Race Psychology

Race and Soul

Carolus Linnaeus combined in his human taxonomy varieties of humans (races) with psychological, natural, and social characteristics. He assigned the classical temperaments to four races: The white Europeans were defined as sanguine and governed by law; the red Americans as choleric and governed by custom; the yellow Asians as melancholic and governed by opinion; and the black Africans as phlegmatic and governed by the will of the master. The construction of psychological, aesthetic, moral, and natural competencies for various races was a common academic endeavor engaged in by scientists and philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who described, for example, Africans as lazy.

The Beginnings of Race Psychology

The application of and the appeal to science introduced the second period of race psychology, when scientific observations were combined with the ideology of race. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach advanced the concept of the Caucasian based on his idea that European culture did not originate in Africa but was born in the Caucasus. Based on an analysis of skulls, he concluded that the prototype of the Caucasian could be recognized in the beautiful skull of a Georgian woman, with Georgia being located in the Caucasus. The term Caucasian, still used in empirical studies of psychology, has, however, no scientific meaning at all. In the second half of the 19th century, some European scholars suggested that the Caucasian variety divided into two branches, identified as Semites and Aryans. Both were associated with different psychological characteristics and formed the theoretical basis for German fascism and the race psychology of Hitler's regime. The second half of the 19th century also saw the association of mental ability and race. In the 1860s, John Langdon H. Down studied the structure and function of various organs in idiots and imbeciles. One group he observed was characterized by round faces, flattened skulls, extra folds of skin over the eyelids, protruding tongues, short limbs, and the retardation of motor and mental abilities. Down went on to classify this group on the basis of their resemblance to racial groups. He was convinced that the facial features and behavioral attributes of these individuals represented typical Mongols—hence his term mongolism for what is now called Down syndrome (trisomy 21). Pioneer of social psychology Gustav Le Bon combined intellectual ability, emotion, and volition with an ideology of race. Races were for him physiologically and psychologically distinct entities, and because all members of a race share an immutable race soul, races were conceived as different species. Eminent figures in the history of psychology participated in scientific racism and race psychology. Paul Broca was convinced that non-European races were inferior and used a variety of scientific tools to prove his preconceived conviction. Francis Galton showed contempt for Africans in his expeditions and writings. He argued that Europeans were by nature more intelligent than so-called primitive races and suggested the quantification of levels of racial intelligence. In the United States, pioneers of psychology such as Granville Stanley Hall, first president of the American Psychological Association, argued that “lower races” were in a state of adolescence, a claim that provided the rationale for segregation and the separate education of African Americans, First Nations people, and European Americans. From a theoretical point of view, the [Page 387]appropriation of Darwin's theory provided a tool for justifying colonialism because it was seen as the struggle between races. (Northern) Europeans were understood as the champions of evolution.

...