"An insurance agent published in 1890 incontrovertible statistics showing how the Negro race was dying out in the United States through sheer physical inferiority. I lived to see every assumption of Hoffman's 'Race Traits and Tendencies ' contradicted; but even before that I doubted the statistical method he had used...
"It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization. By this time, I was unimpressed. I had too often seen science made the slave of caste and race hate. And it was interesting to see Odum, McDougall and Brigham eventually turn somersaults from absolute proof of Negro inferiority to repudiation of the limited and questionable application of any test which pretended to measure innate human intelligence."
P.626-627, "The Concept of Race," inside of his autobiography DUSK of DAWN. DUBOIS :WRITINGS (1986)
Thursday, February 2, 2017
DUSK OF DAWN
"An insurance agent published in 1890 incontrovertible statistics showing how the Negro race was dying out in the United States through sheer physical inferiority. I lived to see every assumption of Hoffman's 'Race Traits and Tendencies ' contradicted; but even before that I doubted the statistical method he had used...
"It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization. By this time, I was unimpressed. I had too often seen science made the slave of caste and race hate. And it was interesting to see Odum, McDougall and Brigham eventually turn somersaults from absolute proof of Negro inferiority to repudiation of the limited and questionable application of any test which pretended to measure innate human intelligence."
P.626-627, "The Concept of Race," inside of his autobiography DUSK of DAWN. DUBOIS :WRITINGS (1986)