HW 7/5 – PvF (1-20) and TMM (51-62)

TMM (51-62)

• biological determinism: the claim that worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity
  • craniometry: measurement of the skull
  • psychological testing
• basic argument of the opposition: social and economic roles accurately reflect the innate construction of people
• determinists like to say that science is objective knowledge that is free from social and political influence
• biological determinism possesses evident utility for groups in power
• this text argues the scientific weakness and political contexts of the determinists arguments
  • criticize the myth that science itself is an objective enterprise
• facts are not pure and unsullied because culture influences what we see and how we see it
• the history of scientific views mirrors social movements
• many questions formulated by scientists are so restrictive that the answer can only validate social preference
• reification fallacy: our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities
• ranking fallacy: our propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale
• this book is about the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, to find that the oppressed and disadvantaged are inferior and deserve their status
• in most cases discussed in this book, we can be fairly certain that biases, though often expressed as egregiously as in cases of conscious fraud, were unknowingly influential and that scientists believed they pursuing unsullied truth
• biological determinism is a theory of limits: it takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be

PvF (1-20)

• 1880’s: beginning of mandated racial segregation laws
• Jim Crow Laws: separate but “equal” facilities for people of different races
• May 18th, 1896: Supreme Court rules on Plessy v. Ferguson
  • Homer Plessy was arrested during a planned protest with the New Orleans African Americans citizen’s committee to challenge Louisiana’s equal but separate accommodation law for all state railways
• The committee contacted Albion Winegar Tourgee, a white novelist and lawyer who was the leading white spokesperson for people of color
  • he believed that the only solution to the “race problem” was education for whites to reduce racial prejudice and for African Americans to increase economic opportunity and to inform them as new citizens
  • he agreed to take on the case for free and his aim was to have segregation laws deemed unconstitutional
• Tourgee planned to have someone of mixed race violate a segregation law so that he could question how people were classified as colored
  • Homer Plessy agreed to be the test case
• Justice John Howard Ferguson ruled that the segregation laws on railways were legal because Plessy was on an intrastate train and the state of Louisiana had the power to regulate railways within its borders
• the Louisiana Jim Crow law was possible because the goals of Reconstruction after the Civil War had not been realized
  • Reconstruction had 2 primary goals: rebuild the South and reform the southern economy, which had previously been based on a slave economy
  • 2 stages of Reconstruction: presidential and Radical or congressional
    • first was lead by Andrew Johnson and mainly consisted of enforcing the 13th Amendment
      • most southern states passed “black codes” which kept African Americans from voting, serving on juries, testifying against whites, and forced them to sign yearly labor contracts to create a disguised form of slavery
  • 1866 Civil Rights Act was passed to put a stop to “black codes” and 14th Amendment was also passed which marked the move to Radical Reconstruction
    • the passage of these acts violated most southerners 2 basic beliefs: white supremacy and state’s rights
  • 1867 Reconstruction Act: expanded the federal government’s control by dividing the South into military zones and giving federal troops the power to regulations from Washington
  • Radical Reconstruction: implemented by a group of Radical Republicans who wanted to bring about the second American revolution and all citizens would have equal civil and political rights
    • Republican Ulysses Grant vs. Democrat Horatio Seymour
      • Democrats had one issue: opposing Reconstruction
      • racial intermixture (ex. interracial marriage) scared many voters
  • 15th Amendment (the last of the Civil War amendments: removed race and color as barriers to vote for male citizens
    • most supporters of Radical Reconstruction did not envision total equality for African-Americans
  • Reconstruction was a failure mainly because of the country’s unwillingness to continue to try to provide political and civic equality for African Americans
    • the end of reconstruction came with the election of 1876: Rutherford B. Hayes is named president in exchange for the end of Reconstruction
• 15th Amendment
  • simply kept states from denying someone the right to vote based on race, but states were still allowed to deny people the right to vote based on other criteria
• 13th Amendment
  • meant to make slavery illegal
  • the passage of “black codes” proved that the language used in this amendment was not specific enough
• political rights: the rights we have in relationship to the political entity that governs over us
• social rights: rights in relation to other human beings in society and are not secured by law
• civil rights: the nonpolitical rights of citizens of a particular country
  • civil rights acts are passed when Congress decides that some social rights are so important that they need legal protection
• 14th Amendment shifted the court of final appeals from the State to the Federal Supreme Court
• 1857 Dred Scott: Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that members of the African race were not part of the sovereign people that constituted the country and therefor were not citizens, but in some states they could have state citizenship, which would not make them United States citizens
• Dred Scott ruling overturned in the first sentence of the 14th Amendment that guarantees any person born in the United States citizenship
• 14th Amendment says no state may make a law that interferes with the privileges or immunities of United States citizens
• 14th Amendment due process clause: limits the power of individual states to restrict various rights
• the first time the courts ruled on the 13th and 14th Amendments was in 1873 in the Slaughter House Cases which involved the rights of white butchers, not African Americans
• Justice Samuel Miller argued that the 14th Amendment forbade state infringement on the privileges and immunities of United States citizenship, which are narrow in scope