ABSTRACT

The immediate post-war years were dominated by two historical factors which, with a few exceptions, effectively suppressed whatever aspirations towards overtly racialist theorising and research were left within mainstream Psychology: the Holocaust and the US Civil Rights movement. This suppression was reinforced by the continued elaboration of those alternative ‘paradigms’ identified previously, particularly the culture and personality school and the study of ‘race prejudice’ in Social Psychology. In the USA moreover, the ‘applied and intra-racial’ genre had initiated what is today known as ‘Black Psychology’, albeit small in size and as yet insufficiently intellectually secure to radically challenge orthodox methodologies and conceptual frameworks. Even if somewhat lethargically, professional Psychology’s ethnic composition was also diversifying. More generally, the 1940s saw the ‘nature-nurture’ issue acquire clear-cut ideological connotations, adherence to nativist positions becoming seen as inherently right-wing and racist. During the period under consideration here overt racism was clearly at bay within US Psychology. At the same time, anti-racist Psychology’s understanding of the issue can now be seen to have retained a considerable degree of naivety, the erosion of which began in earnest in the 1970s. By the 1990s it is apparent, as we will be seeing, that a host of implicitly racist and ethnocentric assumptions persisted undiagnosed among many of even the most anti-racist psychologists.