CHYS 2P38 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: American Civil War, Fibrous Joint, Black Doll
14 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
19th century race science
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"Jim Crow" and the African American child
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Why race doesn't really exist
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Outline
During early years, every civilized man passes through that phase of character exhibited by
the barbarous race from which he is descended. As the child’s features— flat nose,
forward-opening nostrils, large lips, wide-apart eyes, absent frontal sinus, &c.—resemble
those of the savage, so, too do his instincts. . . . The popular idea that children are
‘‘innocent’’ while it may be true so far as it refers to evil knowledge, is totally false in so
far as it refers to evil impulses, as half an hour’s observation in the nursery will prove to
anyone. (Spencer 1963 [1860]: 205–6)
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Spencer Quote
Argues that Europeans enjoys "whole brain development", while the "carib negro" and
"irish" experience less development
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The Europeans developed the maximum intellectual development: Eurocentrism
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Applied concept of recapitulation- "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" to child
development as explanation for racial differences
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Physiological racial differences were minimal in small children, develop during
adolescence
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Robert Dunn Civilization and Cerebral Development (1964)
Slavery was abolished but there was still this ides that African American were
inferior
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The brain is still growing but the skull needs to adapt to
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Anthropometry after the US civil war made the assumption that cranial structure
development, particularly the 'closure of the cranial sutures', indicated 'arrested cognitive
development'
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Continued law, access to education, policy by sudo science
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During US "reconstruction", this became a seductive idea
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Civil War
African American children believed to mature earlier, thus creating "a conflict for existence
between bran growth and reproductive organ growth at puberty"
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Up to the 1940's it was unheard of for a white male and black female to be together
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Stereotype led to fear of (laws against) miscegenation
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African American Children
Protests of white people by going on strike until there was segregation among schools
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Social prejudice produces "scientific knowledge"
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Social identity and "in group theory"- prejudice maintains boundaries of social groups
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Shift all the time
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Change social identities
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Problem with these group is that they are very arbitrary
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Social Prejudice and Social Identity
Black school were looked at as inferior and very underfunded
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School segregation
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Segregation among whites and blacks after the civil war until the mid 1960's
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Laws in the unites states that were set up to discriminate against African Americans
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Black and white children have the same intellectual capacity therefore should get the
same education
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After 1950- and in anticipation of the civil rights movement APA childhood ideology
applied to all children
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Jim Crow Laws
Doll Study
Week 4- Race and Ethnicity
CHYS 2P38 Page 1
