Mainstreaming Scientific Racism
Dan Hicks & Emilio Lobato
University of California, Merced
https://mainstream-race-science.netlify.app
Introduction
The return(?) of race science
Saini (2019)
Many people assumed that the eugenicists had all but disappeared with the Nazi regime, and that race science was pretty much finished at the same time.
Intellectual racism has always existed, and indeed for a chunk of history, it thrived. I believe it is still the toxic little seed at the heart of academia. However dead you might think it is, it needs only a little water, and now it’s raining.
Institutions of race science
- Pioneer Fund
-
Founded 1937, during the decline of (institutionalized) eugenics
(Mehler 1989; Tucker 2002) - Mankind Quarterly
- Founded 1960 by marginalized academics as part of the backlash to Brown v Board (Mehler 1989; Schaffer 2007; Jackson 2005 ch. 7)
- The Tobacco Strategy
-
Used by regulated industries to create the appearance of legitimate scientific controversy and thereby block or delay regulation
(Oreskes and Conway 2011; Fernández Pinto 2017)
Echo chambers
- “creation and distribution of non-peer reviewed journals and pamphlets”
- “funding and organizing of symposiums” for industry-funded research
- “In this way, the tobacco industry circumvented peer review standards in publication” (Fernández Pinto 2017)
- “a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal” (Jamieson and Cappella 2008, 76)
Did Pioneer and Mankind Quarterly nurture race science by protecting it from mainstream peer review?
Our analysis indicates MQ did not play this role
Pioneer-funded researchers
| Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. | psychology |
| Brunetto Chiarelli | anthropology? |
| Hans Eysenck | psychology |
| Robert Gordon | sociology |
| Linda Gottfredson | psychology |
| Garrett Hardin | ecology |
| Joseph M. Horn | psychology |
| Lloyd Humphreys | psychology |
| Arthur Jensen | psychology |
| Michael Levin | philosophy |
| Richard Lynn | psychology |
| R. Travis Osborne | psychology |
| J. Phillippe Rushton | psychology |
| Audrey M. Shuey | psychology |
| Philip A. Vernon | psychology |
| Daniel Vining, Jr. | demography |
- Miller (1994)
- List of Grantees from PF website
- WoS author search results for 14 authors (Sept/Oct 2021)
- Identify journals that published more than 5/14
Pioneer-funded researchers
Journals publishing 6 or more Pioneer-funded researchers, WOS author search results
Text-mining corpus
| Behavior Genetics | 2268 |
| Behavioral & Brain Sciences | 898 |
| Intelligence | 1237 |
| Mankind Quarterly | 1821 |
| Personality & Individual Differences |
7274 |
| Psychological Reports | 21398 |
- 34k journal articles
- Published 1960-2010
Topic modeling
- Statistical method for clustering documents and words simultaneously
- Can we identify a race science topic?
- Does this topic start in MQ, spread to mainstream journals?
UMAP interactive
3 focal topics
| topic 5 | topic 7 | topic 19 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| phrase | beta | phrase | beta | phrase | beta |
| jensen | 0.0087 | 0.0142 | iq | 0.0152 | |
| iq | 0.0076 | europe | 0.0060 | jensen | 0.0078 |
| rt | 0.0067 | book | 0.0056 | whites | 0.0058 |
| general_intelligence | 0.0050 | africa | 0.0054 | blacks | 0.0056 |
| vernon | 0.0045 | religion | 0.0049 | lynn | 0.0043 |
| sternberg | 0.0042 | races | 0.0049 | general_intelligence | 0.0038 |
| inspection_time | 0.0034 | whites | 0.0045 | iqs | 0.0035 |
| slope | 0.0032 | india | 0.0040 | rushton | 0.0031 |
| rts | 0.0029 | death | 0.0040 | iq_scores | 0.0029 |
| digits | 0.0027 | _ | 0.0038 | cognitive_ability | 0.0028 |
| nettelbeck | 0.0027 | god | 0.0037 | subtests | 0.0027 |
| deary | 0.0025 | op | 0.0034 | wechsler | 0.0026 |
| raven | 0.0024 | mankind_quarterly | 0.0033 | racial_differences | 0.0025 |
| general_factor | 0.0024 | blacks | 0.0033 | brain_size | 0.0025 |
| Vocabulary md, k = 30 | |||||
Focal topics, by journal, over time
Conclusions
- Most Pioneer-funded researchers did not publish heavily in MQ
- MQ was the primary venue for one of two race science topics
- The other race science topic did not originate in MQ
- MQ was the primary venue for one form of race science
- “Anthropology-flavored”?
- While mainstream journals were the primary venues for a distinct form of race science
- Psychological Reports, later Intelligence and PID
- “Psychology-flavored”?
- “The race science is coming from inside the house!”
Thanks!
Bonus content
Some definitions
- scientific racism
-
(purportedly) justifying racial inequality and colonialism by appealing to the epistemic authority of science
(compare Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin 1982) - race science - wide sense
- scientific research that is amenable to scientific racism
- race science - narrow sense
- scientific research that itself engages in scientific racism
Ex: genotype clustering studies (Rosenberg et al. 2002) or polygenic scores for educational attainment (Harden et al. 2019) can be wide-sense race science without being narrow-sense race science (Wills 2017; Carlson and Harris 2020)
Different topics or different communities?
Authors by topic
Gould’s critique of factor analysis
As a tool for simplification, [PCA/factor analysis] has proved its great value in many disciplines. But many factorists have gone beyond simplification, and tried to define factors as causal entities. This error of reification has plagued the technique since its inception …. [F]actors, by themselves, are neither things nor causes; they are mathematical abstractions. (Gould 1996, 284–85)
tmfastuses methods from PCA and factor analysis (Rohe and Zeng 2020)- (partial) PCA
- varimax rotation
- Need to avoid hasty reification of topics
Topic modeling as phenomena construction
Topics as phenomena (Bogen and Woodward 1988; Woodward 2009)
- simplified patterns extracted from word occurrence data
- may or may not be stable:
will we see the same topics in a different corpus? (Malaterre and Lareau 2022) - constructed with minimal role for substantive theory
- explananda, not explanans
These words tend to be used together; but why?
These test items tend to be answered in the same way; but why?
References
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Mainstreaming Scientific Racism Dan Hicks & Emilio Lobato University of California, Merced https://mainstream-race-science.netlify.app