SCIENCE, RACISM AND IDEOLOGY

FOR twenty years, from the 1940s to the late 1960s, scientific racism lay dormant; many believed it dead. The coffin of Nazi pseudogenetics had been well nailed down, the myths of the 1930s apparently destroyed and those who had helped push the corpse in and had mounted guard over it felt able to close down their picket line and go elsewhere. Within the last four years, the nails have burst, the coffin opened, and the revived monster, pausing only to change into modern dress, is bearing down on us again. Why has it happened? What is the socio-political context in which this particular ideological use of science has emerged? What are the scientific "facts " at issue? How can scientific racism be defeated? In its modern form, the argument advanced by scientific racism claims to prove that certain groups, notably Blacks and working class, are less intelligent than others, notably White middle class, and that this difference is genetic-that is, inborn and therefore "biologically inevitable". In this article, we show that the basic question asked by scientific racism: "How much does heredity and how much does environment contribute to intelligence", is scientifically meaningless, but is part of an ideological battle which emerges a t particular periods of social crisis. The re-emergence o f scientific racism In 1969 the Harvard Educational Review carried a long article by a relatively little-known educational psychologist from California, entitled "How much can we boost IQ and scholastic a~hievement?"~ The author, Arthur Jensen, concluded that the reasons for the apparent failure of certain "compensatory education " programmes in the US lay, not in the inadequacies of the teaching itself, nor in the social structures which generate poverty in the US, but in the innate, genetic inferiority in intelligence of the groups concerned-mainly Blacks. The article signified the start of this new round of the battle against scientific racism. I t created an immediate furore. In the US, Jensen's lead was followed by a number of others, notably Richard Hernnstein3 who extended the analvsis to claim that most of the determinants of class differences in the US, seen as a broadly and increasingly meritocrati