San Antonio College Library

"Man's Most Dangerous Myth was first published in 1942, when Nazism flourished, when African Americans sat at the back of the bus, and when race was considered the determinant of people's character and intelligcnce. Ashley Montagu presented a revolutionary theory for his time: Breaking the link between genetics and culture, he argued that race is largely a social construction, and not constitutive of significant biological differences between people."...

Debates about race are back and they're only getting bigger. There has recently been a massive upsurge in scientific racial research. The US government has licensed a heart drug to be used only on African Americans. A genetic study claims that Jews are more intelligent because their history of financial occupations favored genes associated with cleverness. Malik argues that this rise in racial ideas is paradoxically due to the efforts of liberal anti-racism....

On the 40th anniversary of the landmark Kerner Commission Report on civil unrest, this edition of the Journal spotlights former Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, one of the last living members of the original Commission, who discusses the root causes of the 1960s riots that rocked Newark, Detroit, and other U.S. cities. Harris also reflects on his ongoing commitment to the cause of reducing racism and deep poverty in inner cities. Bill Moyers then interviews...

The Pew Research Center recently reported that black Americans are more dissatisfied with their progress than at any time in the past quarter century. In this edition of the Journal, Bill Moyers gets perspective from historical and cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson and Glenn C. Loury, an economist and expert on race and social division. Moyers also interviews the Wall Street Journal's Douglas Blackmon about his book Slavery by Another Name: The...

"What does science say about race? In this book a ... research geneticist [posits] that traditional notions about distinct racial differences have little scientific foundation. In short, racism is not just morally wrong; it has no basis in fact, [and] the author ... describes in detail the factors that have led to the current scientific consensus about race"--Amazon.com.

Annotation

This book shows the persistence of cultural traits in particular racial and ethnic groups and the role these groups' relocations play in redistributing skills, knowledge, and other forms of "human capital" from where they originated to the four corners of the earth. Each ethnic group has carried forth a particular set of skills, attitudes, and lifestyles, whether settling in Russia, Brazil, Australia, or the United States. What are the effects of...

"Nearly fifty years after his death, Albert Einstein remains one of America's foremost cultural icons. Among the ocean of Einsteinia - scientific monographs, biographies, anthologies, bibliographies, calendars, postcards, posters, and Hollywood films - there is a peculiar void when it comes to the connection that the brilliant scientist had with the African American community. Virtually nowhere is there any mention of his relationship with Paul Robeson,...