Psychology’s Hidden History: Racist Roots and Poison Fruits

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The field of psychology is rooted in racism

Few people are aware that the origins of the discipline of psychology were largely racist, in that many academic notables were invested in (mis)using science to prove that White people were morally and intellectually superior (Guthrie, 1976). Many of these individuals were eugenicists as well; they advocated for a social agenda that included suppressing the number of children born to those they deemed less fit. This should not be too surprising, given the era during which the discipline of psychology evolved — a time when people of color were considered inferior in Western society as a matter of common knowledge and law.

Many early psychologists were outspoken racists and eugenicists

Granville Stanley Hall (1844-1924) was a pioneering American psychologist and educator. His interests focused on childhood development and evolutionary theory. He also advanced the idea that Africans, Indians, and Chinese were members of “adolescent races” in a stage of “incomplete growth.” The mental inferiority of Black people was unquestionable for Hall, though he did hope for their eventual advancement (Schwebel, 1974). Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University, so clearly his racist notions found wide acceptance in the field, or at the very least did not generate much of a stir within professional circles and remained largely unchallenged.

Paul Popenoe (1888-1979), an American founding practitioner of marriage counseling, asserted that intelligence is determined by the amount of White blood one has. He wrote, "The Negro race is germinally lacking in the higher developments of intelligence" (Popenoe & Johnson, 1918). In his early years, he worked as an agricultural explorer and scholar of heredity, and he played a notorious role in the Eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. He was one of America's most prominent racist eugenicists and an influential advocate for involuntary sterilization.

Lewis Madison Terman (1877-1956) was an American psychologist, noted as a pioneer in educational psychology in the early 20th century at Stanford University's School of Education. He is best known as the developer of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. He was also a prominent eugenicist and a member of the Human Betterment Foundation. Some gemstones from Terman include, “There is nothing about an individual that is as important as his IQ.” Of Black people, he said, “Their dullness seems to be racial” and “Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical…they cannot master abstractions.” And most chillingly, “From a eugenic point of view [Blacks] constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.” Terman also served as president of the American Psychological Association.

The Bell Curve was a best-selling and controversial 1994 book by Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein (1930-1994) and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray. The pair concluded that Black people were genetically inferior and less intelligent than White and Asian people. When considering these assertions, it is important to recognize that the content of IQ tests reflects the culture, priorities, values, and knowledge of the group that created the test. What we think of as “standard” IQ tests were developed by elite Western White academics. As such, Eurocentric priorities appear in IQ tests like the Stanford-Binet. The tests may purport to be “culture-fair” but are not and cannot be because all cultures prioritize different sets of abilities as markers of intelligence and train children accordingly. You cannot give these same tests to people from different cultures and assume an equivalent result, yet this is just what some psychologists are doing, even now.

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Even today, some prominent psychologists have a racist agenda

Although the science of psychology has largely rejected notions that some races are genetically inferior, less intelligent, more neurotic, or immoral by predisposition, a small group of psychologists was never quite able to let go of this idea. Here are some documented facts.

A researcher from the University of Delaware asserts that race plays a critical role in IQ and that African Americans have lower IQs than other ethnic groups. She supported The Bell Curve in 1994, with a letter to the Wall Street Journal called, "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," as well as the ideas of Jean-Phillipe Rushton, who claimed that Black people have smaller brains than White people. (He also held the belief that there was an inverse relationship between intelligence and penis size, stating, "It’s a trade-off: more brain or more penis. You can’t have both.”) You can read more about this research at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster asserted that non-Whiteness was linked to genetic inferiority and that a nation's intelligence and capability was linked to its racial composition, with more Whiteness having a positive correlation with a nation’s influence and sovereignty. (He was eventually removed from Ulster for his racist assertions.) Lynn has made other outrageous claims, including: “What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of phasing out of such peoples .... Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”

Others are self-proclaimed “race-realists,” a term used to justify the belief in a hierarchy of people based on race. They write that people of color are less intelligent because of the genes which determine the color of their skin. Here is an article and failed attack on the brilliant quantitative psychologist Eric Turkheimer, who rightly proclaims that proponents of racist science, ”while entitled to their freedom of inquiry and expression, deserve the vigorous disapprobation they often receive.”

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The long game

Genetic differences between socially constructed racial groups are minuscule (less than 0.5 percent), and there are no identifiable racial genomic clusters (Maglo, Mersha, & Martin, 2016). Differences in intelligence, aptitude, and ability are not based on skin color, facial features, or hair texture. But, undeterred by facts, race psychologists have quietly worked for decades to expand a bolus of knowledge that they continue to cross-reference to make their work appear legitimate. When it became increasingly difficult to get their work published in reputable journals, they infiltrated the editorial boards of legitimate journals or started their own journals entirely (Winston, 2020). (Here is one example — the sexist title alone should give pause.)

Now that the essential foundations for this discussion have been laid, check out the final post in this series about racism in psychology: More Bias in Psychology.