Race Psychology was not so much consciously motivated by racism (though there are exceptions) as the route by which unconscious racist motivations were forced to the surface.
From a current perspective, the terms of this overwhelmingly white-authored 'anti-racism' discourse in Psychology often (though not always) appear naive or patronising, and occasionally overcompromising. It would, though, be naive to imagine it could have been otherwise.
Ideology may indeed determine a scientist's interpretations of the available data, but in the Psychology of race issues it determines the very data a scientist seeks to obtain.
That Psychology's scientific engagements with race could be an expression of ideology is quite transparent here. One could go further: once 'race' has overtly become an ideological issue (and prior to 1930 it is not entirely clear that it had), the ideological dimension is inescapable.
Liberal and non-WASP applied psychologists wanted a Psychology that could guide their interventionist practice in enhancing their clients' well-being. They were more interested in the effects of racism on the self-images and attitudes of those on the receiving end than in seeking the innate roots of race differences. They sought to ameliorate mental illness problems by identifying the socio-economic conditions exacerbating them, rather than smugly assert that high Negro manic-depression rates were only to be expected in such an innately emotional race.
In historical retrospect, this genre is not quite so ideologically unambiguous as it appears on the surface. It helped create what Mama (1995) terms a 'damaged Negro' image[…], replacing the biologically racist image of 'Negro' identity. This still (a) ascribes a non-differentiated universal psychological character to all African Americans, (b) sees this as determined by white behaviour, disregarding the existence of any genuinely autonomous African American culture, and (c) focuses almost exclusively on African American males.
By locating the source of racism within individual minds, US Psychology was nonetheless able to avoid having to formulate any serious critique of US culture. In distracting attention from racism's social systemic roots it is, in hindsight, clearly open to the charge that its faulty diagnosis helped sustain racism by misdirecting anti-racist energies. It would be excessively paranoid to claim this was in any sense deliberate.
A more fundamental, though related, flaw has only become visible in the last decade or so. This is that the discourse of the entire approach remained locked within an implicitly racialist framework. First, the reality of 'racial groups' as such, is nowhere radically contested despite growing awareness of problems in how to define them. Second, by aspiring towards 'racial tolerance' as the ultimate goal, the deep ambiguities of the concept 'tolerance' were occluded. 'Tolerance' implies enduring the unpleasant, it takes as given that 'races' will somehow naturally (albeit irrationally perhaps) find one another to varying degrees objectionable, and, as an aspiration, is really an exhortation to those with social power to suppress these feelings on moral grounds.
[…]we can also see that there is no space for consideration of genuine ethnic cultural differences. The assumption is that there is one ideal standard of behaviour or life-style—the white US one—divergences from which white Americans must learn to 'tolerate' (pending perhaps some future convergence).
Pragmatically it is undoubtedly necessary for any oppressed people to reclaim and assert their difference—self-respect, dignity, and a real sense of identity can be acquired in no other way. 'Scientifically', it is equally necessary to affirm that such differences are positive human historical and cultural achievements, not expressions of innate qualities possessed by specific 'races'.
The 'interactions of individuals' are somehow logically prior to the 'techniques of economic production', and so forth, to which they 'adjust'. It would be easy for a Marxist to argue that it is these 'techniques of economic production' that determine the patterns for the interactions of individuals, even the categories of individuality themselves. Forms of economic life are excluded from Linton's definition of 'culture', thereby exacerbating the cultural relativism paradox by excluding a priori an explanatory level beyond the psychological in which the true human universal is the necessity of creating a viable form of economic life. From this perspective its culture, and the modes of consciousness this determines, may be apprehended as consequences of a society's 'techniques of economic production' (and other non-psychological things as well no doubt, like the climate). While dogmatically prioritising the economic may be unwise, avoiding any consideration of the extent to which it is fundamental left the culture-psychology relationship essentially mystified.
The existence of genuine cultural differences becomes invisible from this perspective, and thus it can shed no light on the cultural-level sources of racism itself. The culture and personality paradigm, on the other hand, became, as has been indicated, increasingly concerned with identifying psychological universals, again leaving the cultural sources of racism to one side. It is in its inabilities to directly address these cultural sources, and creatively, as opposed to descriptively, address cultural difference, that the ultimate weakness of the first wave of anti-racist US Psychology lie.
Psychology is never separate from its host culture, the psychological concerns of which it shares, articulates, and reflects, and in the US of the 1930s it was as visibly embroiled in collective cultural life and public affairs as it has ever been. If I choose to research anti-Semitism following discussions with a newly arrived Jewish academic colleague, fleeing from Nazi Germany, is this decision 'internally' or 'externally' determined? The question obviously makes no sense.
Notwithstanding these developments, the fact remains that Psychological discourse on 'race' was overwhelmingly white in authorship and, we can now see, oversanguine regarding the issue's depth. However benign in intent, white psychologists simply could not (and cannot) directly articulate and analyse the experience of people of other ethnicities; they could only work as best they could on their behalf. Thus they inevitably ended up creating further white images or stereotypes of them, especially the African American, as 'damaged' or as 'Victims' (although as we saw, African Americans tended to endorse this at the time). They were also blind to the ambiguities of the 'tolerance' aspiration that underlay the prejudice paradigm. In these deeper senses, Psychology retained its place in the cultural system by which white control over black identity and 'subjectivity' (to adopt Mama's term) was exercised.
