Invention of the white race // Rakesh on eugenics

[C. Petersen]

> I agree with James H that conflict was thus understood
> > in cultural/ethnic terms in the case  of European immigrants. They were
> > never racialized in the same way blacks were (subject to eugenic
> > regulation for the genetic health of the nation and subject to
> 
> I'll have to reread Gould soon, but to the best of my memory he does cite
> specific evidence that the eugenics movement (and more particularly,
> racist understanding of intelligence) contributed importantly to the
> immigration act, and formal discussion in Congress would not necessarily
> be any indication one way or another. 

I used to work in a university health sciences library that had thousands
of different journals, some dating back to the 1800s. There were some
Eugenics journals that discuss this stuff hidden in a medical paper format
and jargon. All of these promptly went out of print around 1944, '45. But
it really was in the medical mainstream for some time. 

   Arthur Jensen just came out with this really thick heavy book that
supposedly 'scientifically' demonstrated the superiority of whites and
japanese people over everyone else. I flipped through it but didn't read
the whole thing. He  says that there is the existence of a 'g factor'
that is a definable and measurable factor equal to IQ, and he came to the
conclusion that there is no difference between men and women on average,
but that sub-saharan Africans have an average IQ of 70. It goes on and on
with this crap, and he includes all the irrelevant details of his
regression analyses etc. as though that will make it more legitimate, but
his overall results agree with the Bell curve, that the demographic groups
in the world that are the wealthiest right now, also are the most
intelligent. He showed samples of 'nonverbal' questions that were given on
his tests and it would just be recognizing a pattern or guessing the next
shape in a sequence... and it's just total bullshit. It's not particularly
surprising that if you give paper pencil tests to some people in Nigeria
who haven't gone to western schools and don't require this type of spatial
reasoning, that they won't do as well as people in western countries who
have been taught this sort of thing since kindergarten. Women are equally
distributed among all classes, so logically, the class bias wouldn't show
up here. He gets into political advocacy like Charles Murray too (Did
anyone see the painfully stupid libertarian book that Murray came out with
about a year ago? .... oh my god. It was printed on fake aged paper, and
they were promoting it as being similar to revolutionary war era political
tracts by Patrick Henry. And he just droned on like Ayn Rand about how the
truly great and smart people would just have to seize the system away from
the leaches and dare to live up to the original ideals of the country.)
CP