In this episode, we discuss the racial term Caucasian: origins, uses (and abuses) and how it figures in the racial conversation today. For a transcript:

http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/origin_of_the_term__caucasian_.pdf

​In this episode, we discuss the racial term Caucasian: origins, uses (and abuses) and how it figures in the racial conversation today. Origin and Use of the Term "Caucasian"File Size: 283 kbFile Type: pdfDownload File [...]

​In the fourth and final installment of our mini-series on race and intelligence, we get right-up-to-the-minute with James Watson’s recent (unfounded) claims that genetics and IQ are linked. Along the way, we figure out how IQ research has changed since the 1990s (spoiler alert: not much), and—most importantly—why people keep returning to this stuff even though it’s never been substantiated.

Transcript: http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/race_and_intelligence_part_4.pdf

In this episode we try to shed some light on the shadowy Pioneer Fund which has supported racist science and white supremacist political activism since the 1930s. From its founder Wycliffe Draper through Henry Garrett and Roger Pearson with Mankind Quarterly to William Shockley and Arthur Jensen and finally The Bell Curve, we trace some of the racist threads that dogged the 20th century and are still active.

Transcript: http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/race_and_intelligence_part_3.pdf

In this episode, we continue the series on race and intelligence by heading across the pond to discuss work of the knighted psychologist, Sir Cyril Burt, and the two British ex-pats who worked in the U.S., psychometrician Raymond Cattell and anthropologist Ashley Montagu.

Transcript: http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/race_and_intelligence_part_2.pdf

Some Resources:

Cattell, R. B. (1933). Psychology and social progress: Mankind and destiny from the standpoint of a scientist. London: C.W. Daniel.

Dobzhansky, T. and M. F. Ashley Montagu. (1947). Natural Selection and the Mental Capacities of Mankind. Science, 105(2736), 587-90.

Jensen, A. R. (1974). Kinship correlations reported by Sir Cyril Burt. Behavior Genetics, 4(1), 1-28.

Kamin, Leon J. (1974). The Science and Politics of I.Q. Social Research 41(3), 387-425.

For those who never saw him, here’s Montagu talking anthropology, although nothing to do with race: Ashley Montagu on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (Sept. 13, 1974).

Montagu, Ashley. (1962). The Concept of Race. American Anthropologist 64(5), 919-28.

Montagu, Ashley, ed. (1974). Race and IQ. New York: Oxford University Press.

Montagu, M.F.A. (1942). Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. New York: Columbia University Press.

Montagu, MF Ashley. (1945). Intelligence of Northern Negroes and Southern Whites in the First World War. The American Journal of Psychology 58(2), 161-88.

Sperling, Susan. (2000). Ashley Montagu (1905–1999). American Anthropologist 102(3), 583-88.

Thompson, Matthew. (1998). The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain, c.1870-1959. New York: Oxford-Clarendon Press.

Tucker, W. H. (2010). The Cattell controversy: Race, science, and ideology. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

In today’s episode, we travel to East Africa with Dr. Melissa Graboyes, a historian of medicine. Melissa talks with us about medical experimentation in East Africa during the colonial period, race-based health inequality in those parts of the world today, and how it was that prisoners in Zanzibar subverted racial categories through food!

Some resources for this episode:

​Melissa’s professional website

Johanna Crane, Scrambling for Africa: AIDS, Expertise, and the Rise of American Global Health Science

Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Melissa’s book, The Experiment Must Continue: Medical Research and Ethics in East Africa, 1940–2014

Melissa’s articles, Chappati Complaints and Biriani Cravings: The Aesthetics of Food in Colonial Zanzibari Institutions, Journal of Eastern African Studies, May 2011: 313-328

“Searching for a Well Fed Swahili: Diet Creation in Colonial Zanzibari Institutions, 1935,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. Forthcoming.

In this episode we begin the very long story of the pseudo-scientific conflation of race and intelligence over the last several hundred years. Much more to come on this topic in future podcasts.

Transcript: http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/race_and_intelligence_part_1.pdf

Some episode resources:

Jensen, Arthur. "How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?" Harvard educational review 39, no. 1 (1969): 1-123.

Spearman, Charles. "" General Intelligence," objectively determined and measured." The American Journal of Psychology 15, no. 2 (1904): 201-292.

Goddard, Henry Herbert. The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York: Macmillan Company, 1912).

Terman, Lewis Madison. The Measurement of Intelligence: An Explanation of and a Complete Guide for the Use of the Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916).

Brigham, Carl Campbell. A Study of American Intelligence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1923), 197.

Brigham, Carl Campbell. "Intelligence Tests of Immigrant Groups," Psychological Review 37, no. 2 (1930): 165.

We got to interview Gene Demby, co-host of NPR’s podcast Code Switch! Gene talks about what it’s like to be a leader in national conversations about race and identity, why higher education is so unwelcoming to people of color, and how scientific racism continues to be so powerful. Oh, and also, why Archibald’s ribs are the most delicious food in America🙌

Click here for podcast

Here are some links to go with the interview:

Code Switch podcast and blog: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/

Gene’s other project, PostBourgie: http://www.postbourgie.com

​Archibald’s! Go there!: https://www.facebook.com/Archibalds-BBQ-159266197418500/

In this episode, we restart our march through history, which we left off a few episodes ago back in the 18th century. With our guest, Dr. Hilary Green, we dive into 19th-century American slavery and the idea that black and brown bodies are “closer to nature” than light-skinned bodies. Dr. Green talks about racism, popular ideas of biology, and how our denial of black suffering still resonates today in racial health disparities.

Some resources:

Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 by Hilary Green

More information on Dr. Green’s walking tour of the University of Alabama Campus

Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery by Jennifer Morgan

Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs

The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation by Diana Ramey Berry

Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deirdre Cooper Owens

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by Walter Johnson

Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson

Almanack and Ephemeris by Benjamin Banneker

Dr. Gwenetta Curry’s work on race and stress

In this episode, we continue our mini-series on global race. This time we travel with historian Teresa Cribelli to 19th-century Brazil, where she and Jo banter about slavery, colorism, and how Brazil came to be seen as a nation that embraces racial mixing despite the fact that it subscribed to a national strategy of “whitening” its population. No peacocks this time, but we do talk about Linnaeus!

Here are some resources for this episode:

2016 NPR article on Brazil’s racial tribunals: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/for-affirmative-action-brazil-sets-up-controversial-boards-to-determine-race

Dr. Cribelli’s book about industrialization and modernization in19th century Brazil: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/industrial-forests-and-mechanical-marvels/7EBBFF40C0D570383C9E26A4BAD27616

Dr. Cribelli’s professional web page: https://history.ua.edu/faculty/teresa-cribelli/

John Gast’s 1872 painting “American Progress”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Progress

Modesto Brocos, painter of the 1895 “Redemption of Ham”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modesto_Brocos