ABSTRACT
The contours of America's long-standing obsession with race have been mirrored in psychologists' studies of race. Scientific psychology has not simply reflected dominant cultural understandings of race but has reconfigured race through the discipline's evolving theoretical commitments. In an era of research fascinated by individual differences, for instance, race conveniently stood as a “natural” category for comparing differences, whereas in a research climate attuned to social problems, race comprised a crisis to be rectified. In the spirit of laboratory practices, psychologists literally experimented with race, alternately designating it a conceptual category, a variable, a genetic entity, a methodological problem, or a cognitive process.
