Subject: BHA: RE: Re: Richard Boyd on Iraqi resistance fighters getting us past Kant
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2004 15:00:52 -0500


Hi Howard,
 
I have read your selections from and comments upon Richard Boyd several times, particularly the following passage: 
 
Describing the IQ controversy in general terms he refers to the articles by
Block and Dowrkin in 1976 that finally exposed the fraud involved in the
earlier theoretical presentations.  Boyd asks what had changed to make this
possible.

He argues that there was "something about the imaginative capacities of many
scientists and philosophers: their capacities to imagine and articulate
alternatives to the racist explanations for patterns of work and behavior,
and for relations of power and wealth."

This didn't happen, he observes because of anything done at Cambridge or
Berkeley or Ann Arbor.  "It was done instead in Dehli and Calcutta, in Dien
Bien Phu, Saigon and Hue, in Johannesburg and Pretoria, in Watts and Harlem.
it was done, largely, but not exclusively, by militant people of color; most
often by disciplined, organized people of color with guns.  Their struggles
against racism and imperialism made salient important non-racist
alternatives to racist explanations of power and stratification."

He then argues that because science did not *self correct* on these
questions as the given assumptions argue it must, that instead,

"Perhaps we should count systematic political struggles against racism and
imperialism as part of scientific activity.  if, say, Vietnamese peasants in
their anti-imperialist struggles contributed to overturning scientific
racism, perhaps we should count those struggles as part of the history of
science.  . . . Not only did the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles
we are considering contribute indirectly to the scientific critique of
racism, they typically reflected, on the part of their participants, a more
accurate understanding *by far* of the political eocnomy of racism and
colonialism than that provided by institutional social sciences.  If we
should choose to treat the Vietnamese peasants who fought against the French
and the U.S. as having done social science, then they surely did better
social science than most mainstream social scientists. . . . in roughly the
period from 1945 to 1985, the scientifically, politically and morally most
important insights about the human sciences came from the work of
marginalized people of color and their allies in struggles against racism
and imperialism, and from related efforts of other marginalized people
inspired by those struggles."

I began my studies in sociology and anthropology in the late 1950s, and from my very first course in racial and minority relations, I was taught that race was not a real biological category -- I particularly remember Ashley Montagu's "Myth of Race" -- and that the arguments for genetic differences in IQ between races was an artifact of the the interaction between social conditions and the biases of the tests.   At that time, it had not yet been discovered that a lot of the evidence supposedly based on test scores had been cooked.  I don't deny that there has been a great deal of racist "science," but there was vigorous internal criticism of it.  
 
I think that we should continue to distinguish between scientific or philosophical work and struggles to overcome social, economic, and political oppression.  They certainly can be related in a variety of ways, but to be related they must be different.
 
Best regards,
 
Dick

 
��Ҷ��2)�Y��x����mi�fz{l�騽�����ɞ�Ơzf����r��j)�u�mi�fz{l����z������*+�/�y�'�֥���֜�g���'���+-���J��Ȧy�������q�,y�0JZ�������ةj��,^vױ��ej)���mn�r����ڦ�bq�b���gy�����~�&�+-n�����+-���V�{������v��