ABSTRACT
Arthur R. Jensen's 1969 Harvard Educational Review article probably would have set off little or no controversy if he had made only two points (the failure of compensatory education, and the role played by the genes in IQ), and the word "Jensenism" might never have been uttered were it not for the third component—race. The cultural constructionist view opposes the concept of race both for presuming to establish fixed categories out of the flux of nature and for any further tendency to attach racial stereotypes to those categories once they are established. Jensen responds by giving two definitions of "race" that, he says, differ only in the perspective that they take. In the taxonomic definition, races are subspecies or varieties of a species that differ in their physical characteristics and may also differ in their behavior. The number of races one wishes to distinguish by certain criteria depends on the criteria used and on how fine-grained the distinctions are.
