Scientific Racism - After 1945

After 1945

By 1954, 58 years after the Plessy v. Ferguson upholding of racial segregation in the United States, American popular and scholarly opinions of scientific racism and its sociologic practice, had evolved. In 1960 the journal Mankind Quarterly started, which some see as a venue for scientific racism. It is criticized for a claimed extremist right-wing politics, anti-Semitic bent, and espousing academic hereditarianism. The magazine was founded in 1960, partly in response to the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education which desegregated the American public schooling.

In April 1966, Alex Haley interviewed American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell for Playboy. Rockwell explained why he believed blacks were inferior to whites, citing a study by G.O. Ferguson that showed black people who were part white outperformed "pure-black niggers" (Rockwell's words) on a test. The statistics used in the study and the excerpt from the Playboy article were used as an example of a statistical fallacy in the book Flaws and Fallacies in Statistical Thinking by Stephen K. Campbell.

International bodies such as UNESCO attempted to draft resolutions that would summarize the state of scientific knowledge about race and issued calls for the resolution of racial conflicts. In its 1950 The Race Question, UNESCO declared that "A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens", which were broadly defined as the Mongoloid, Negroid, and the Caucasoid "divisions" but stated that "It is now generally recognized that intelligence tests do not in themselves enable us to differentiate safely between what is due to innate capacity and what is the result of environmental influences, training and education."

Today, the term "scientific racism" is used to refer to research seeming to scientifically justify racist ideology. The accusation of scientific racism often is cast upon researchers claiming the existence of quantifiable differences in intelligence among the human races, especially if said differences are partly genetic in origin. Contemporary researchers include Arthur Jensen (The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability); J. Philippe Rushton, president of the Pioneer Fund (Race, Evolution, and Behavior); Chris Brand (The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications); Richard Lynn (IQ and the Wealth of Nations); Charles Murray; and Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve), among others. These authors themselves, while seeing their work as scientific, may dispute the term "racism" and may prefer terms such as "race realism" or "racialism".