Social Science Is Not Social Reality: Race, Values, and the Defense of Scientific Racism

A review essay on books by (1) Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, 1992); (2) Michael Omi & Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s ([2nd edition] New York: Routledge, 1994); (3) David Wellman, Portraits of White Racism ([2nd edition] New York: Cambridge, 1993); & (4) Sandra Harding (Ed), The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 1993). These books consider how social & subjective views of race have shaped the scientific exploration of race relations in the US & UK, underlining science's continued lack of acknowledgement & correction of its own elitist & racial axis. Barkan argues that prominent US & British interwar scholars were driven in their studies of race by strong political motivations that fostered white claims to cultural superiority. Wellman examines how the racial theories of US academics, 1960s-1990s, surface in the perspectives of individuals. Harding's collection addresses the science-politics dialectic in the formation of race policy. Omi & Winant highlight the influence of a racially structured society on scientific investigation & science's subsequent lack of resistance. D. Bajo